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Henry Ford
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http://www.hfmgv.org/
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Business Leaders, Trends and Future
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Henry Ford spent most of his life making headlines, good, bad, but never indifferent. Celebrated as both a technological genius and a folk hero, Ford was the creative force behind an industry of unprecedented size and wealth that in only a few decades permanently changed the economic and social character of the United States. When young Ford left his father's farm in 1879 for Detroit, only two out of eight Americans lived in cities; when he died at age 83, the proportion was five out of eight. Once Ford realized the tremendous part he and his Model T automobile had played in bringing about this change, he wanted nothing more than to reverse it, or at least to recapture the rural values of his boyhood. Henry Ford, then, is an apt symbol of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial America.
Ford moved back to Detroit nine years later as a married man. His wife, Clara Bryant, had grown up on a farm not far from Ford's. They were married in 1888, and on November 6, 1893, she gave birth to their only child, Edsel Bryant. A month later Ford was made chief engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant with responsibility for maintaining electric service in the city 24 hours a day. Because he was on call at all times, he had no regular hours and could experiment to his heart's content. He had determined several years before to build a gasoline-powered vehicle, and his first working gasoline engine was completed at the end of 1893. By 1896 he had completed his first horseless carriage, the "Quadricycle," so called because the chassis of the four-horsepower vehicle was a buggy frame mounted on four bicycle wheels. Unlike many other automotive inventors, including Charles Edgar and J. Frank Duryea, Elwood Haynes, Hiram Percy Maxim, and his Detroit acquaintance Charles Brady King, all of whom had built self-powered vehicles before Ford but who held onto their creations, Ford sold his to finance work on a second vehicle, and a third, and so on.
Ford was the nominal coauthor of three books in collaboration with SAMUEL CROWTHER: My Life and Work (1922, reprinted 1987), Today and Tomorrow (1926, reprinted 1988), and Moving Forward (1930). Especially recommended studies of his life and activities are ALLAN NEVINS and FRANK ERNEST HILL, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (1954), Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (1957), and Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933-1962 (1963); CAROL W. GELDERMAN, Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist (1981), a full-length biography and a study of his company's development;WILLIAM GREENLEAF, Monopoly on Wheels (1961), a discussion of the Selden patent case. DAVID L. LEWIS, The Public Image of Henry Ford (1976), examines the media's portrayal of Ford and his company as well as the company's efforts to influence that portrayal. |
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By Crowther, Samuel
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Amazon's customers rating 
This is Henry Ford's most revealing insights into his philosophy of both business and life. Discover how Henry Ford believed in, used and commanded spiritual and philosophical principles to build his...
Ranking at Amazon 0
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Ayer Co Pub
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December - Hardcover
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Business Leaders
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Our price: n/a (list: n/a)
Used from: n/a
Information updated on 09/02/2008
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2 books found | | | |
