The Surprising Life of Henry Ford: Part 1

In this episode, CarStuff's Scott Benjamin joins the show for a discussion of Henry Ford's early years, inventions and innovations. Yet as Ford's success grew, his willingness to change did not - and ultimately a darker side of his personality emerged.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
Sarah Dowdy and I have another special guest with me today,
this time fellow editor Scott Benjamin. Hello, everybody, thanks for

(00:21):
joining us. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. For
those of you who don't already know, Scott is the
co host of the Car Stuff podcast and podcast you
may have heard of, just a general automotive expert. To
i'd say, I appreciate it, thank you. So it goes
without saying then that Scott is going to be talking
with us today about an aspect of automotive history. Yeah. Yeah,

(00:44):
this is you know what. This is a topic that
when on the surface, you might not think it's all
been interesting, you think you know everything about this guy,
But when you really start to dig deep into it,
I mean, I think you can attest to this, it
becomes he becomes very interesting. He's a fascinating guy. And
I mean, if you have an aready looked at the
title we're talking about Henry Ford, and I just have
to point out to I've done a few of these

(01:06):
guest hosts now with Deblinga on maternity leave, and most
people have had a few topics they've considered. But Scott,
you are sure you wanted to talk about Henry Ford.
And I can really see why now. I mean, he
has a fascinating legacy, certainly we can talk all about that,
but he's also just a weird guy. There's a lot
of weird stuff to talk about. Yeah, we'll get to

(01:26):
the weird stuff for sure, But you know, he in
some ways normal for you know, normal in a way
that you know an industrialist would be, if you can
say that, really, But but then he does kind of
take a left hand turn somewhere along the way, and um,
we're gonna explore all aspects of that because there's some
stuff that I mean, even taking notes, Like I started

(01:48):
to take notes and I realized that I'm getting up
to like ten twelve pages of notes, and I said,
I've just gotta stop. I'm gonna writing a book about
this guy. If I don't, maybe you can do that
after it seems like, you know, he's interesting enough to
do that. He really is. And I think before we
get too much into the positives of Ford's life and
the negatives, just get a few myths out of the

(02:10):
way Scott did Henry Ford invent the car? Did he
invent the moving assembly line? No, he did that all right.
So how did he get so mixed up with those
two things? Well, because his car, his quadricycle that he
did build, was built in eight and you've got to
admit that that's early early on in automotive history. Um,

(02:30):
that's right around the time when um Carl Bentz was
putting together his car over in Germany. It's right right
at the very beginning of the the internal combustion engine
and people with the idea that I'm going to make
a moving vehicle instead of a steam vehicle carriage. Yeah, yeah, So,
I mean this is early early on. It was not
the first, Um, it wasn't the greatest you know at

(02:51):
the time, but it became that way. And um, you know,
he didn't invent the Slumbi line, which he gets a
lot of credit for. I think a lot of people
say that, you know, thinking that that's the truth, But
it was actually another name that you'll recognize. His name
is Ransom Eli Olds. Um so Ario is our Oldsmobile
I'm presuming exactly a Boldsmobile. Um. He actually had an

(03:13):
a Sumbi line. That wasn't an automated as Sumbi line. Um,
it was a you know, manufacturing facility for vehicles, of course,
but um he put them together in mass not quite
as as fast as Henry did, because Henry incorporated moving
belts and um, further automation. He perfected what Ransom Holds
had already created. And that that what you just said, perfecting,

(03:37):
perfecting the car, or at least making it so it's
something that could be produced on a mass scale, fixed easily,
perfecting the assembly line. That's why we're still talking about
for today. That's what made his name, that's what made
his legacy, and we'll go into all of that more. Um.
But that perfection also certainly extended to other aspects of

(03:59):
his life, and that I think is a little bit
responsible for some of the weirder forward story. Very eccentric.
He's a he's a perfectionist. He's kind of a tyrant sometimes. Um,
he's pretty famous now, I mean this comes up a
lot more now. He's well known as being anti Semitic.
There are some some shady sides of the story. You

