Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  His fascination with watches led him to what he was sure was a brilliant idea. He would invent a watch so elementary in design that it could be mass-produced. Two thousand of them a day would come off a simple assembly line and they would cost only 30 cents each to produce. He was absolutely certain he could design and produce the watch; the only problem, he decided, was in marketing 600,000 watches a year. It was not a challenge that appealed to him, so he dropped the project, but the basic idea of simplifying a product in order to mass-produce it stayed with him.

  He went from Flowers and Brothers to a company called Detroit Dry Docks, which built new vessels and repaired steamboats, barges, tugs, and ferries. His job was to work on the engines, and he gloried in it, staying there two years. There was, he later said, nothing to do every day but learn. In 1886, however, at the age of twenty-three, he returned to the farm, lured by an offer from his father of forty acres of timberland. William Ford made the offer because he wanted to rescue his wayward son from the city and his damnable machines; Henry Ford took it because he momentarily needed security—he was about to marry Clara Bryant. Nothing convinced him more of his love of machines than the drudgery of being back on the farm. Again he spent every spare minute tinkering and trying to invent and reading every technical magazine he could. He experimented with the sawmill on the farm; he tried to invent a steam engine for a plow. Crude stationary gasoline engines had been developed, and Ford was sure a new world of efficient gasoline-powered machines was about to arrive. He wanted to be part of it. Five years later, with all the timber on the farm cut, he was bored to death. Positive that important new inventions were just around the corner, he told Clara they were going back to Detroit. His father continued to worry about him. “He just doesn’t seem to settle down,” William Ford told friends. “I don’t know what will become of him.”

  The last thing Henry Ford was interested in was settling down. He intended, he told his wife, to invent a horseless carriage. But first he needed to know a good deal more about electricity. So he took a job with Detroit Edison at $45 a month. Thomas Edison was one of his heroes, and Ford thought he could learn more about the electrical system for the internal-combustion engine, which a number of young inventors were toying with at the time. He did well at Edison. He was soon the company’s most skilled engineer, making the grand salary of $100 a month. But that wasn’t enough. He needed extra money to pay for the materials for his inventing, so he worked at night teaching would-be machinists at the Detroit YMCA.

  In the few years since he had first arrived, Detroit had grown considerably; its population was now over 205,000. The railroads had begun to open the country up, and no other city in America had grown as quickly, save Chicago. Detroit now had streetlights. There were more machine shops than ever before. The newest arrivals were mainly immigrants, Germans, Scandinavians, Irishmen, Poles, and some Englishmen. In this city the age of coal and steam was about to end.

  Though America’s sources of liquid fuel were still somewhat limited, the dreams of her young inventors were not; it seemed almost every young inventor in the country, and in Europe as well, thought himself destined to invent a practical horseless carriage. Detroit was the perfect center for these inventors. It had specialized in making bicycles, and a number of inventors were experimenting with putting a gas engine on a bicycle in some form or another. (In fact, Ford referred to his first car as a quadricycle.)

  In 1891 Ford was using the kitchen of his and Clara’s apartment as a lab; he fastened a primitive gas engine he had made to the kitchen sink. Eventually, no doubt to Clara’s considerable relief, he moved his shop into a nearby shed. By 1896, at the age of thirty-three, he finally had his first car on the street. Because the handful of cars in those days—for other inventors had gotten to the road-test stage too—were so much resented for scaring horses and making noise, he needed a special permit to drive it in the streets. Ford was so excited before his first ride that he had barely slept for forty-eight hours. He had been so obsessed and preoccupied during the creation of the car that he had overlooked the fact that the door of the garage was too small for the car to exit. So he simply took an ax and knocked down some of the brick wall to let the car out. His friend James Bishop rode ahead on a bike to warn off pedestrians. A spring in the car broke during the ride, but they fixed it quickly. Then Henry Ford went home so he could sleep for a few hours before going to work. Later he drove the car out to his father’s farm, but William Ford refused to ride in it. Why, he asked, should he risk his life for such a brief thrill?

  Ford’s early years trying to build a good car were not easy. Detroit was filled with scores of talented machinists chasing exactly the same dream. By the turn of the century about fifty companies a year, most of them in Detroit, were entering the auto business. Many of them did not even last the year. Some men lacked entrepreneurial abilities. Others lacked the toughness to survive in what was to be a business of hard men. Some lacked the money to sustain their dreams, and many lacked the passion to continue after their first attempts did not entirely succeed.

  Henry Ford sold his first car for $200 and used the money to start work immediately on his next. He had been encouraged by his great hero, Thomas Edison, whom he met at a convention. Edison had asked the young Ford a series of pointed questions. Then, after Ford had sketched out his ideas, Edison told him, “Young man, that’s the thing! You have it—the self-contained unit carrying its own fuel with it! Keep at it!” That was all the encouragement he needed, particularly since it came from the great Edison.

