History of Ford MotorHenry Ford (1863 – 1947) stands alone as a lone visionary personally responsible for the creation of the automobile industry in America.
A self trained mechanic with a lifelong disdain of experts with university degrees, Ford built his firsts automobile in 1893, and a decade later he founded the Ford Motor Company.
He intended to produce “the car for the great attitude,” and to do he had to harmonies mass production with mass consumption. Ford was not the first manufacturer to use interchangeable parts or to run an assembly line, but in his quest to produce an inexpensive and standardized product he perfected assembly line production techniques.The result proved dramatic. In 1908, before he introduced the assembly line, Ford made 10,607 Model Ts – the “Tin Lizzie” – which he sold for $850 each. He shifted to an assembly line in 1913, and production quickly rose to 300,000 cars a year.
In 1916 he sold 730,041 Model Ts for $360 each, and in 1924 he produced two million of the cars retailing at $290 each. A total of fifteen million Model Ts rolled out of Ford plants before production ceased in 1927.
Prior to Ford, it took over twelve hours to assemble a car. By contrast his first assembly line turned out a model T every 93 minutes, and by 1927 Ford was making a Model T every 24 seconds.
The Ford Motor Company became not only the word’s largest automobile manufacturer but the world’s largest industrial enterprise.
History of Ford Motor
