Henry Ford was born on a farm near Dearborn in Michigan. In the years 1879-86 he acquired wonderful skills as a machinist in Detroit and then had a spell in the Edison Company under the master inventor-entrepreneur himself. He built his first gasoline engine in 1892 and a decade later organized the Ford Motor Company. The result was the Model T of 1908.
Ford marketed the first model T at $850 in 1908, when he sold 5,986. By 1916, when he sold 577,036, he had got the price down to $360. By 1927, when the series was discontinued, he had sold over 15 million of these autos, and made them and their rivals standard equipment for the American family. Ford gave the entire, vast nation a mobility it had never possessed before – and which in time spread throughout the world. Ford grasped that Big Business, with its economies of scale, could lead to even bigger business provided it shared its profits with its workforce by paying handsome wages. In 1914, when industrial workers were averaging about $11 a week, he abruptly decided to pay his men $5 for an eight-hour day, so that they could all buy his Model Ts. The idea was obvious but new, and valid. By 1920 Ford had contrived to deliver to the mass consumer a quality product at the lowest possible price; to pay the highest wages in the industry and, at that date, in history; and to become (after John D. Rockefeller) the nation’s second billionaire – indeed, at the height of his success, he was the richest man on earth. But he was not easy to prosecute as a monopolist because in 1908, the year of his Model T’s birth, General Motors was formed with the quite opposite strategy of offering cars for every taste and pocket. William Durant put together Buick and two other companies, then added Oldsmobile and Cadillac, and finally Chevrolet. By 1920-1 GM was selling 193,275 vehicles a year, against Ford’s 845,000. That gave Ford 55.67 percent of the market but with enormous competition (the 253 car-manufactures of 1908 had narrowed down to 44 by 1929) there was never any possibility of monopoly. By the 1930s GM was the world’s largest industrial company.