  Ford’s next model was considerably heavier than the first, more of a car and less of a quadricycle. He persuaded a lumber merchant named William Murphy to invest in the project by giving him a ride around town. “Well,” said Murphy when he reached home safely, “now we will organize a company.” In August 1899, Murphy brought together a consortium of men who put up $15,000 to finance Ford’s Detroit Automobile Company. Ford thereupon left Detroit Edison so he could work full-time on his car. Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. “Electricity, yes,” Dow told Ford. “That’s the coming thing. But gas—no.”

  In February 1900, at the threshold of the twentieth century, Ford was ready to take a reporter from the Detroit News Tribune for a ride. The car, he said, would go twenty-five miles an hour. The reporter sensed that he was witness to the dawn of a new era. Steam, he later wrote, had “been the compelling power of civilization,” but now the shriek of the steam whistle was about to yield to a new noise, the noise of the auto. “What kind of noise is it?” the reporter asked. “That is difficult to set down on paper. It is not like any other sound ever heard in this world. It is not like the puff! puff! of the exhaust of gasoline in a river launch; neither is it like the cry! cry! of a working steam engine; but a long quick mellow gurgling sound, not harsh, not unmusical, not distressing; a note that falls with pleasure on the ear. It must be heard to be appreciated. And the sooner you hear its newest chuck! chuck! the sooner you will be in touch with civilization’s latest lisp, its newest voice.” On the trip Ford and the reporter passed a harness shop. “His trade is doomed,” Ford said.

  Ford was not satisfied with the cars he was making at the Detroit Automobile Company. They were not far behind the quality of the cars being made by Duryea or Olds, but they remained too expensive for his vision. Ford desperately wanted to make a cheaper car, but his stockholders were unenthusiastic. By November 1900, the company had died. But Ford was as determined as ever to make his basic car, and he decided that the way to call attention to himself and pull ahead of the dozens of competing automakers was to go into racing. In 1901 he entered a race to be held in Grosse Pointe. It was to be a major event, twenty-five miles (it had to be cut to ten because other races earlier in the day had taken so long to run). The morning of the race more than a hundred cars had driven through the city’s streets, an awesome spectacle, wrote the reporter for the Detroit Evening Press, who noted, “and n
ot a horse in sight.” Ford won the race and became, in that small, new mechanical world, something of a celebrity. That propelled him ahead of his competitors.

  Two years later, in 1903, he set out to start the Ford Motor Company. He was forty years old and had, he felt, been apprenticing long enough. There were eight hundred cars in the city at that time, and some owners even had what were called motor houses to keep them in. Ford soon worked up his plan for his ideal, inexpensive new car, but he needed money. He thought he would need $3000 for the supplies for the prototype (instead the cost was $4000). He got the money from a man named Alexander Malcolmson, who supplied coal by wagon to houses and companies; his slogan was “Hotter Than Sunshine.” Ford and Malcolmson capitalized their company for $150,000, with fifteen thousand shares. Though the early investors were to do very well indeed, some did not have a great deal of confidence in the company. John Gray, Malcolmson’s uncle, who was also the company’s biggest stockholder, made a 500 percent return on his early investment but went around saying that he could not really ask his friends to buy into the company. “This business cannot last,” he said. James Couzens, Malcolmson’s bookkeeper, debated at great length with his sister, a schoolteacher, on how much of her savings of $250 she should risk in this fledgling company. They decided on $100. From that she made roughly $262,000. Couzens himself managed to put together $2500 to invest, and from that, when he finally sold out to Ford in 1919, he made $29 million.

  This time Ford was ready. He was experienced, he hired good men, and he knew the car he would build. From the start there was no doubt in his mind what he wanted—a car that could be mass-produced by a manufacturing process that was as standardized as possible. “The way to make automobiles,” he told John Anderson, one of his financial backers in 1903, “is to make one automobile like another automobile; just as one pin is like another pin, or one match is like another match when it comes from a match factory.” He wanted to make many cars at a low price. “Better and cheaper,” he would say. “More of them, better and cheaper.” That was his complete vision of manufacturing. “Shoemakers,” he once said, “ought to settle on one shoe, stove makers on one stove. Me, I like specialists.”

  But he and Malcolmson soon split over the direction of the company: Malcolmson argued that fancy cars costing $2200 to $4700 were what would sell. At the time half of the cars being made in America fell into this category; a decade later, largely because of Ford, those cars would represent only 2 percent of the market. Malcolmson wanted a car for the rich, Ford one for the multitude. Even Ford’s father was wary of his move to a popular car; he warned his son that the market would be glutted if he went to more than thirty-five cars a day. Though the early models were successful—the company sold an amazing total of fifteen hundred cars in its first fifteen months—it was the coming of the Model T in 1908 that sent Ford’s career rocketing. With the Model T the modern industrial age—the industrial age that benefited rather than exploited the common man—began.

