CELTIC
CORNER
Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants
Legend has
it that auto baron Henry Ford had a unique way of firing people. An employee
would leave on a Friday and return on Monday to find his office cleaned out and
a notice that he was no longer employed by the company.
Three
things are known for certain about Henry Ford: He revolutionized the automobile
worldwide; he brought into being something called the production line, which
revolutionized industry; and he changed the way America lived. Before Ford,
there was the horse and buggy. After Ford, there was the motorcar.
Members of
the Ford family started to come from County Cork to Dearborn, Michigan in 1832.
William, Henry’s father and a host of uncles and aunts arrived in the area in
the 1840’s, driven from Ireland by the potato famine.
Michigan
was a good place to emigrate to. At the time, anyone could buy an acre of land
for the munificent sum of ten shillings, about $1.20 in American money. The
immigrants bought every square inch of soil they could afford and then set
about farming it. At harvest time, the produce was sold in Detroit, which was
not so far away that it couldn’t be reached by horse drawn carts.
Henry, born two years
before the Civil War ended, worked on his family’s land. But when he was
sixteen, he took a part time job at a machine shop, where he could exercise his
interest in inventing and how mechanical things work.
He then
went to work for the Detroit Edison Company and by the time he was thirty had
worked his way up to being chief and was responsible for that city’s
electricity.
The job
allowed him a lot of free time. While he had to be on call twenty four hours a
day, circumstances rarely required his presence. He was able to bury himself in
his shop where in 1893 he constructed a gasoline engine that was an improvement
over those that then existed. Three years later he invented an ungainly,
spidery looking thing with four wheels that was part bicycle, part car. He
called it the “quadricycle” or “horseless carriage”.
Over the
next few years, he improved the horseless carriage and in 1903 he felt he had
developed a marketable car. With just $28,000 Ford incorporated the Henry Ford
Company.
His
company was a success (he publicized it by racing his cars; he himself drove a
“999” to a world record, covering a mile in 39.4 seconds) and was almost immediately
pounced on by the Licensed Auto Manufacturers, who said he couldn’t use the
gasoline engine, which they claimed had been patented in 1895. Ford disagreed,
saying his engine was different from the original. They went to court and in
1909 Ford lost. But in 1911 he won an appeal.
In 1908
Ford told the world that he would build a car for the masses and he did. The
Model T sold more than fifteen million vehicles and Ford captured half the
world market.
At the
core of his success was not just the car, which was well made, but the value
consumers’ received for their money. In 1908 the Model T cost $950, but because
of Ford’s innovations on the production line and because of his willingness to
pay his workers double what other auto manufacturers did and thus encourage
them to greater productivity, in 1927 he was able to produce a Model T that
sold for less than $300.
To get
supplies for his cars, Ford bought the producers-the mines, forest, glassworks,
rubber plantations of the raw materials needed, as well as ships and trains to
transport the materials. His cash flow was so great that he could finance these
purchases himself.
While Ford
had a passion for building cars and other mechanical items, he had a deep interest
in other activities as well. One was country dancing, which he remembered
fondly form his youth. In fact he had met his wife, Clara (whom he married in
1888), at a square dance. In 1900 he set about to bring country dancing back
into public consciousness.
He also
brought it back into the consciousness of his employees whether they liked it
or not. Here, his dictatorial side showed. He made learning square dancing
mandatory for his executives actually curtaining off a large area in one of
the laboratories to serve as a dance studio.
He also
had members of his company research county dancing thoroughly to make sure the
steps were correct and he ultimately wrote a book on the subject entitle Good
Morning-After a Sleep of Twenty Years, Old Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived
by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. Ultimately, Ford would push and support country
dancing to the point where it became part of the curricula of many colleges.
Though
Ford’s car and production line achievement helped eliminate the old ways things
were done and the way people lived, he never lost a liking of things from
yesteryear. To help preserve those traditions, he built Greenfield Village near
Detroit, which sought to reproduce things the way they had been when he was a
boy.
And his
admiration for Thomas Alva Edison (he once wrote in one of his notebooks, “God
needed Edison”) was reflected in his Greenfield Village duplication of the
Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratories where Edison had invented so much. Ford had
worked for Edison and regarded him as his mentor. Early on, when he had been
working on the gasoline engine, Edison had encouraged him to continue rather
than get involved with steam or some other fuel system.
In the
1930s the fortunes of the Ford Motor company declined. The successor to the
Model T, the Model A, did not sell as well and across the 1930s the graph line
showing the company’s sales continued downward. But when World War II came along
and with it the demand for thousands of new vehicles, Ford rebounded.
Ford was a
tough man, but the great sadness in his life, the one thing he could never put
behind him, was the death of his son Edsel of cancer in 1943. It is said the
heart went out of him not only for business but for life itself. Two years
after this, he handed the reins (or steering wheel) of the company to his
grandson Henry II.
He died
four years after Edsel and gave his shares of the company to the Ford
Foundation, instantly making it a leading philanthropic organization.
Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhuit!
= Happy New Year!
Pronounce it something like:
/ah-vleen fwee vosh-ah ghwitch
Frank
Darcy
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