30 July: Henry Ford

Born on this date in 1863 was car manufacturer Henry Ford. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. In his early teens, he supplemented his pocket money by repairing watches. He taught himself how to do it, and made his own tools out of old nails and corset bones.
2. His father was a farmer and expected him to take over the farm one day, but Henry had no interest in farming. Instead, he went to work for the Thomas Edison Illumination Company in Detroit and at 20, was promoted to Chief Engineer, which meant he was responsible for keeping the city's lights working. He worked there for six years before Edison himself encouraged him to leave and work on his idea of creating an affordable automobile.
3. The car designs weren't the only thing that was innovative at his factories. He was first to use a moving assembly line in 1913. He was more willing than most manufacturers at the time to employ people with disabilities. By 1919, 20% of his workforce had a disability of some kind. He was also a pioneer of the concept of a minimum wage. He paid his workers well so that the best engineers would want to work there, forcing his competitors to raise their rates of pay, too. People who had worked at the company for six months or more were also offered a share of the profits. Not everything he did would be seen as good practice today, however. Shares of the profits were only offered to workers of good character who didn't drink or gamble and took good care of their children – and Ford actually employed investigators to spy on them. He was also against unions.
4. There was a brief foray into politics when President Woodrow Wilson suggested he should run for US Senate in 1918. Ford did so, but spent no money at all on his campaign, believing that people should vote for him if they wanted to. He didn't win, but only lost by 4,500 votes.
5. He famously said that people could have any colour car they wanted, as long as it was Black. Before the assembly lines, it was possible to get a Model T in Red, but in due course efficiency dictated that they should all be painted black because black paint dried more quickly.
6. He was ahead of his time in more things than running a factory. He wrote a book called The Case Against the Little White Slaver, about the dangers of cigarette smoking in 1914, long before smoking was proved detrimental to health. If not for the second world war, we might have been driving cars made from soybeans, thanks to Henry Ford. He was working on a lightweight car made from biodegradable plastic made from soybeans in 1941, but the project was sidelined by the war.
7. Over his lifetime, Ford amassed more than 160 patents. They weren't all related to cars. He invented the charcoal briquettes we use on Barbecues, making them out of the wood scraps left over from the oak parts of the Model T. During the first world war, he started building aircraft. His most successful aircraft was the Ford 4AT Trimotor, often called the "Tin Goose" because it was made from corrugated metal. 199 of them were made before the Ford Airplane Division was forced to close down in the Great Depression. A Ford Tri-Motor appears in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
8. Thomas Edison was Ford's idol and so much so that when Edison was dying, Ford persuaded Edison's son to catch his last breath in a test tube and seal it with a cork. The tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
9. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, years are numbered as Annum Fordum, or "Year of Our Ford." Huxley's characters also use Henry's name as "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord." Ford himself, however, believed there was some kind of higher power. As a young man, he'd walk four miles to church every Sunday. He once said in an interview: “Somewhere is a Master Mind sending brain wave messages to us. There is a Great Spirit. I never did anything by my own volition. I was pushed by invisible forces within and without me.”
10. Another thing Henry Ford would be condemned for today was his anti-Semitic views. Although his was one of the few major corporations at the time actively hiring African American workers, disabled workers and women, Jews were a different matter. He sponsored a strongly anti-Semite newspaper, and his reason for funding square-dancing in American schools was because he thought Jazz, a type of music he disliked, had been invented by Jews. It's possible, however, that his anti-Semitism killed him in the end. In one biography, it was suggested that when Ford was shown footage from Nazi concentration camps in 1947 at the age of 83, and forced to confront the brutality caused by the prejudice he'd stoked the flames of, it caused his final, fatal stroke.

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