(04:19):
said anti semitic. I've bet a lot of people are
raising the river brows because they had never heard of it.
They've never heard of it. It's it's it is kind
of a more recent thing you'll hear with Ford's legacy.
He's not quite the folk hero that I think he
must have been during his own day. True, you want to, like,
you want to start at the very beginning with this guy. Yeah,
let's start. How did how did he get going? How
did he take these ideas that other people were thinking

(04:40):
of but make them into something well revolutionary? You know
he was. He was kind of a tinkerer, you know.
He he started out really, you know, in a humble situation.
He was a farm boy from Detroit, born in the
middle of the Civil War. One of those things that
just it's hard to wrap your mind around. Almost born
in the Civil War, died in the nineteen forty such
a different world, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And you can imagine

(05:02):
the world that he started life in and then what
it ended up to be, you know, in the late
forties when he when he passed away, Um, how dramatically
different it was. And it was because of his inventions. Yeah,
it's it's thanks apart to him, exactly, It's it's almost
entirely to him. Really in some ways. Um, but yeah.
He he was born just outside of Detroit on a
on a farm. Uh, spent about fifteen years there. I'd say, um,

(05:27):
and then that's this is weird, Like these little key
events lead to the person that Henry became. His dad
gave him a watch, and of course, you know, I
think a lot of boys do this, They just tear
it apart find out what made it work. But he
was able to put it back together and tear it
apart and put it back together, and he got to
know the inner workings of the machinery. And he really
liked machinery. Um. I think even locally he would, you know,

(05:48):
work on other people's watches. He became kind of a
local repairman what they said, right, So that aside, you know,
he had this interest in machinery. He his mother died
when he was relatively young. I think he was about
sixteen when she died, and his father was kind of
stunned that he was leaving the farm, and he said, well,
I was only really hanging around because I love my mother.

(06:08):
And his dad was shocked by this, but he did leave.
He went to become an apprentice at a machine shop
in Detroit to Detroit. Yeah, which is crazy. I mean
I understand, you know, you're just you know walking there
with you know nothing really the clothes in your back
and saying, you know, I want to start a new
life here. So he walked to Detroit, becomes a machinists apprentice. Um.
He also worked at a dry dock facility which is

(06:31):
on Atwater Street in Detroit. You can still go down
to this dry dock facility there. There's a brewery down
there now that I've been to a few times. Um.
And then he eventually you know, went back to the farm,
helped out his dad, but kind of got you know
involved in the steam machines that were on the farm
because that was when he took his tinkering up a knock.
This is this is not new technology, but it's technology,

(06:52):
and you know maybe it was new to his farm,
but he really enjoyed the steam machines and um, you
know decided that, you know, maybe this is something I
want to want to pursue. And he actually went to
Westinghouse in their steam engine division and became a serviceman
and like a repairman for them. UM. So you know
that just kind of keeps his this this uh, this

(07:15):
not humble beginnings, but it is in a way, it's
humble begins. He was very fascinated with machinery and how
things worked. Yeah, not not looking to be a farm boy.
Al is like, yeah, exactly, So, yeah, you were mentioning.
He's still tinkering at home, and he builds this farm locomotive,
which is essentially an engine attached to a mowing machine,

(07:36):
kind of a prototype tractor. And then he goes back
to Detroit and he gets a different kind of job,
one that you're not really you're not expecting him to
take this track. He goes to work for the Edison Company,
and of course Thomas Edison is a great hero of
his remains a hero of bit throughout his life. But
his new job with Edison Company was to supervise the

(07:57):
electrical service, you know, to make sure everything was running operly.
So it meant that he was always on call. And
if you're always on call, of course you have a
lot of downtime and for four and he's not just
whiling aways hours, he's still tinkering. He's working on new inventions. Yeah, yeah,
we're talking like eighteen ninety two, ninety three, something like