  It was the car that Henry Ford had always wanted to build because it was the car that he had always wanted to drive—simple, durable, absolutely without frills, one that the farmer could use and, more important, afford. Nor did Henry Ford like the idea of making cars for the rich. He was an agrarian populist, and his own people were fanners, simple people; if he could make their lives easier, it would give him pleasure. He planned to have a car whose engine was detachable so the farmer could also use it to saw wood, pump water, and run farm machinery. The Model T, said his first sales manager, was “practically a farmer’s car.” Ford’s great success in making a car that the average man could enjoy launched the cycle of mass production and mass consumption in America. Mass-producing the cars would provide jobs and a decent wage for more and more people, and as the cost of the car came down with mass production, the workers could soon afford to buy one themselves.

  The Model T was tough, compact, and light, and in its creation Ford was helped by breakthroughs in steel technology. The first vanadium steel, a lighter, stronger form developed in Britain, had been poured in the United States a year before the planning of the Model T. It had a tensile strength three times that of the steel then available in America and could be machined much more readily. That was major progress. Ford instantly understood what the new steel signified. He turned to one of his top men, Charles Sorensen, and told him it permitted them to have a lighter and cheaper car.

  The T was a brilliantly simple machine; when something went wrong the average owner could get out and fix it. Unimproved dirt tracks built for horses, which made up most of the nation’s roads and which defeated fancier cars, posed no problem for it. Its chassis was high, and it could ride right over serious bumps. It was, wrote Keith Sward, a biographer of Ford, all bone and muscle with no fat. Soon the Ford company’s biggest difficulty was keeping up with orders. Fortunately for Ford, the teachings of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first authority on scientific industrial management, had just come into vogue. Taylor, armed always with a watch and an abiding disbelief in the enthusiasm of the average worker for his chores, had brought the new technique of time-and-motion studies to the steel industry and others. Taylor had, for example, measured how much a worker with a shovel could do on a given day; he had found the worker most efficient when instead of scooping up the maximum shovelful, thirty-eight pounds, he scooped up twenty-one pounds, since it allowed him to shovel more loads. Taylor became important because the times demanded it. As machines began to dominate men in factories, allowing one production breakthrough after another, the study of efficiency took on greater meaning. Ford, fascinated by efficiency of production, absorbed Taylor’s principles and began to use them in his plant, eventually developing and applying them to an almost mythic degree.

  Because the Model T was so successful—it was in such demand that dealers were sometimes commanded to stop taking orders—Ford’s attention now turned to manufacturing. The factory and, even more, the process of manufacturing became his real passions. The process, he told everyone, was the fun in his world, for he could see such dramatic changes in production possibilities and accomplishments every day that working in the factory had become like working in the future. Even before the T’s success he had been concerned about the production process. In 1908 he had hired an industrial efficiency expert named Walter Flanders and offered him a whopping bonus of $20,000 if he could make the plant produce ten thousand cars in twelve months. Flanders completely reorganized the factory and made the deadline by two days. He also helped convince Ford that they needed a larger space. Flanders understood that the increasing mechanization of the line meant that the days of the garage-shop car maker were over. There was a process now, a line, and the process was going to demand more and more money and employees. Flanders understood that every small success on the line, each increment that permitted greater speed of production and cut the cost of the car, mandated as well an inevitable increase in the size of the company. “Henceforth the history of the industry will be the history of the conflict of giants,” he told a Detroit reporter.

  Ford thereupon bought his Highland Park grounds. Here he intended to employ the most modern ideas about production, particularly those of Frederick Winslow Taylor. These would bring, as Taylor had prophesied, an absolute rationality to the industrial process. The idea was to break each function down into much smaller units so that each could be mechanized and speeded up and eventually flow into a straight-line production of little pieces becoming steadily larger. Continuity above all. What he wanted, and what he soon got, in the words of Keith Sward, was a mechanized process that was “like a river and its tributaries,” with the subassembly tributaries merging to produce an ever more assembled car. The process began to change in the spring of 1913. The first piece on the modern assembly line was the magneto coil assembly. In the past a worker—and he had to be a skilled worker—had made a flywheel magneto from start to finish. A good employee could make thirty-five or forty a day. Now, however, there was an ass
embly line for magnetos. It was divided into twenty-nine different operations performed by twenty-nine different men. In the old system it took twenty minutes to make a magneto; now it took thirteen.

  Ford and his men soon moved to bring the same rationality to the rest of the factory. Quickly they imposed a comparable system for the assembly of motors and transmissions. Then, in the summer of 1913, they took on the final assembly, which, as the rest of the process had speeded up, had become the great bottleneck. The workers moved as quickly as they could around a stationary metal object, the car they were putting together. If the men could remain stationary as the semifinished car moved up the line through them, less of the workers’ time—Ford’s time—would be wasted.