History 479 Paper Henry Ford

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Production Methods

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At the time of the Ford Motor Company's fiftieth anniversary, the company proudly claimed that the Ford system was a product of America's industrial history, and was made up of seven elements: power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed, and repetition.(Shiomi and Wada 2)

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Production Methods

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"In 1916, less than two years after the appearance of the Ford system, annual US automobile production reached 1-million units, a level not destined to be reached by any other nation until England achieved that figure in 1954, well after World War II."(Shiomi and Wada 3)

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Production Methods

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Previous research has not given sufficient consideration to the production management and control side of the original Ford system, possibly because of the convenience of the 'great water supply system' metaphor and subscription to the myth that Henry Ford disliked organization. However, at the entrance to the Highland Park plant there was a large four-storey headquarters building equipped with the latest office equip-ment, with a total of 864 salaried employees in 1915, rising to 1,398 in 1916. The employment department alone had 526 people. 9 The Ford Motor Company made the monthly production plan to cope with the fluctuation of demands. The production office had to allocate this monthly carproduction number to Detroit and twenty-two other domestic, and two foreign plants, and moreover coordinate the daily flows of 6-million materials and parts (5,000 per unit, 1,200 units per day) on one-car-perminute cycle time in the Highland Park plant.(Shiomi and Wada 5)

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Great Quote about the beginnings of the industrialization of automobiles from 1919

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There are only three American industries whose product has attained the billion mark; one of these is steel, the other food products, while the third is an industry that was practically unknown in the United States fifteen years ago. Superlatives come naturally to mind in discussing American progress, but hardly any extravagant phrases could do justice to the development of American automobiles(Hendrick 171).

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Early industry

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In 1899 the United States produced 3700 motor vehicles; in 1916 we made 1,500,000. The man who now makes a personal profit of not far from $50,000,000 a year in this industry was a puttering mechanic when the twentieth century came in. If we capitalized Henry Ford's income, he is probably a richer man than Rockefeller; yet, as recently as 1905 his possessions consisted of a little shed of a factory which employed a dozen workmen.(Hendrick 172)

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Early industrialization

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Moreover, the automobile illustrates more completely than any other industry the technical qualities that so largely explain our industrial progress. Above all, American manufacturing has developed three characteristics. These are quantity production, standardization, and the use of labor-saving machinery. It is because Ford and other manufacturers adapted these principles to making the automobile that the American motor industry has reached such gigantic proportions.(Hendrick 172)

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Pre-Ford Automobiles

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The French apparently led all nations in the manufacture of motor vehicles, and in the early nineties their products began to make occasional appearances on American roads. The type of American who owned this imported machine was the same that owned steam yachts and a box at the opera. Hardly any new development has aroused greater hostility. It not only frightened horses, and so disturbed the popular traffic of the time, but its speed, its glamour, its arrogance, and the haughty behavior of its proprietor, had apparently transformed it into a new badge of social cleavage.(Hendrick 175)

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Ed. Jim Cullen
Popular Culture in American History pg 40

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Suburban life required the family car. The constuction of new communiitites was not matched with expanded systems of public transportation; instead; the state and federal highway systems expanded to connect suburbs and their neighbouring cities. Cars, a necessity of suburban life, were also an important symbol of the family's status and buying power.

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Significance of Ford's Life

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Comming to prominence amid the collapse of Victorian tradition with its values of self discipline, thrift, and producerism, Ford popularized a new creed of consumer fulfillment. He was perhaps the first American businessman to realize that large-scale production depended upon large-scale consumption. (Watts xii)

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Significance of Ford's Life

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In an atmosphere of consumer abundance, Ford became a principal architect of a cultural order, stressing standardized experiences, collective self-conciousness, and widely dispersed leisure among a popular audience. (Watts xii)

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Early Life

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"Ford's mechanical inclanation was the product of his frustration with the painfully inefficent farming labor that he took part in as a child. He would often attempt to devise various methods and contraptions which would make the tasks he was assigned easier. This is telling, because even earlier on it is clear that he has a concept of increasing efficency through the use of technology. (Watts 14)