(08:17):
that by he was promoted to chief engineer of of uh,
the Edison Illuminating Company. I said that weird Edison Illuminating company,
you know, and with Thomas Edison at the helm, and
he had all this time and money, like you said,
and he starts tinkering in his grudge and he builds
the quad recycle. Oddly enough, now he was working. He
was fascinated with um internal combustion engines, and he made

(08:40):
this little, tiny, single cylinder motor that he built on
his his kitchen table. How many businesses start on your
kitchen table? A lot of them, do, I think? Actually
this one did. Yeah. Um, So he builds this this engine.
He says, well, why don't I put it? And he
called it the quad recycle because it had bicycle tires. Um,
he just made a really crude body for this thing,
but built in his garage and and finally got the

(09:01):
thing on the road in eighteen nine and was just
thrilled with the results. You know, he's thirty three years
old at this point. Um. You know he's he's the
chief engineer at this company run by Edison. Um. He
went to a I think it was a seminar, wasn't
he went to seminar in New York, met Thomas Edison himself,
that you know, the president of the company, and Edison
encouraged him to continue on with his work because he was,

(09:23):
you know, beaming about his his latest invention. And Edison, yeah,
he said, yeah, stick with it. That's something that you
know kindred soul. Yeah exactly. Well, and Edison is always
looking for new projects exactly. Yeah. So um, anyways, he
he said, stick with it, you know, that's the thing,
that's the thing to go for. And and Henry actually
built two or three of these prototype vehicles. Now what

(09:44):
I found really interesting about these prototypes of his and
something because of course other people were building machines like
this too at the time. He would sell them. So
when he finished one, he would sell it to finance
his next project, whereas the other guy might just think,
I built this amazing machine. I'm going to hold onto
it and show everybody. Yes, So that first quadricycle, if

(10:05):
you can imagine what that's worth, Henry Ford's first car.
He sold it for two hundred dollars to some guy.
I don't know if you lived down the road or what,
but he sold it for two hundred dollars, and then
he built two more, and then he decided that he
wanted to buy back the original, so he owns the
original and then eventually, you know, now it's on display
in the Henry Ford Museum. Well it's good. He rescued
it from obscurity exactly. But you're right in a strange

(10:26):
for him to part with that first invention, well, kind
of a shrewd decision though. I mean, clearly he was
thinking about the future, about what he was going to
build next. He needs some money, I guess, yeah. But
that perfectionism that we keep on mentioning um deciding to
sell his invention to go on to build a better one.
That really defines the next stage of his career because

(10:47):
in he has enough interest in his work in enough
backers to form the Detroit Automobile Company, which was eventually
the Henry Ford Company, and he essentially was dumped by
his investors because he was still infested with the tinkering stage.
He wasn't ready to say, all right, let's just get

(11:07):
this car to market. You know, I'm ready to go
on it. He wanted to make something better. He was
he was almost like, I want to build this by hand. Myself.
That was his his mentality, you know. And you know this,
this is where he paired up with a cat named
William William H. Murphy, and Murphy was a wealthy investor,
and they, like he said, they formed that company. You
know that that company, though, was out of business six

(11:28):
months later, and that's because of this dispute between Murphy
and Ford and how things were going to be running
and it just didn't work out. And you know, there
were we just talked about this recently on car stuff
as a matter of fact, but there were hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of defunct car companies and rather the
car companies that went defunct in just in the United
States in this timeframe. So, um, it wasn't unusual for

(11:49):
somebody to start up a car company with really nothing,
just more than a garage and an idea. And um,
I don't even know if they actually produced any vehicles
or not. I mean in six months, I don't see
how they could have probably just a plan in stage
at that point. But they did, as you said, went
on to h to create the Henry Ford Company. So
here's the company. And again this is what's odd to

(12:09):
me again with Murphy as a backer, so he was
willing to stick with him for a little bit longer.
I don't know what happened there, Like what happened They
shut down one company after six months, and then they
opened up again with Henry Ford's name on the on
the marquee um with Murphy back, and I thought that
was strange, but um, I guess again they butted heads
and Ford decided that the products were too expensive and

