subject: A History Of Ford [print this page] Ford has come a long way since its humble beginnings, when Henry Ford officially launched the company on the 16th of June 1903.
The history of Ford cars is almost as long as the history of the automobile itself, in fact you could probably consider "Ford" to be a synonym for "car".
In order to understand how the ford brand went to become an American (and now global) icon, we must first look at how it all began, way before we had Ford in Birmingham , London, China, Germany and every other stretch of the globe.
Henry Ford started his first car company "The Henry Ford Car Company" in 1901, however he wasn't pleased with the company and so he left after just a year, taking the rights to his name with him. The company that he left eventually became another well-known brand - the Cadillac motor company.
Determined not to give up his dream of creating the ultimate car, Henry set about gaining investment to fund his new company. Henry quickly found twelve investors who put 28,000 dollars into funding the new business. In the "new" ford motor company production was a slow process. Initially the company only produced one or two cars a day. Frustrated with this slow process Henry Ford came up with a new way to assemble the cars. Instead of people slowly gathering pieces by hand, Ford decided it was much faster to have a production line.
He increased productivity in two ways, first he made tweaks and improvements to the assembly line concept and technology that he came up in a previous job. His second change was something more revolutionary - He decided it would be more efficient for Ford to produce all parts for their cars themselves. This meant that no other factories or outside help would be needed to assemble their cars. This sped up the production process considerably, as it meant there was no waiting for deliveries of parts from other factories. Another benefit to this method was that Ford could produce the car parts for a much lower cost than it would be to buy it in from another company.
After speeding up the production process and fine tuning the production process Ford were able to produce even more cars than previously and quickly established themselves as one of the major car brands in America. After the 2nd world war Ford continued to grow and benefited tremendously from the post-war economic boom. This was the moment where Ford really began to stop being a brand, and became a national treasure Little did Henry know that his cars would still be sold over 100 years after he founded his company.
