Henry Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford did not invent the automobile or the assembly line, he developed and manufactured the first automobile that many middle class Americans could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would profoundly impact the landscape of the twentieth century. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. As owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with "Fordism": mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to systematically lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put dealerships throughout most of North America and in major cities on six continents. Ford left most of his vast wealth to the Ford Foundation and arranged for his family to control the company permanently.
Ford was also widely known for his pacifism during the first years of World War I, and also for being the publisher of anti semitic texts such as the book The International Jew.
His father gave him a pocket watch in his early teens. At 15, Ford dismantled and reassembled the timepieces of friends and neighbors dozens of times, gaining the reputation of a watch repairman.
Ford was devastated when his mother died in 1876. His father expected him to eventually take over the family farm, but he despised farm work. He later wrote, "I never had any particular love for the farm—it was the mother on the farm I loved."
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), society is organized on "Fordist" lines, the years are dated A.F. or Anno Ford ("In the Year of our Ford"), and the expression "My Ford" is used instead of "My Lord".
Upton Sinclair created a fictional description of Ford in the 1937 novel The Flivver King.
Symphonic composer Ferde Grofe composed a tone poem in Henry Ford's honor (1938).
Ford is treated as a character in several historical novels, notably E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), and Richard Powers' novel Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (1985).
Ford, his family, and his company were the subjects of a 1986 biography by Robert Lacey entitled Ford: The Men and the Machine. The book was adapted in 1987 into a film starring Cliff Robertson and Michael Ironside.
In the 2005 alternative history novel The Plot Against America, Philip Roth features Ford as Secretary of Interior in a fictional Charles Lindbergh presidential administration.
The British author Douglas Galbraith uses the event of the Ford Peace Ship as the center of his novel King Henry (2007).
Ford appears as a Great Builder in the 2008 strategy video game Civilization Revolution.
In December 1999, Ford was among 18 included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, from a poll conducted of the American people.
In 1928, Ford was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal.
In 1938, Ford was awarded Nazi Germany's Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a medal given to foreigners sympathetic to Nazism.
The United States Postal Service honored Ford with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) 12¢ postage stamp.
“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.”
“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.”
“Kdybych poslouchal své zákazníky, býval bych jim dal jen rychlejšího koně.”
“Experience is the thing of supreme value".”
“Money is like an arm or leg- use it or lose it.”
“Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.”
“As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow.”
“It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he?”
“It ought to be the employer’s ambition as leader to pay than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make it possible”
“There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail”
“Speculation into thing already produced that is not business”
“As we serve our jobs we serve the world.”
“To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.”
“To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
“You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”
“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one...”
“New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.”
“To do more for the world than the world does for you - that is success.”
“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.”
“The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already.”
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
“There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.”
“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”
“Ci si myslite, ze to dokaze, alebo nedokaze, v oboch pripadoch mate pravdu.”
“Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.”
“That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.”
“We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.”
“everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
“success is 99% failure”
“You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is, it's how we use it that makes things possible.”
“Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necesary to a worthwhile achievement".”
“Es gibt mehr Leute, die kapitulieren, als solche, die scheitern.”
“I am looking for a lot of men who have and infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”
“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”
“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”
“When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.”
“There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”
“An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.”
“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.”
“None of our men are 'experts.' We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the 'expert' state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”
“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.”
“When everything seem to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it ....”
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
“One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do.”
“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it.”
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”