(12:30):
just not what he wanted to produce. UM, so he
dumped out of the company, took his name along with
him and Murphy. This is this is interesting. I think
Murphy renamed the company Cadillac Automobile Company. So they managed
to have some staying power too. I think they're doing
okay even without for Yeah, yeah, they're they're doing all
right even to today. Ford meanwhile went off to eventually

(12:53):
start a second company, although at this point he had
already raised capital from Detroit's wealthy citizens and they weren't
really ready to sponsor him again after the last debacle,
So this time he was raising money from more just
ordinary folks, and he started the Ford Motor Company. I
think it was incorporated in nineteen oh three, and he
didn't feel how he did anymore, you know about let me,

(13:15):
let me tinker and tinker, I'm not ready to go
to market. He had a he had a product. This
time he was ready to go yeah. Yeah, And you know,
just prior to that, he was one of his manufacturers.
Actually I'm sorry, one of his uh backers actually had
his name in there in there as well. Henry changed
the name in nineteen o three because it was originally
called Ford and Malcolmson Company. And Malcolmson, I guess, was

(13:36):
a coal merchant in Detroit. He was a dealer of
some kind of coal dealer, which is you know, it's
not a profession really in Detroit anymore. But so he
and and one of the other investors this surprise the
heck at me. It was the Dodge brothers. The Dodge
brothers were some of the initial investors. And we're talking
about you know, John and Horse Dodge of you know Dodge,

(13:57):
well Dodge that we see now, yeah, exactly, Dodge of Dodge. Um.
They actually invested in the original Ford Motor Company. So
so you know, by nineteen o three when it's just
Ford Motor Company, that's kind of telling that, you know,
Henry's starting to you know, push his way around a
little bit, and we'll come back to the Dodge Brothers
and in a minute. But with this new company, in
nineteen o eight, Ford launched the Model T, which he called,

(14:21):
quote a motor car for the great multitude. And I
think most people, I mean maybe we've even seen a
Model T. You see him around every now and then. Um,
but do you want to give a description because I'm
sure you know maybe some of our international audiences and
it's familiar with the Model T. Just I mean, it
essentially looks like a black box on wheels. But what
made it so remarkable at this time. What's remarkable was

(14:44):
that it was affordable. That's probably the biggest thing it say.
It was the everyman's car here in the United States.
Now there's a there's a counterpart to that in in
Europe that we'll talk about later, But um, this was
the every man's car in the United States. Um. It's
really very very simple in design. Um, and you'll find that,
you know, if you look at a Model T, it's
not it doesn't have a lot of frills to it.

(15:06):
It's very simple. Like you mentioned, Um, you said, it's
the box on wheels. It's true and mostly you'll see
them in black. And there's an infamous quote, you know
from him, you know you could have any color as
long as it's black. That was made around nineteen fourteen,
so we're talking about six years into production. And production
went from nineteen o eight to nineteen twenty seven, so
you know, there's a good significant amount of time when

(15:27):
it was only made in black. From the factory prior
to that point, you could actually get them in several
different colors, which I don't think a lot of people
know you can get and there's a lot of different
colors you can get. Um, so that was I'm sure
it was a cost saving, you know, measure at that
point when you decided we're just a lot of paint
exactly where painting every one of these things black. There's
gonna be no custom orders at this point. Um. And

(15:47):
they sold get this, They sold for eight and twenty
five dollars initially in nineteen o eight, which is about
two dollars, so that's not terribly cheap, but it's on
the low end, Okay, I mean, if you're if you're
going into like today's money, Um, by the time you
got around to I'm sorry by nineteen sixteen, when sales
were approaching like five thousand per year, this became wildly popular.

