Henry Ford Trivia
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46 free Henry Ford trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Henry Ford trivia quiz follows the farm boy from Dearborn who hated farming, took apart neighbours' watches at 15, worked for Edison's electric company, and built a Quadricycle in his shed in 1896. It covers the two failed companies before Ford Motor, the record run on frozen Lake St. Clair, the Model T and the moving assembly line, the $5 day and the five-day week, the Peace Ship, the Senate race, the Dearborn Independent, the Battle of the Overpass, Fordlandia, the Trimotor, Willow Run and the family coup that finally handed the company to his grandson. The easy questions are ones most people know: the car, the colour, the company. The medium ones ask about his mentors, his rivals, his racing days, his labour policies and his aviation ventures. The hard ones dig into the Dodge brothers, the 999, the six-cent libel verdict, the soybean car, Kingsford charcoal and Brave New World. It suits a business or American history round, a car-club quiz or anyone who wants to look past the assembly line. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ford told a reporter in 1916 that history is 'more or less' what?
Bunk
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.
Q 02What exasperated the backers of Ford's first car company?
Endless tinkering
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.
Q 03Ford's father William sailed for America in 1847 from which country?
Ireland
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.
Q 04What reputation did the 15-year-old Ford earn by taking neighbours' property apart and putting it back together?
Watch repairman
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.
Q 05At 12, Ford met the first vehicle he had ever seen moving without horses; what powered it?
Steam
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.
Q 06Which part of his rural Michigan boyhood did Ford say he never had any love for?
The farm
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.
Q 07Which firm employed Ford as an engineer from 1891, promoting him to chief engineer in 1893?
Edison Illuminating Company
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.
Q 08What did Ford name the self-propelled vehicle he completed and test-drove in June 1896?
The Quadricycle
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.
Q 09Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone called themselves the Vagabonds on yearly trips doing what?
Camping
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.
Q 10What did the Henry Ford Company become after Ford walked out in 1902?
Cadillac
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.
Q 11Which siblings built the chassis for the first Ford cars and became shareholders in the company?
The Dodge brothers
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.
Q 12Ford set a land speed record in January 1904 by driving a car over what surface near Detroit?
A frozen lake
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.
Q 13As Model T sales boomed, what did Ford do to prices?
Cut them
Q 21What did Ford, at 69, put into a low-priced car for the first time in 1932?
A V8 engine
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.
Q 22What problem was Ford's $5 day of 1914 meant to cure?
Constant quitting
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.
Q 23To earn the full $5 day, a Ford worker first had to pass company inspectors checking what?
His home life
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.
Q 14Which Model T design choice spared passengers from stepping out into traffic?
Steering wheel on the left
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.
Q 15Ford credited the overhead trolleys of which Chicago trade with inspiring his moving assembly line?
Meatpackers
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.
Q 16Ford's famous line said customers could have any colour they wanted 'so long as it is' what?
Black
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.
Q 17Which small car finally broke the Model T's production record of 15 million, in 1972?
VW Beetle
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.
Q 18To whom did Ford hand the presidency of Ford Motor Company at the end of 1918?
His son Edsel
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.
Q 19What ruse scared Ford's minority shareholders into selling him their stock in 1919?
Announcing a rival car company
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.
Q 20Which luxury car maker did Ford buy in 1922?
Lincoln
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.
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.
Q 24What did Ford give his factory workers in May 1926?
A two-day weekend
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.
Q 25Which former Navy boxer ran Ford's Service Department and its intimidation of union organisers?
Harry Bennett
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.
Q 26Whose ultimatum, by Ford's own account, made him sign with the UAW in 1941 instead of closing his plants?
His wife Clara
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.
Q 27What was the nickname of the Ford Trimotor aircraft?
The Tin Goose
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.
Q 28What did Ford fund in 1915 to try to end World War I, taking activists to Europe?
A Peace Ship
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.
Q 29Which president urged Ford to run for the US Senate from Michigan in 1918?
Woodrow Wilson
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.
Q 30How much did the jury award Ford in his 1919 libel win over the Chicago Tribune?
Six cents
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.