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First Automobile

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Thus, advances in gas engines occurred in a number of places, but the trail that actually led to the motor car began in Germany. Legal rulings there in 1884 and 1886 canceled the Deutz Company's patent rights to the four-stroke principle, an event that hastened the birth of the automobile industry by several years. For early in 1886 Karl Benz fitted a four-stroke gasoline engine of his own design to a large tricycle and drove it successfully. This machine is usually considered to be the world's first gasoline automobile.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 5)

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First Automobiles in America

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More significant, bicycle mechanics Charles and Frank Duryea, apparently stimulated by newspaper accounts of an early Benz motor tricycle, designed a gasoline automobile. They had it built by a machine shop in Springfield, Mass., and first ran it in September 1893, the first gasoline car built in the United States. The Duryeas did not sell any of their cars until 1896, and made hardly more than a dozen of them altogether. In 1894 Elwood Haynes had a gasoline car built on his design by the Apperson machine shop of Kokomo, Indiana, but the Haynes-Apperson Company did not make cars for sale until 1898. Others were tinkering, of course, among them Hiram P. Maxim in Lynn, Massachusetts, and Henry Ford and Charles B. King in Detroit.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 13)

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First Automobile Boom (1895-1908) and the Shift from European Dominance to American

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The period 1895 to 1908 marked the first automobile boom. During these years, France dominated the young industry. It was the leading producer for most of the period and the leading exporter throughout. From France as a center, technical and marketing methods spread to other European countries and to a lesser degree to the United States. This is not to suggest that in this period the French had nothing to learn from elsewhere, but on balance French contributions outweighed French receipts. The minor economic recession of 1907-8 brought a brief pause to the industry in Europe, but it also signaled a turning point. From this time until the First World War, the industry in Britain and Germany grew at a faster rate than in France and relied less on that country. More importantly, a challenge came from America, where manufacturers began to find a mass market for automobiles and sought to create new methods of production to satisfy it. These revolutionary innovations would make the United States the center of the industry from 1908 on.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 14)

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Automobile as High Society Before Ford, but American tendencies towards a more democratic use is evident

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The first successful automobile clubs began to appear in 1900, in New York and Chicago. Within a few years, nearly a hundred were organized. Those such as the Automobile Club of America ( New York City) that followed the European example of socially restrictive membership, high dues, and elaborate club facilities usually failed to attract many members, but the more democratic clubs thrived.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 18)

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Early Market and Sales of the Ford Cars

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In the early days of the Ford company in the United States, it granted discounts of up to 25 percent to dealers. Established firms such as Peugeot and P & L originally sold through agents already handling other items for them, but new ones such as Renault Frères and Olds and Ford in the United States did not seem to experience difficulty finding dealers. Peugeot was probably the first to establish company-owned sales and service branches. Ford began to do the same in 1905.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 19)

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Social Classes with the Pre-Model T Automobiles

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In all countries, the earliest buyers of cars came from the same social groups: wealthy sportsmen, doctors, businessmen, and engineers. Sportsmen usually did not consider the original cost and the expense of operation as major factors in the decision to buy a car, but others were concerned about them. Automobile magazines frequently tried to demonstrate the financial advantages of mechanical transportation over the horse-drawn carriage. Some of these periodicals also tried to persuade manufacturers that a large market existed for reliable low-priced cars. 7 Most of the European and many of the American makers during this period preferred instead to aim at the wealthy with a limited output and a substantial profit per car. This attitude, however, should not be considered as solely the result of snobbishness or feeble entrepreneurship. Most of the early producers of cars were technicians or engineers. They aimed to make high-quality products to satisfy their own standards and those of their peers. Reflecting their training and experience, their interests focused on elegant design and technical innovation. Yet such attitudes made their cars expensive. Few of them recognized a challenge or potential profits in factory management or marketing, for these were "less noble" matters.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 22)