(16:12):
Prices went down all the way down to about three
and sixty dollars, and that's only like around seven thousand,
maybe eight thousand dollars today. So you can see where
you know, this would be very very appealing an economy car,
extremely appealing for everybody, and and it put the nation
on wheels. And this is such as they comparison. But
I had to think of like if you got to

(16:33):
Ikea and you see a walk or something and you
bought it last year and it was eight dollars and
now it's four dollars, and you think, how did they
do that? The walk is exactly the same. Henry Ford
figured out a way to scale his production. Yeah, this
is the this is the thing about the assembly line.
This is so this is where I'm getting excited now.
This is this is where he would watch the Sumbi lines.

(16:55):
He would he would have people that watched it. He
would do it himself, but he would perfect and and
shave corners here and there wherever he could and just
make things more efficient in in tiny, tiny, little incremental ways.
And that brought about savings and he did, he truly did.
I mean you could see in the pricing. He passed
those savings onto his his sales base. And he knew

(17:15):
that if he could, you know, if he could drop
the price of the vehicle, he would sell more vehicles.
He was very shrewd about this. You know, he still
was making a profit. He knew that if he could
increase his sales. And sometimes this is astounding when you
think about it now, sometimes his sales numbers for the
Model T year over year were more than increases from
the year prior, which if he has an untapped market,

(17:37):
people who have no car, yeah, no car, would never
have been able to buy a car, even the year
before when his prices were very slightly higher. It's now
within their reason. And if you if you don't anything
about the Model T um in addition to just that
it was great, you know, get around town type vehicle
or get out to the country vehicle. People would use

(17:57):
these as as stationary motors on now we talked about
the the steam engine the knee had, you know, on
the farm, that was exactly the mowing machine. People would
buy a Model T and they would attach auxiliary belts
to them. They would you know, they would drive saw mills,
they would use them as snowplows, they would um everything,
anything and everything you could do with it with a motor.

(18:19):
They would use them to power power the house. Um.
It was just it was a way to get elected.
It was like almost a way to get electricity. It
was like a generator. Yeah, in a way, all purpose,
and you could drive it out to get more fuel
if you needed to. It was it was an incredible
machine and really opened a lot of people's eyes. Well,
and you were talking about this a minute ago, saying,
you know, this way for people to get up and

(18:41):
go get up and go to the country wherever. It
really did start to change how people thought about the country,
how people thought about their lives. People who travel would
have been far beyond their reach just a few years earlier,
suddenly felt like they could go anywhere. And that in
turn changed just the way cities were made up and
its suburbs possible. It made for huge development booms in

(19:04):
California and Florida in the nineteen twenties. It affected industries oil, glass, steel, um.
You were talking about timber earlier. UM, and even change
things like agriculture. I had never thought about it like this.
But with so fewer horses needed, with all these cars,
you needed less acreage devoted to hay crops. And imagine

(19:27):
the sanitary conditions in the city. Um, how how much
more sanitary it is to have And I know they're
burning fuel, I understand that, but um, versus having a horse,
you can understand what I'm talking about. We can get
the pictures there exactly. I've heard stories of you know,
horses being just left dead in the streets in Chicago
or major cities, and that's the kind of conditions that

(19:48):
you know, he was trying to change, and he did dramatically,
and even thinking about people, Um, I don't know, just
your your personal life. I've always learned about Ford in
conjunction with the American teenager and you know, being able
to have your bow instead of come visiting you and
your parents parlor, go out for a drive or something,

(20:08):
just dramatically shaking up the social fabric of the United States.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more too,
because some of that came to bother Henry Ford. Eventually,
you know what else? It shook up his bank account?
Did he became the wealthiest man what you know what
I'm gonna say, not the wealthiest. I think Rockefeller was
the wealthiest. I believe he was number two in line,

(20:30):
but the wealthy, the second wealthiest man in America, if
not in the world at that point. Um. He became
part of what they called the Millionaires Club, which hard
to imagine. You know, this this fifteen year old who
walked to Detroit and to become an apprentice. It was
now in this millionaires Club with his old pal Thomas
Edison and Harvey Firestone. Harvey Firestone is Firestone tires, Um,

(20:53):
you know, the rubber entire company. Um. But these guys,
they were they were pals. You know, these are the
three absolute head of American industry at the time. So
you can imagine what it was like when the three
these guys got together. Um, crazy times. I'm sure they
would go hunting and fishing and you know, they work together.
They vacationed together, they had winter estates and Fort Meyers together. Um.

