Innovators change things. Innovation requires self-confidence, a taste for taking risks, leadership ability and a vision of what the future should be.
Henry Ford had all these characteristics, but it took him many years to develop all of them fully. His beginnings were perfectly ordinary. Early on Ford demonstrated some of the characteristics that would make him successful, powerful, and famous. He organized other boys to build rudimentary water wheels and steam engines.
He learned about full-sized steam engines by becoming friends with the men who ran them. He taught himself to fix watches, and used the watches as textbooks to learn the rudiments of machine design. Thus, young Ford demonstrated mechanical ability, a facility for leadership, and a preference for learning by trial-and-error. These characteristics would become the foundation of his whole career. But young Henry was fascinated by machines and was willing to take risks to pursue that fascination.
In he left the farm to become an apprentice at the Michigan Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars in Detroit. Over the next two-and-one-half years he held several similar jobs, sometimes moving when he thought he could learn more somewhere else. He returned home in but did little farming. By now Ford was demonstrating another characteristic—a preference for working on his own rather than for somebody else.
Ford did not know a great deal about electricity. He saw the job in part as an opportunity to learn. Henry was an apt pupil, and by had risen to chief engineer of the Illuminating Company. But he had other interests. He became one of scores of people working in barns and small shops across the country trying to build horseless carriages.
Aided by a team of friends, his experiments culminated in with the completion of his first self-propelled vehicle, the Quadricycle. It had four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, was steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse. A second car followed in Ford now demonstrated one of the keys to his future success—the ability to articulate a vision and convince other people to sign on and help him achieve that vision.
He persuaded a group of businessmen to back him in the biggest risk of his life—a company to make and sell horseless carriages. But Ford knew nothing about running a business, and learning by trial-and-error always involves failure.
The new company failed, as did a second. To revive his fortunes Ford took bigger risks, building and even driving racing cars. The success of these cars attracted additional financial backers, and on June 16, Henry incorporated his third automotive venture, Ford Motor Company. The Model T was easy to operate, maintain, and handle on rough roads.
It immediately became a huge success. Ford could easily sell all he could make; but he wanted to make all he could sell. Doing that required a bigger factory. In the company moved into a huge new plant in Highland Park, Michigan, just north of Detroit. As American cars grew ever larger, the rest of the world needed an honest small car to deal with higher fuel prices and congested former cart paths.
This was a simple, straightforward car, with a front engine and rear-wheel drive, that made Ford almost as British as it is American. Deeply beloved in the United Kingdom, it became a fierce rally car and a performance icon.
Arguably, this is the best-looking truck ever made just ask any street-rodder. And thanks to a modern chassis underneath, the beauty was more than skin deep. Although many of these have been customized into hot rods, some are still working hard every day. Think of it as the engineering blueprint that the entire American industry would follow for the next 35 years.
In the mids, the American car industry was flailing, failing, and falling behind the Japanese. Then came the cleanly aerodynamic, front-wheel-drive Taurus and suddenly it was rational to buy an American car again. No one may ever collect one as a classic—save for perhaps the high-performance SHO —but the Taurus saved Ford. The F-series pickups have been among the best-selling vehicles on earth ever since. Car fans will continue to disagree whether the first Mustang, introduced in April of , was officially a , The flathead Deuce is the eternal hot rod.
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