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Initial Government Reactions to Increasing Automobile Numbers

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Neither type of opposition prevailed, of course, but governments gradually did try to deal with both problems, first registering cars and drivers as well as regulating driving, especially speed, and then by covering roads with hard surfaces. Local officials usually acted first to regulate driving, sometimes within national rules, as in Britain. Public authorities did not hesitate to tax motor vehicles, charging fees for license tags and levying property taxes on them. The latter taxes tended to be higher in Europe than in the United States, for automobiles were more closely identified with the rich in the Old World. As a whole, however, before 1914 governments did not recognize the revolutionary implications of the automobile for their own uses, and so concerned themselves little with it.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 23)

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US in the Turn of the Twentieth Century, shows that Ford and his Model-T were by far not the first automobiles, nor the first production-made

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By the end of 1901, the company had produced 425 Oldsmobiles, which sold at the low price of $650. By this time, Olds had also expanded production facilities, finishing the first building of a new factory back in Lansing. Keeping establishments in both Lansing and Detroit operating through 1905, the Olds Company made 2,500 cars in 1902, 3,000 in 1903, and 5,500 in 1904. The 1902 figure was a U.S. record, and the 1903 total a world record. Like Locomobile and its steamers, Olds had uncovered a large market for an inexpensive car. His was the third American example of quantity production of a single model chassis, preceded by Electric Vehicle's output of some 1,200-1,500 electric cars in 1899-1900 and the Locomobile operation in Watertown and Bridgeport.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 40)

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Ford was not even the first man in Detroit to build an automobile, forming of his first company and selling of car, minimal success.

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It took Henry Ford a longer time than Olds to establish himself in the automobile business. A farm boy from near Detroit, he became a machinist and self-taught engineer. In an interesting parallel with Henry Royce, Ford became chief engineer for an electric utility in Detroit in 1893. For several years, he tinkered with gasoline engines and in June 1896 he finished building a quadricycle weighing only 500 pounds, less than half that of a typical European car of this period. This machine was not the first constructed in Detroit, for Charles King, a consulting engineer and friend of Ford's, had oper

ated one of his own manufacture three months earlier. Ford soon sold his first car, and by 1899 had built another. This machine operated creditably enough for Ford to find backing to establish the Detroit Automobile Company. This concern soon failed because Ford lacked experience in organizing production and made no more than twenty cars in the years 1899-1900. (Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 41)

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First Real Success, still had stuff manufactured out of house, only assembled them, already largely profitable.

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Nevertheless, some of the same men who supported this firm again financed Ford in a new enterprise, the Henry Ford Company ( 1901), which backed his efforts in making some racing cars. He soon left this company, and his interest in racing lasted only until late 1902. Probably impressed by the success of the Oldsmobile in these years, Ford decided to make a small car to compete with it. In August 1902 he convinced a local coal dealer, Alexander Malcomson, to finance still another automobile venture. Ford and his assistant, C. H. Wills, built prototypes while Malcomson's associate James Couzens handled the business arrangements. All was ready by June 1903 when Ford, Malcomson, Couzens, and a few others organized the Ford Motor Company. It was capitalized at $100,000, of which only $29,500 represented cash paid in at this time. Like the French Renault in 1898-99 and Olds in 1901, Ford began strictly as an assembly operation. At a price of $250 for each set, the Dodge Brothers machine shop supplied the crucial items for the two-cylinder car, including the chassis frame, engine, transmission, and axles. Carburetors, wheels, bodies, and other equipment also came from suppliers. Although this first Ford model was not outstanding mechanically, the demand for moderately priced cars was such that the firm easily sold 1,700 of them at prices ranging from $850 to $950 between June 1903 and September 1904. In this first year, the business made enough profit to pay dividends equivalent to 98 percent of the capital and build a large new factory, still primarily for assembly purposes. In 1904-5 the company employed about 300 men.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 42)

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Scope of the life of the Model-T.

