AMERICA--A NEW WORLD POWER 1890-1914

THE DEADLINE IN CABANAS : HERE THE CUBAN PATRIOTS, KNEELING WITH THEIR FACES TO THE WALL, WERE SHOT BY SPANISH SOLDIERS

AMERICA

Great Crises In Our History Told by Its Makers A LIBRARY OF ORIGINAL SOURCES Volume X A New World Power 1890-1914 ISSUED BY

AMERICANIZATION DEPARTMENT VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS OF THE

UNITED STATES CHICAGO, U. S. A.

HENRY FORD AND THE AUTOMOBILE

By James Rood Doolittle.

A MOST interesting and informative chapter in Doolittle's "Romance of the Automobile Industry" is the accompanying account of Henry Ford and the great part he has played in what has come to be the foremost American industry, in point of financial magnitude. The article is given here by permission of the publishers, The Klebold Press, New York.

Ford, the premier automobile manufacturer of the world, is credited with making, in 1893, the second gasoline car to be operated successfully in the United States a car which "has been the strongest educational force the industry has produced."

In the Ford employ to-day--thirty-two years afterward are 100,000 persons turning out 8,500 automobiles every twenty-four hours. Their employer has instituted a profit-sharing plan whereby $10,000,000 has been distributed annually to employees, and has built for their free use a $2,000,000 hospital.

THE name of Henry Ford is known and his personality is respected wherever civilized man dwells. As head of the company that has produced or has scheduled for current production something like $700,000,000 of automobiles in eleven years, there can be no question about his rank in the industry. As the chief of 100,000 workmen, most of whom he developed from mere laborers to the grade of skilled mechanics, each deemed worthy of mechanics' wages but schooled to perform only a single operation, he has gained fame.

The world is interested in Henry Ford as a pacifist, educator and philanthropist, but the automobile industry recognizes in Ford a scientist, a bulldog fighter and a manufacturer par excellence.

Ford invented and built with his own hands a two-cylinder, four-cycle gasoline car that ran at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour in the spring of 1893. That places him so close to the top of the list of American automobile inventors that there is a doubt as to exactly how he ranks. From the best data available as to his status in the list, he should be credited with making the second gasoline car that ran in the United States. Duryea certainly built and ran a car in 1893 and tried out his Buggyaut, commenced in 1891, quite extensively before the date of Ford's first car, but the weight of the testimony is that Ford was second.

He fought the Selden patent to a standstill, without proving anticipation of its claims.

His car has been the strongest educational force the industry has produced, because the ranks of motorists are increased from the bottom and Ford cars are the first cars purchased by entries into the motor field in a large percentage of cases. The array of 1,500,000 Ford cars and the service they have done needs no emphasis here.

Henry Ford and the Ford car are the best advertisements the automobile industry has enjoyed. Speaking broadly, their value to the rest of the industry is incalculable.

Of full medium height, Mr. Ford is slenderly built but sinewy as hickory. Equipped with meager primary schooling, he has taken all the degrees conferred by the University of the World.

There has been an immense amount of flub-dub written about Ford's hardships; his luck and his genius, but the only real hardship he ever had was that he chose to work hard. He was successful because he worked out an important problem at the right time and his genius may be described as the logical sequence of the hard work and success.

Ford's genius rests upon his ability and willingness to do an astounding amount of work. He made a monumental success because he did the work and expended the intelligent effort at the right time, and then kept right on expending intelligent effort until the whole world recognized it.

Ford was the eldest of three sons and three daughters, born to William Ford, native of Ireland but of English blood, who emigrated to this country and settled eight miles west of Detroit, Michigan, in 1847. The young Irish-English immigrant was a man of strong personality and was a steady and moderately successful farmer. He married Mary Litogot some years after reaching Michigan, and Henry Ford Was born July 30, 1863.

A great storm of criticism and protest has been raised concerning the attitude of Ford toward war. Opinions may differ according to the partisanship of those who hold them, but the stern position assumed by Ford is perfectly clear and logical from his point of view. Hatred of war comes naturally to Henry Ford, for he was born to the sound of fife and drum. His mother listened to the tramp of armed hosts and heard the dismal music of the funeral bands; the wailing bugle call of "Taps" over the graves of fallen warriors. She saw an endless line of maimed men come back from the battle front and she gave to Henry Ford an inherited aversion to war that is as deeply ingrained in his being as it is possible for anything to be.

There is nothing in his attitude to show that he fears war he simply hates it.

The boy Henry was a baby until the end of the struggle between the States, and his childhood was little different from that of the average farmer boy, where there is a measure of prosperity. For the father was not poor. The boy had enough to eat and wear and a comfortable home in which to live. He had to work hard and long as soon as he was able. But that is the lot of all farmer boys. He was no laggard and between the farm work and the rudimentary schooling he received, he found time to rig up a little shop on the farm where he had a vise, a lathe and a rude forge, as well as tool equipment of miscellaneous kinds. He fairly reveled in mechanics and sought out repair work, mostly for the love of the work itself rather than for any money returns that might result.