Henry was an apt pupil, and by 1896 had risen to chief engineer of the Illuminating Company. He saw the job in part as an opportunity to learn. Ford did not know a great deal about electricity. In 1888 Ford married Clara Bryant and in 1891 they moved to Detroit where Henry had taken a job as night engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. By now Ford was demonstrating another characteristic-a preference for working on his own rather than for somebody else. Instead he operated and serviced portable steam engines used by farmers, occasionally worked in factories in Detroit, and cut and sold timber from 40 acres of his father’s land. He returned home in 1882 but did little farming. Over the next two-and-one-half years he held several similar jobs, sometimes moving when he thought he could learn more somewhere else. In 1879 he left the farm to become an apprentice at the Michigan Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars in Detroit. But young Henry was fascinated by machines and was willing to take risks to pursue that fascination. These characteristics would become the foundation of his whole career.įord could have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a farmer. Thus, young Ford demonstrated mechanical ability, a facility for leadership, and a preference for learning by trial-and-error. He taught himself to fix watches, and used the watches as textbooks to learn the rudiments of machine design. He learned about full-sized steam engines by becoming friends with the men who ran them. He organized other boys to build rudimentary water wheels and steam engines. Early on Ford demonstrated some of the characteristics that would make him successful, powerful, and famous. He was born on his father’s farm in what is now Dearborn, Michigan on July 30, 1863. Henry Ford had all these characteristics, but it took him many years to develop all of them fully. Innovation requires self-confidence, a taste for taking risks, leadership ability and a vision of what the future should be.
They take new ideas, sometimes their own, sometimes other people’s, and develop and promote those ideas until they become an accepted part of daily life.
But more than any other single individual, he was responsible for transforming the automobile from an invention of unknown utility into an innovation that profoundly shaped the 20th century and continues to affect our lives today. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile.
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