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The sensation of the automobile show at New York in November 1907 was the new Buick 10, a small four-cylinder design somewhat larger and heavier than Ford's Model N and selling at $900. In 1908 Buick made 4,000 of the 10s and about 4,500 of other types for a total that surpassed Ford's by more than 2,000 cars. Ford responded to the challenge, for during 1908 his firm prepared a new low-priced four-cylinder model, the "T," and deliveries began in October. They would stop only in 1927, 15,458,781 cars later. The Buick 10 and the Ford T uncovered for the American industry a large, apparently unlimited market for inexpensive, reliable, four-cylinder cars. The next problem would be to manufacture them in quantities sufficient to meet the demand.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 45)

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American Dominance of the Automobile Industry and the Effects Upon the Economic Structures

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American automobile production grew rapidly after 1905. From then until 1914, only twice was the annual increase less than 20 percent. In 1913 production reached 485,000 cars and trucks, more than ten times that of the leading European country, France, and more than three-fourths of world output. As production rose to these massive proportions, two basic characteristics emerged in the American automobile industry: the establishment of very large business organizations, and the perfecting of manufacturing techniques to make and assemble huge numbers of identical parts without using an enormous work force, especially of highly skilled workmen.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 51)

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Changes that assembly line production had upon the workers

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Such spectacular results in raising labor productivity resulted from requiring the workers to pace their actions to the speed of the line. They devoted their time and energy to one particular productive task rather than spending moments walking about picking up tools and materials and wondering what to do next. In addition to these mechanical improvements, Ford management also took steps in 1913 and 1914 to stabilize its work force, notorious for its high rate of turnover. These measures contributed to higher labor efficiency.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 61)

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Booming Industry in Creating a Demographic Shift and a Need for Workers that Transcended Ethinic and Cultural Boundaries

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This happened especially in the factories of the American Midwest, where the industry grew so rapidly from 1905 on. There, the skilled men did not suffer seriously because they usually could find positions as toolmakers or supervisors. The unskilled recruits at first came from the farms and the declining lumber business of the area and Canada, then in rising numbers from the flood of immigrants coming to the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe during these years. Detroit soon became a polyglot city, and the Ford company posted some notices in at least eight different languages, including Greek and Arabic.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 64)

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Ford's Policies to Prevent the Large Turnover Rate That had resulted in the widespread use of unskilled labor set very profound changes in the manufacturing/industrial professions, set bar high for others.

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The most significant event concerning labor in the entire period was the announcement on 5 January 1914 that the Ford Motor Company would reduce the working day to eight hours and pay a minimum of $5 per day. This startling event capped a new labor policy that Ford had initiated in October 1913, in the midst of the experiments with moving assembly lines. Foremen lost their right to discharge workers (and labor turnover dropped sharply), the wage scale was simplified, a promotion system was established, and a 13percent wage increase was granted. But these progressive actions were soon dwarfed by the $5 wage, which nearly doubled the rate of pay for American auto workers. Eligible for the new wage were workers twenty-two years and older who had worked for the company for six months and whose home life met certain standards of acceptability. Most Ford workers met these qualifications, 57 percent by the end of March 1914, and 76 percent of the rapidly growing labor force by the middle of 1916.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 69)

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Ford Realized the Importance for Consumption to keep Up with the pace of production, recognized the need for, and set the groundwork for a mass-consumer American culture

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This massive pay increase demonstrated how a share of the large financial rewards resulting from mass marketing and gains in labor productivity could be passed on to workers. When generalized, as ultimately would happen first in the United States, it would produce the mass-consumption society typical of the industrialized western world in the mid-twentieth century. The role of the Ford Company in this achievement should not be overemphasized.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 69)

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Origins of the American Automobile Revolution

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The Americans found it and soon the question no longer was how to sell the cars they made, but how to organize production so as to meet the apparently unlimited demand. Here was the beginning of a revolution: the discovery of a widespread desire for individual private mechanical transportation, and the adoption of new methods of production to make cars to satisfy this demand.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 74)

