Henry Ford - A Great Innovator

Background Note Contd...

He stayed on this job for three years. In 1881, he began working at Dry Dock Engine Works (DDEW), a steamship company in Detroit. This gave him a chance to work with motors. Dissatisfied with his work at DDEW, Ford went back to Dearborn in 1882. He spent a few years in Dearborn in various activities like managing and repairing steam engines, working temporarily in Westinghouse Engine Company (Detroit), and repairing his father's farm equipment.

The 'Mechanical' Journey of Ford

In September 1891, Ford joined the Edison Illuminating Company (EIC) in Detroit as a night operating engineer at its sub-station at Woodward and Willis (Detroit) at a monthly salary of $45. In just a couple of years, he became the Chief Engineer, earning $100 per month. His responsibilities included ensuring uninterrupted electric supply in the city for all 24 hours in a day. The work schedule and timings were highly irregular, but this provided him the much-needed opportunity, time and finances to carry out his own experiments on internal combustion engines. Ford experimented with petrol-driven engines and horseless carriages for many years. In the early 1890s, he labored to develop a cost-effective small farm tractor.

He was successful in building a steam tractor with a single cylinder engine, but failed to make a suitable boiler light, which would make the tractor operational. In 1892, he put together a "gasoline buggy" with two cylinder engines which generated 4HP (horsepower). His experiments finally yielded results in June 1896, when he came out with his new invention - a self-driven vehicle called 'Quadricycle.' The quadricycle was a 4 HP vehicle, consisting of four wire wheels similar to heavy bicycle wheels, powered with a handle like a boat, and had only two forward speeds, with no backpedal.

The chassis of the quadricycle was placed on the four bicycle wheels. Richard S. Tedlow (Tedlow), Harvard Business School professor, said, "Henry Ford had done what not one top automobile executive in the world could do today. He had built a complete car with his bare hands."¹¹ Commending the great invention of the quadricycle, another writer Sidney Olson¹² said, "To non-mechanical people, which mean most people, the natural question about his first car may be: What took him so long? Well, there was no such thing as a spark plug; it hadn't been invented.

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11] As quoted in the book, Giants of Enterprise, by Richard S. Tedlow, HarperBusiness, 2001, page 149.

12] Former Advisory Board Chairman of Quentin Burdick Center for Cooperatives (QBCC), which was set up in North Dakota (US) in 1992 to promote cooperative development.

Case Details

Case Code : LDEN025
Themes: Corporate Social Responsibility, Entrepreneurship
Case Length : 13 Pages
Period : 1903
Organization : Ford Motor Corporation
Pub Date : 2003
Teaching Note : Not Available
Countries : USA
Industry : Automobile

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