The Ford Foundation is a benevolent legacy of the inventor, Henry Ford

This edited article about Henry Ford originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 353 published on 19 October 1968.

Henry Ford, American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, photographed in the first Ford car

When young Henry Ford was working on his father’s farm near Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A., he often wondered whether life had to be so hard.

It was not that he was frightened of hard work. It was just that, as he rattled and bumped his way over acres of wheat fields in the clumsy horse-drawn reaper he thought: surely there’s a better way of doing this? Couldn’t a machine do it?

Henry Ford, who before he died was to put the world on wheels, was born at Greenfield, Michigan, on 30th July, 1863, and had always shown himself fascinated by anything mechanical. At the age of eleven, he saw his first mechanically-propelled vehicle – a steam engine and boiler mounted on wheels and trailing behind it a water cart and a coal cart.

It was a clumsy, smelly and noisy contraption, but it could saw wood and thresh corn quicker than men could. And that set Henry thinking.

When Henry was sixteen, his mother died, and he ran away from home to work in the machinery department of an electrical factory for the equivalent of 7s. 6d. a week. Later he worked for a watch repairer, and worked out a way of making the parts and assembling them so that a watch need cost only 1s. 6¬Ωd. to make and could be sold for 2s. 1d. He had thought of mass production, of arranging all the tasks necessary in their proper order, seeing that materials of the right kind and quantity were to hand at every stage, or speeding and simplifying production. He was on the point of starting a watch factory when his father was taken ill and he had to go home to help on the farm again.

There Henry met Clara Bryant and married her at the age of twenty-four. Mr. Ford senior gave the couple forty acres of land as a wedding present, and Henry built his home there to settle down. They wrote a book on dancing, which both of them liked.

But soon Henry was back in Detroit, tinkering with machines.

The first one he made was a horseless farm vehicle which generated steam by means of a paraffin boiler which was far from safe. He decided that the internal combustion engine was the only answer.

While working as an experimental engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit in 1892, he started making his own mechanically-propelled vehicle in a shed behind his house in Bagley Avenue, Detroit. Unfortunately, by the time he had finished it, it proved too big for him to get it out; to the laughter of onlookers, he had to knock bricks away.

Then the buggy lurched forward, its two-cylinder engine coughing and spluttering, belching out clouds of black smoke. It was chain-driven and its planks were mounted on four bicycle wheels with extra heavy tyres. The noise was deafening, but Henry Ford was smiling with happiness. It worked!

In 1903 Ford established the Ford Motor Company, with £20,000 put up by a few subscribers, becoming Vice-President, designer and master mechanic and receiving the majority of the shares for his knowledge and invention. Later he bought the remaining shares so that his family owned all of his rapidly-expanding industrial empire.

An “empire” it certainly was. His company started with 311 employees and produced 1,708 cars in its first year. The cheap and sturdy car, the Ford T, became known affectionately as the “Tin Lizzie”, and it rapidly transformed the whole industrial and social scene. At only $300 (about £75) it gave ordinary people a new mobility; with it they could go further afield, on business or to make a new start in life. They could enjoy themselves more, and make more friends.

Ford’s factory was also the beginning of mass production, the cornerstone of America’s vast expansion and prosperity. Every operation was assigned to specialists who did nothing else; the conveyor-belt (a feature of almost every factory nowadays, whether it makes toothpaste, biscuits or refrigerators) increased production enormously, and kept down the price.

By 1917, Ford was employing 41,000 men in his factories and had an output of 3,000 motor-cars and motor-wagons a day. His personal income rocketed to $35,000,000 a year (in English equivalent, about £25,000 a day of £17 a minute!).

No matter how hard you were to try (and not many get the chance) you would find it difficult to spend that amount of money. Henry Ford didn’t try to spend it. He didn’t eat or drink to excess, rode his bicycle every day to keep fit, and chopped wood as a hobby.

In fact, in many ways he was an eccentric. He declared that he wanted to live to be a hundred, ate weed sandwiches because he thought they would help him achieve this, and dipped his comb in a glass of salt water before he used it, to stop himself going bald. His main passions were gardening and agriculture. On his secluded estate at Dearborn, covering 1,300 acres, he had a rose garden with 11,000 bushes and 350 varieties of roses.

Ford opened works at Trafford Park, Manchester, at Cork and, on 17th May, 1929, at Dagenham in Essex, twenty miles down-river from London. Deep-water facilities were essential to his factories; the river frontage facilities enabled ships to unload the iron ore and other raw materials needed in car production.

The growth of Dagenham, as with all his plants, has been fantastic. From over 7,000 employees in 1932 its staff had grown to 57,000 by 1962. In 1932 Dagenham produced 25,000 vehicles; in 1962 over 500,000.

Like most rich and powerful men, Ford had an obstinate will. He disliked trade unionists and was bitterly anti-union until 1941. He was anti-Semitic. He was also a pacifist, which made him unpopular in both wars and a laughing stock in the first, when he hired a Danish vessel as a “peace ship”, to sail around to spread the idea of peace. Unfortunately, the cranks and intellectuals with which he crowded his vessel quarrelled violently with each other, and the project had to be abandoned.

In the Second World War, Henry Ford, although an isolationist, sent 135 mobile canteens to help bombed-out families during the blitz on Britain. Once his own country was threatened, he organised at Willow Run the making of over 8,000 badly needed planes.

“Service to other men is the secret of making money,” he once said. “If you go for money and nothing but money, you won’t get it.”

Ford died at Dearborn on 8th April, 1947, at the age of 84. The bulk of his £250 million fortune he left, after making generous provision for his family, to the Ford Foundation, which he had begun as a charity in 1936.

Since then, the Ford Foundation has become internationally famous for its educational and benevolent activities, financing charitable and socially useful projects throughout the world. It has given away the staggering sum of nearly $3,000 million to over 5,000 different projects scattered across America and 78 other countries. It finances experiments in teaching and learning, gives grants to artists, sculptors, theatre directors, film makers and others with creative talent, and studies important social problems.

One of the Foundation’s most valuable activities is its encouragement of good race relations and of equality of opportunity for all American Negroes. Immense sums are being spent to improve the education of Negro youths. The Foundation also assists biological research, so that the acute problem of the world’s expanding population can be studied alongside the equally urgent problem of how to increase the world’s fertility enough to grow more food.

Henry Ford was a man of intense drive, ambition and power. Inevitably, he had many critics. Nevertheless, his decision to make his vast fortune work for humanity makes him one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.