HENRY FORD'S KEY SECRET

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How did this man become the car king? After all, he never learned to read drawings in his entire life, and engineers simply made a wooden model for him, which he studied. What rules of life was this person guided by?

Let's see what the secret of one of the most famous industrialists in history is.

0:00 Introduction

0:18 Childhood

2:03 Worker and Farmer

2:52 Wife and family

5:36 First ATV

6:09 A matter of life

8:47 Ford Motor Company

13:20 Success

16:51 Difficulties

18:41 Ford and Hitler

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, the son of a Michigan farmer, an emigrant from Ireland. The father was dissatisfied with him, considering him lazy and sissy - the son behaved like a prince who happened to be on a farm. Henry was reluctant to do whatever he was told. He hated chickens and cows, hated milk. "Already in my early youth, I thought that many things could be done differently - in some other way." For example, he, Henry, has to climb steep stairs every morning, carrying buckets of water. Why do this every day when you can only lay two meters of water pipes underground?

When his son was twelve, his father gave him a pocket watch. He could not resist - he forged the cover with a screwdriver, and something wonderful opened up to his eyes. Parts of the mechanism interacted with each other, one wheel moved the other, each screw was important here. Having disassembled and assembled the watch, the boy pondered for a long time. What is the world if not one big mechanism? One movement is generated by another; everything has its own levers. To be successful, you just need to know which levers to push. Henry quickly learned how to repair watches and for some time even worked part-time, touring the surrounding farms and taking chronometers that had been put up for repair. The second shock was the meeting with the locomobile. Henry and his father were returning by cart from the city when they met a huge self-propelled car enveloped in steam. Overtaking the cart and frightening the horses, the smoking and hissing monster rushed past. At that moment, Henry would have given half his life to be there in the chauffeur's booth.

At the age of 15, Ford left school and walked at night, without saying anything to anyone, went to Detroit: he would never become a farmer, as his father wanted. At the factory where he got a job, they made horse-drawn carriages. Here he did not last long. Ford only had to touch the broken mechanism to understand what the problem was. Other workers began to envy the gifted newcomer. They did everything to survive the upstart from the factory, and they succeeded - Ford was fired. Later, Henry got a job at the Flower Brothers shipyard. And at night he worked part-time by fixing the clock so that he had something to pay for the room.

And William Ford, meanwhile, decided to make one last attempt to return his son to farming: he offered 40 acres of land on the condition that he would never say the word "machine" again in his life. Henry suddenly agreed. The father was pleased, the son too. The gullible William did not even suspect that his son was simply fooling him.

Soon, Henry Ford decided to get married. Clara Bryant was three years younger than him. They met at a country dance. Ford was a brilliant dancer and impressed the girl by showing her his pocket watch and claiming that he had made it himself. They were connected by a lot - just like Henry, Clara was born into a farmer's family, she did not disdain any work. The girl's parents are pious and strict people, of course, they would not give her up for a young man without a penny, without land and a home.

Having hastily built a cozy house on his site, Henry settled in it with his young wife. Years later, the automobile monarch will say: “My wife believed in my success even more strongly than I did. She has always been like that. Clara could spend hours listening to her husband's reasoning about the idea of creating a self-propelled crew. Throughout her long family life, she always knew how to maintain an elegant balance - she was interested in her husband's affairs, but never interfered in them.

On the farm, he invented a gasoline-powered grain thresher. Ford sells the patent for this invention to Thomas Edison, and he invites Henry to his company. However, there, as the chief engineer, Henry is still most attracted to machines.

Having married in 1887, he will live with his wife all his life. Once asked by journalists if he wants to live another life, Ford will answer this way: "Only if you can marry Clara again."