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Long neutrality from WWI allowed Americans to gain an even further advantage over Europe in this period

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The First World War did not halt the irresistible growth of the automobile manufacturers. It even expanded their working capital and their productive plant. It was an unequal expansion, however, for it benefited most of all the American companies. They took advantage of these years to increase their lead over Europe because the United States did not enter the war until 1917.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 79)

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Early Impacts on the Government of the Automobile and How it hade a role in expanding a role of the Federal Government

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A growing awareness of traffic problems came as a fourth and last result. Detroit was the first city to erect a "stop" sign in 1914, and in August of the same year Cleveland installed the first electric traffic signals. To improve rural roads, in 1916 the Congress passed the first law of the automobile age providing for federal aid for highways. The implications of this legislation were not immediately apparent because American entry into the war impeded its fulfillment. Its importance resided in the following principle: if the nation needed better roads, the national government must help provide them.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 86)

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WWI and the growing realization for better roadways to support the country's bursting industrial capabilities

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American entrance into the war demonstrated clearly that the country needed a network of national highways rather than simply piecemeal improvement of local roads. Overwhelmed, the railways soon were clogged with freight, making it impossible to ship military trucks to ports of embarkation for France. At this point, Roy Chapin, president of Hudson, suggested that trucks be driven from the Midwest to the East Coast. The army approved, and from the end of 1917 to autumn 1918 some 18,000 of them made the trip. This episode provided a striking demonstration not only of the possibilities of road transport even under poor conditions, but also highlighted the urgent need to transform the entire road system.(Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson, and Laux 89)

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Automobile and Demographics

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Sprawl has come under increasing attack in recent years for weakening neighborhood social ties. Characterized by low-density development, a separation of land uses, and infrastructure that favors the automobile, the sprawling neighborhoods of today are thought by many to spawn social isolation among their inhabitants.(Freeman 69)

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Automobile and Suburban Sprawl and Subsequent Urban Decay

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As the states and the federal government invested in streets, roads, highways, and bridges, the citizenry simultaneously flocked to the open land on the urban periphery. These two related trends—the suburbanization of the nation and the overhaul of the transportation infrastructure—combined to define and shape late twentiethcentury America, laying the groundwork for the twenty-first century legacy of ballooning municipal debt burdens, deteriorating center cities, incessant demands for capital improvements, and unstable municipal tax bases.(Gutfreund 1)

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Good Summary of What Sprawl Does

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American landscape was transformed by the drive to accomodate automobility in the United States, leading to the rapid decentralization of American communities after World War II, the dispersal of the citizenry across previously undeveloped countryside in the pattern now known as sprawl, and the accompanying abandonment of many central cities.(Gutfreund 5)

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Great Quote about Political Lobbyists Involvement in the Federalization of Highways

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On January 15, 1953, Charles E. Wilson, President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in connection with his nomination as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense. When one of the Senators on the panel suggested that Wilson's extensive holdings of GM stock might present a conflict of interest, the auto executive responded thus: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist.” 1(Gutfreund 7) Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (New York, 1996). Charles Wilson's words are often misquoted, and at least one other popular guide to familiar quotations contains an incorrect version of Wilson's statement and incorrectly places it in 1952.

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Roads and their uses and construction while railroads were king

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At the same time, the federal government planned a piecemeal series of turnpikes known collectively as the National Road, which was completed in dribs and drabs over several decades at a cumulative cost of $6.8 million. However, by mid-century the federal government had abandoned all of its highways, and the private turnpike operators had deserted most of theirs. In the face of stiff competition from railroads, they had turned them over to county governments as local roads. For many decades thereafter, railroads were universally accepted as the basic mode of long-distance transportation, and Americans relied on roads for local traffic only. 2 Accordingly, the national government and the states focused their attention on railroad development, leaving roads and streets under the exclusive purview of local government.(Gutfreund 8)