(21:17):
You know, they called them that, you know, the Millionaires Club,
because they would all they were genuinely friends. It's kind
of a brain trust exactly. Yeah. Yeah, So it was
kind of an interesting, you know turn that he's now
in this this extreme, extremely different lifestyle. But we should
talk to you a little bit about how he gets
to that real upper level. Because in the middle of
his growth, when his company is doing really well, the

(21:39):
model t is selling well, he's ready to expand hugely
to to the size that he eventually does. But some
of his shareholders that the Ford Motor Company, are not
interested in that because it seems like it might not
pay off. It seems like the shareholders might not make
money initially, and so we we said to remember the
Dodge brothers. Finally, the Dodge brothers, who are two of

(22:02):
his shareholders, took him to court over his plan to expand.
They won because I think the judge ruled, well, it
is your job to make your shareholders some money, um.
And Ford was was furious about this, that his his
idea could be manipulated by his shareholders and decided to

(22:23):
find a way out of that, essentially to get complete control. Yeah,
so he took matters into his own hands, and he
pretty much took control of the company. And when I
say it took control, I mean he really took control.
He reorganized, he completely reorganized it. And you know there's
there's like a little story here that I read in Time.
I think it was in Time magazine. I'm trying to
remember back to something I read a long time ago.

(22:44):
But the basic, basic part of the story was this
that you know, this is an employee in old time
now and this is from the nineties seventies, I think so.
But but back you know, when Harry Ford was making
just a pile of cash on the on the Model
T and it was wildly successful. He couldn't really at
that point imagine, you know, varying from that that design
was making in money. That was that was what worked.

(23:06):
And you know the refinements that were being made were
nothing more than cosmetic at that no designing a new
car entire no, exactly. So Ford walks into the story
is from this old timer that you know he was there.
Um Ford walks into this design studio and the engineers
have and I don't know how this happens, but they

(23:27):
surprised him with a with a prototype of what the
new Model T should look like. I'm imagining one of
the big red bows on top. I'm sure, yeah, exactly,
But he was he kind of, you know, looked at
the vehicle and he paced around it, and he was,
you know, kind of steaming within. You know, you could
tell he wasn't happy with it. Um. So they had created,
they tried to perfect his design, and he didn't like that.

(23:49):
He opened one of the doors and ripped it off
the hinges with his bare hands. He got in the car,
he kicked out the windshield. He I mean, he just
destroyed every bit of that car. I mean, by hand.
I mean the rage. Can you imagine, It's almost like,
you know, when you hear these stories of like the
mother that lets the car off the child or tears
the inner strength exactly. It was. It was just like this,

(24:10):
this rage, you know, drove him to this, this incredible
superhuman strength, and he destroyed by hand this car that
these guys have made and telling them all the time,
you know, we're yelling at them, screaming at them, uh
you know why it wouldn't work and what was bad
about this? And they never ever brought it up again. Okay,
So I think at that point some warning bells are
probably going off for people. This is a clear turning

(24:32):
point in the story, um, the story of Ford's life.
Tearing off the car doors, I mean, come on, that's
just something an unhinged person does symbolic it is. So
that is clearly the perfect point to leave off on
this first part of our episode. Um, and next time
we're gonna be getting into some of the stranger's stuff too,

(24:53):
but also some of the Ford nostalgia to not just
the board control. Um, and one of our old favorite
episodes is going to come up to for Land. Yah. Yeah,
you know what, I'm not gonna let it gets a
little weird. Ef it does get pretty weird. I mean
that's a good thing though, So stay tuned until then. Um.
If you want to email us with some more forward

(25:14):
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(25:35):
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