An inspiring read : Henry Ford - Vincent Curcio
An interesting insight into the mind of an American Icon. The book has details of almost everything in Ford's legacy, the story of model-T, invention of the "assembly line", the famous 5$ wage with a 5 day work week and the acquisition of Lincoln.
The first 7 chapters were absolutely captivating, capturing the rise of Ford.
“Waste not, want not,” one could read in a McGuffy Reader, and it was one of his lifelong guiding principles. In fact it was a mania. Everything but everything at the Ford works was saved and utilized to cut costs and make money. Wood shavings alone were turned into charcoal briquettes, formaldehyde, creosote and ethyl acetate; derivatives of coal furnished coke, ammonium sulfate and benzol, the latter of which was sold in 88 gas stations in the Detroit area at prices competitive with gasoline. Even Dearborn garbage was turned into alcohol, heating gas and refined oil, while Detroit sewage became soap. By 1928, he was selling $20 million in byproducts per year. In all, his drive to use or transform every item he found in his factories or elsewhere was responsible for the creation of some 53 industries in his lifetime. The abhorrence of waste encompassed much more than material things for Ford. His objection to war was that it caused waste, of civilization and lives. Beneath his enlightened labor policies offering employment for all, was something similar. “That is our business,” he told Henry L.Stidger in 1923. “We salvage everything; even men.”
Ford realized early on that the curiosity about the Model A was intense, and dealt with it the way Mamma Rose advised her daughter Gypsy Rose Lee to deal with the same kind of curiosity in Gypsy: “Find out what they want, and then don’t give it to them.”
In his youth he had worked with a black man, William Perry, at opposite ends of a cross saw in Dearborn. In 1914, he brought Perry to the Highland Park factory, and made him his first black employee, admittedly something of a showpiece at first to demonstrate Ford’s unorthodox hiring practices. But Perry wasn’t just a token, for as Ford’s distinguished biographer Robert Lacey points out, by the early 20s Ford had more than 5,000 black workers in his employ, and 10,000 by 1926, some ten percent of his total workforce, and more than all the other car companies put together.
In little more than a dozen years he had managed to turn a plaything for the rich into an appliance for the masses.
Ford was in motion all his life. In fact, motion, ceaseless and ever more refined, was the guiding principle of his existence. Despite this, it took him a remarkably long time to figure out what he was going to do. As we have seen, his first 28 years were inchoate, an undecided shuttling back and forth between the farm and the city. He was 30 before he began serious work on a motor vehicle, 35 before he made a business out of it and 40 before he made a success. But even that success was not a mature one, in terms of his real goals. He knew he wanted to make a vehicle that the masses could afford, but it took him until 1908 to refine his ideas and develop such a vehicle. Then it took him another five years to figure out a system to make and deliver that vehicle to the masses, and furthermore, to create his dreamed of mass market for it. So it was that he was 50 years old when Ford got where he wanted to be in his own life’s project. 69 Not that he stopped then. Like a hummingbird or a shark, he had to keep moving. To rest on your laurels was to stagnate for Henry Ford, and wasting your time was a cardinal sin. For the rest of the second decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the next he started a hospital; organized a peace expedition in the midst of a World War, then did an about face and became a major supplier of war materiel to his country; began what was to become the world’s largest industrial complex, completely integrating it; took over and became publisher of a highly controversial weekly news magazine; lived through a devastating libel case ; saved his company and made it stronger during the worst crisis the auto industry had ever seen; and at last became, with his family, the sole owner of his vast enterprise. He broached all these challenges with his usual energy, brainpower and vision, but for several of them he was not prepared in terms of background or sophisticated reasoning. Therefore he began a series of stumbles that would grow and eventually haunt even the success of a man as extraordinarily accomplished as he. His candor and spontaneity could be endearing. When a reporter asked him how it felt to be the world’s first billionaire, he squirmed in his seat and replied, “Oh, shit!” Robust health and good nutrition were lifelong concerns of Ford’s; far ahead of his time, he urged consumption of fruits, vegetables and legumes instead of meat and sugar. “Most men are digging their graves with their teeth,” he admonished.” He referred frequently to the works of Luigi Cornaro, a 17th Century Italian nobleman who became completely dissipated through bad diet at the age of 35, then changed his eating habits entirely and lived to 102. Eat and drink only what agrees with your stomach, not your palate, and eat only small amounts, was Cornaro’s advice. Such was Cornaro’s advice, and Ford heeded it. Exercise was another part of Ford’s “clean living” lifestyle, which he publicized as an example to others. That lifestyle excluded liquor in all forms, which he thought of as the major enemy of self-control, without which a man could not utilize his talents to create success for himself and prosperity for others. “Liquor never did anybody any good,” he said. “Business and booze are enemies.” Ford was particularly prescient in his condemnation of cigarettes, becoming one of the first major figures to attack the smoking habit by publishing a pamphlet entitled, “The Case Against The Little White Slaver” in 1914. In addition to what he saw as a dulling of the senses, (“with every breath of cigarette smoke [boys] inhale imbecility and exhale manhood”), he quite correctly saw that smoking debilitated such major organs as the heart, kidneys and lungs. There may have been more than a whiff of old fashioned moralistic reform coming off his jeremiads against the evils of tobacco, and especially alcohol, but nearly a century on, in the age of smoke free living and bottled spring water replacing alcohol for millions, there is still a pervasive societal echo from his pronouncements on these matters.
2087
izzy806
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
dailybridgerton