Henry Ford and the Model T

One of the Greatest inventors in American History was Henry Ford. Henry Ford is most famous for his creation of the Model T Ford which was the first design of the automobile car of today. Henry Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan in the United States. His father was a farmer and his mother was a housewife. He attended school until the age of fifteen. Then he decided to enter the workforce and began his life as a worker with factory work and a series of apprenticeships.

These jobs helped Henry Ford learn mechanical skills and learned all about parts of engines. In 1892 he built the first ever gasoline buggy. The idea of creating a gasoline powered car factoring into his mind when he was working in the factories and he saw that the most common type of travel was by horse and carriage. Ford wanted to invent a new way of travel that would be quicker, easier, and have the ability to be massed produced. He decided on the model of a car in the shape of the rectangular design with wheels attached at the bottom. By 1896 he had perfected one of his model cars and was actually able to drive it around in public. In 1899 he left his job at the Edison Illuminating Company that he had been an engineer at and decided to start up his own car company. Most of Henry Ford’s innovative ideas came from the great inventor Thomas Edison who is most famous for not only his invention of the light bulb that brought electricity to hundreds of thousands of people, but his multitude of other inventions such as the phonogram.

When Henry Ford first went into the automobile industry, his company did very poorly, going into debt and eventually going out of business in 1900. He then turned his attention and focus towards race cars. In 1903 he created the Ford Motor Company and received $100,000 from investors to start up his own company. His goal was to make a brand of cars that would be faster and cheaper than his former prototypes. Ford’s big car model came with the Model T in 1908 which was a car designed for the common American to drive for everyday use. Its mass production allowed it to be sold cheaply on the market and allowed so many people to purchase the Model T car. The mass production came from the assembly line methods that Henry Ford perfected in the factories of each worker handling one responsibility and then passing the item on the assembly line on a conveyor belt down to another worker.

Ford also paid his workers very well at $5 an hour which was a lot at the time to keep his workers happy and working hard. Ford used this high pay of workers to prevent unions which he hated from forming among the employees. Ford promoted his cars through newspapers and books, his most famous was “My Life and Work” which was published in 1922. For most years Henry Ford sold his car models in black and white. However when Ford’s competition caught up to him and began selling car models in different colors, Ford began losing a lot of customers and business that went to rival car companies. Finally, Ford decided to make his cars in different colors. By 1930 his company was no different than other car companies. Still by that time Ford had became a very rich man. At that point in time he gave operations of his company over to his son Edsel.