46 Fun Facts About Henry Ford

Ford told a reporter in 1916 that history is 'more or less' what?

Bunk was his word to the Chicago Tribune. Yet the same man spent his later years rescuing the American past, and in 1929 he dedicated a museum complex in Dearborn packed with Americana and historic buildings.

What exasperated the backers of Ford's first car company?

Endless tinkering sank it: Ford kept improving the model and called it not ready for customers, so the backers who wanted a car to sell gave up. His third try, Ford Motor Company in 1903, started with just $28,000 in cash.

Ford's father William sailed for America in 1847 from which country?

Ireland, and County Cork in particular, was William's home. Seventy years on, his son picked Cork as the site of a tractor factory, the emigrant's boy returning as an employer.

What reputation did the 15-year-old Ford earn by taking neighbours' property apart and putting it back together?

Watch repairman was his name around the neighbourhood by 15. The watches doubled as his textbooks: taking them apart and making them run again taught him the basics of machine design.

At 12, Ford met the first vehicle he had ever seen moving without horses; what powered it?

Steam drove it, a heavy engine rolling along a Michigan road under its own power. By his own account Ford was off his father's wagon and quizzing the engineer at once, and the first machines he built were steam-driven too.

Which part of his rural Michigan boyhood did Ford say he never had any love for?

The farm never won him; it was the mother on the farm he loved, he wrote. He thought the work drudgery, and called it his constant ambition to lift that load off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors.

Which firm employed Ford as an engineer from 1891, promoting him to chief engineer in 1893?

Edison Illuminating Company bosses later offered him the post of general superintendent, on condition that he give up his gasoline engine. He chose the engine, quitting in August 1899 to build cars.

What did Ford name the self-propelled vehicle he completed and test-drove in June 1896?

The Quadricycle ran on four bicycle wheels, and Ford sold it later that year for $200, money he put straight into a second car. Once Ford Motor Company was thriving, he bought his first one back.

Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone called themselves the Vagabonds on yearly trips doing what?

Camping it was, though hardly roughing it: servants and photographers came along, and President Harding joined the party in 1921. Ford wrote that the trips were good fun until they began to attract too much attention.

What did the Henry Ford Company become after Ford walked out in 1902?

Cadillac was the new name once engineer Henry Leland and his son took charge of the plant. Two decades later Ford had the last word, buying the luxury car firm the Lelands founded next.

Which siblings built the chassis for the first Ford cars and became shareholders in the company?

The Dodge brothers, John and Horace, were building a car of their own by 1916 while still holding Ford stock. When Ford held back dividends to fund expansion, they took him to court.

Ford set a land speed record in January 1904 by driving a car over what surface near Detroit?

A frozen lake: he covered a mile of Lake St Clair ice in 39.4 seconds, the car leaping into the air at every fissure. He wanted a record because nothing advertised a new model better.

As Model T sales boomed, what did Ford do to prices?

Cut them, and kept cutting: the touring car that cost $850 in 1908 sold for under $300 by 1925. Ford passed the savings from faster production on to buyers.

Which Model T design choice spared passengers from stepping out into traffic?

Steering wheel on the left put the driver by the middle of the road and passengers by the kerb. Ford chose it so that passengers could get in and out without walking around the car in the street.

Ford credited the overhead trolleys of which Chicago trade with inspiring his moving assembly line?

Meatpackers: their overhead lines carried carcasses past butchers who each made one cut. Ford's version, begun in 1913, cut the time to assemble a chassis from over 12 hours to about 93 minutes.

Ford's famous line said customers could have any colour they wanted 'so long as it is' what?

Black it was, but only for a while: the first Model Ts came in red, green, grey and blue. Black was the sole choice from about 1914 to 1925, though Ford dates his remark to 1909.

Which small car finally broke the Model T's production record of 15 million, in 1972?

VW Beetle output passed the T's total in February 1972. Ford got to 15 million by building a single model for 19 years, and by 1918 half of all the cars in America were Model Ts.

To whom did Ford hand the presidency of Ford Motor Company at the end of 1918?

His son Edsel, then 25, kept the title until his death in 1943. It was a title without the power: Henry kept the final say and at times reversed his decisions.

What ruse scared Ford's minority shareholders into selling him their stock in 1919?

Announcing a rival car company did it: Ford said he would quit and build a car cheaper than the Model T. Fearing their shares would be worthless, all seven outside holders had sold to the family by July 1919.

Which luxury car maker did Ford buy in 1922?

Lincoln was failing when Ford paid $8 million for it in February 1922. The deal was his son's cause more than his own: Henry, maker of the everyman's car, never cared much for luxury ones.

What did Ford, at 69, put into a low-priced car for the first time in 1932?

A V8 engine had been a luxury until Ford found a way to build one cheaply, and his version stayed in production until 1953. Even so, by 1936 his company had slipped to third behind General Motors and Chrysler.

What problem was Ford's $5 day of 1914 meant to cure?

Constant quitting was the trouble: men left the monotonous line so fast that Ford was hiring 53,000 a year to keep 14,000 jobs filled. Roughly doubling their pay steadied the workforce almost at once.

To earn the full $5 day, a Ford worker first had to pass company inspectors checking what?

His home life had to pass muster: about fifty company investigators looked for drinking, boarders and an untidy house. Ford later dropped the scheme, conceding that paternalism has no place in industry.

What did Ford give his factory workers in May 1926?

