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Henry Ford: Cars
built 209 days ago
Henry Ford's life story is an inspiration to any child with a dream. In the early 1900s, people thought young Henry was crazy for wanting to build an affordable motor car. Today, Henry's "crazy" idea is credited for changing the face of the modern world! Your little dreamers ages 6 to 10 will be encouraged to persevere when they read this remarkable biography. 32 colorfully illustrated pages, hardcover from Oxford University.
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Henry Ford realized he'd need a more efficient way to mass produce cars in order to lower the price. He looked at other industries and found four principles that would further their goal: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort. Ford put these principles into play gradually over five years, fine-tuning and testing as he went along. In 1913, they came together in the first moving assembly line ever used for large-scale manufacturing. Ford produced cars at a record-breaking rate.
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Henry Ford had ... invented the middle class. Factory workers in 1914 earned as little as $1 per day. Ford workers were averaging $2.34. He was accused of committing an economic crime by raising the minimum pay to $5 per day. He also shortened the workday and added $10 million of profit sharing for the factory workers. Low-paid workers became middle-class consumers, who could afford to buy the cars they made.
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Henry Ford is best known as a mass-manufacturer of automobiles. However, it was Mr. Ford who put the nation on wheels, giving the "motor car" idea practicability when he developed the means to mass-produce and sell it at a price within the means of the average worker.
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There is a story about the late Henry Ford that illustrates the application of this strategy in the car industry. Ford sent a team of agents to tour the scrap-yards of America in search of discarded Model T Fords. He told them to find out which components never failed. When they returned they reported failures of just about everything, except the kingpins. They always had years of service left in them when some other part failed irretrievably. His agents wanted to hear how the boss would improve the quality of all those components that failed.
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Henry Ford's career as a builder of automobiles dated from 1893 when his interest in internal combustion engines led him to construct a small one-cylinder gasoline model. The first Ford engine sputtered its way to life on a table in the kitchen of the Ford home in Detroit. A later version of that engine powered his first automobile in 1896.
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