A two-day weekend arrived when Ford cut the working week from six days to five, 40 hours in all. His motive went beyond kindness: he argued that workers needed leisure to buy and use what industry made.

Which former Navy boxer ran Ford's Service Department and its intimidation of union organisers?

Harry Bennett staffed his force with street fighters and ex-convicts, and in 1937 his men beat Walter Reuther and other union organisers at the Battle of the Overpass. Henry Ford II fired him in 1945.

Whose ultimatum, by Ford's own account, made him sign with the UAW in 1941 instead of closing his plants?

His wife Clara threatened to leave him unless he signed, Ford later said. The last holdout then gave the union more than his rivals had: a union shop, the industry's top wages and dues taken from pay.

What was the nickname of the Ford Trimotor aircraft?

The Tin Goose was skinned in corrugated metal, wings and all. Douglas airliners made it obsolete by the mid-1930s, yet a few of the rugged Fords worked on for decades.

What did Ford fund in 1915 to try to end World War I, taking activists to Europe?

A Peace Ship it was, a chartered ocean liner whose mission the press widely ridiculed. It ended no war, yet Ford wrote that he did not regret the attempt: we learn more from our failures, he said, than from our successes.

Which president urged Ford to run for the US Senate from Michigan in 1918?

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, nearly got his man: Ford lost narrowly. The winner, Truman Newberry, resigned in 1922 under scrutiny of what he had spent on beating him.

How much did the jury award Ford in his 1919 libel win over the Chicago Tribune?

Six cents was all the jury gave him of the $1 million he sought. The paper had called him an ignorant idealist, and its lawyers made the point by quizzing him on the stand, where his grasp of American history fell apart.

What was the name of the hometown newspaper Ford bought in 1918 and used to publish antisemitic articles?

The Dearborn Independent claimed up to 900,000 readers by the mid-1920s, a reach it owed to Ford's dealers, who were made to push it on car buyers. Its articles were bound into four volumes as The International Jew.

Ford is the only American mentioned favourably in which infamous book?

Mein Kampf praises him by name, and the admiration lasted. On Ford's 75th birthday in 1938, Nazi Germany gave him its highest medal for a foreigner, and he accepted it.

What was Ford hoping to grow at Fordlandia, the town he built in the Amazon in the 1920s?

Rubber for his tyres was the plan, along with a model American town in the jungle, yet none was ever successfully produced there. His grandson sold the land back to Brazil in 1945 for a fraction of its cost.

In 1929 Ford signed a deal to help which country build a car plant?

The Soviet Union was not even recognised by Washington when the great capitalist signed. Ford sent engineers and executives to Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga, where the new plant was to build cars of his design.

Ford became a popular hero in 1911 by winning a long court fight against what?

A patent on all cars that burned gasoline had been granted in 1895 to George Selden, a lawyer, and an association of makers used it to decide who could build them. Ford lost in 1909, appealed and won.

What did Ford's vast Willow Run plant turn out during World War II, at about one an hour?

B-24 bombers, the Liberators, came slowly at first: Ford's men found car-making methods hard to turn on aircraft. By 1944 the plant, then thought the largest factory in the world, had hit its stride.

What did Henry Ford II do with the family firm in 1956?

Sold shares to the public, that is: until January 1956 the only stockholders were the family and the Ford Foundation. Henry had paid about $106 million in 1919 to rid himself of outside shareholders.

Which charcoal briquette brand began as a use for wood scraps from Ford's sawmill?

Kingsford is named for Edward Kingsford, who found Ford the Michigan timberland that fed his plants. The briquettes sold under Ford's own name at first and took the Kingsford name only later.

Which crop gave its nickname to the plastic-bodied car Ford unveiled in 1941?

Soybeans were his pet crop: Ford had them made into paint and plastic parts, and even had a suit made from soybean fibre.

Which scientist befriended Ford over a shared interest in industrial crops?

George Washington Carver and Ford grew close over making goods from crops. When the ageing scientist could no longer manage stairs, Ford had an elevator put into his Tuskegee dormitory.

What did Ford call his Dearborn estate, a name later given to a car?

Fair Lane was home from 1915 until Ford died there in 1947, and the Fairlane car followed in 1955. The company later gave the land to the University of Michigan for a Dearborn campus.

What open-air museum did Ford create in Dearborn by collecting and moving old buildings?

Greenfield Village took its name from the township where his wife grew up. Ford bought historic buildings, the Wright brothers' bicycle shop among them, and had them taken apart and rebuilt in Dearborn.

In which novel are the years counted 'A.F.' and people swear by 'Our Ford' instead of 'Our Lord'?

Brave New World counts its years from the first Model T, and its citizens make the sign of the T where the cross once went. Huxley made a living carmaker the deity of his future, revered for the assembly line.

What was the 'Little White Slaver' that Ford attacked in a 1914 book written for American boys?

The cigarette had already been banned by a dozen states, so Ford was joining a crusade, not starting one. His book opens with a letter from Edison, who blamed the burning paper and would hire no cigarette smoker.

Which old-time pastime did Ford use his fortune to revive, funding classes for it in American schools?

Square dancing was his answer to jazz, which he loathed and blamed on Jews. He kept a dancing master on his staff and made executives and visiting royalty learn the quadrille.

Which belief did Ford say had freed him from the clock, because there would always be time enough?

Reincarnation came to him at 26, he told an interviewer, and put a restless mind at ease. He held that genius was no gift but experience carried over from many earlier lives.