Of the 161 patents credited to pioneering automobile industrialist Henry Ford, a mostly forgotten and quirky one issued to him on Jan. 13, 1942, highlights the rare genius of Michigan’s most famous inventor. The patent was for a revolutionary automobile, referred to as the soybean car, with body panels made from soybean-based plastic panels.
Twelve years in the making, the car was assembled by attaching 14 molded plastic panels, each 3/8-inch thick, to a welded tubular steel frame. The side windows, the windshield, and the rear window were made from acrylic sheets, rather than heavier glass. The “green” vehicle weighed 2,000 pounds, which gave it a distinct fuel economy advantage over steel-bodied cars, which were up to 1,000 pounds heavier.
Ford unveiled the white, two-door coupe-styled car at the Dearborn Days community festival on Aug. 13, 1941. It was powered by Ford’s 60-horsepower flathead V-8 gasoline engine that was popular in other company models of the time. The car was, at times, referred to as the hemp car because hemp was added to the soybean plastic formula to provide additional strength.
Henry Ford touted his agricultural-based vehicle as cheaper to manufacture, due to sourcing renewable crops, and safer than traditional ones made with steel. A news film clip and photographs from that time show Ford swinging a heavy axe and smacking the black trunk lid of his personal car without doing any damage. The lid was made from the same plastic panels Ford used on the soybean car. Ford staged that media demonstration to back up his claim that a car made of soybean panels could withstand a rollover accident without being crushed.
By 1935, Ford Motor Co. opened its own soy processing plant and had more than 12,000 acres of soybeans under cultivation. As a second car went into production, World War II intervened and the soybean project was put on hold, then abandoned after the war. The original car and the one under construction were later destroyed.
Adding to the mystique of the soybean car was the disappearance of the formula Ford and his team of scientists used to make its plastic panels. His vision for a mass-produced, plastic-bodied vehicle came back to life a dozen years later when Chevrolet introduced the 1953 Corvette.
No such mystery surrounds Henry Ford’s achievements in the traditional auto industry. The inventor was the oldest of six children born to William and Mary Ford on a farm near Dearborn on July 30, 1863. William, a native of County Cork, Ireland, came to America in 1847 and took up farming in Wayne County.
From an early age, the young Henry Ford showed an aptitude for mechanics. His father gave him a pocket watch in 1875 and the 12-year-old took it apart to see how it worked — it was his earliest exposure to the basics of engine design. That same year, he marveled at a steam engine powering a farm machine. It was the first vehicle he ever saw that wasn’t drawn by horses.
Ford began spending much of his time in a small workshop he set up at home. He earned a reputation as a watch repairman, and fixed timepieces for family members, friends, and neighbors. At age 15, he built a functioning steam engine.
He also was dyslexic, a condition that prompted him to leave school in 1879 after completing eighth grade. Instead of furthering his school-based education, he became a machinist apprentice, then got a job working on steam engines for Westinghouse around southern Michigan. With a year’s experience, he returned home and made a living servicing small steam engines for farmers, while also working odd jobs in factories in Detroit.
In 1888, Ford married a neighbor’s daughter, Clara Bryant. Three years later, the couple had their only child, Edsel Bryant Ford. They moved from Dearborn to Detroit, where Ford took a job as an engineer with Edison Illuminating Co., even though he knew very little about electricity. The job made a lasting impact on his life as he was introduced to another great inventor, Thomas Edison, who would become Ford’s lifelong friend and mentor.
Ford quickly earned a promotion to chief engineer at the main Detroit Edison plant, where he oversaw maintaining electric service to the city around the clock. He didn’t have set work hours, since he was always on call — a perk that allowed him to spend all his free time in his workshop along Bagley Street near Grand Circus Park (the family lived on the second floor).
By the end of 1893, Ford had built a functioning gasoline engine. Three years later, he rolled out his first horseless carriage, the Quadricycle, a four-horsepower vehicle built on a buggy frame with four bicycle wheels equipped with larger tires. The vehicle, which borrowed components from Charlie Brady King’s car — King was the first to drive a motor vehicle in Detroit — weighed 500 pounds, and the two-cylinder engine ran on ethanol fuel. With two forward gears and no reverse, it had a top speed of 20 miles per hour and was steered with a tiller adapted from a boat.
The next few years were rather turbulent ones for Ford. With the backing of several investors, he founded the Detroit Automobile Co. in 1889, only to declare bankruptcy 18 months later. Ford quarreled with his investors, who couldn’t get vehicles to market as quickly as they wanted, since Ford constantly stalled for more time to perfect them.
In 1901, he founded his second car company, Henry Ford Co., but similar disagreements with investors prompted him to leave the business that later would become Cadillac Motor Car Co. Because wealthy investors were wary of him, Ford rounded up 12 friends who collectively chipped in $28,000 to form Ford Motor Co. on June 16, 1903. Initially, Ford owned 25.5 percent of the stock.
On July 15, the new Ford Motor Co. sold its first car. Three years later, Ford was president and controlling owner of the company. He became his new company’s best pitchman as he generated national publicity competing in auto races in vehicles he designed and built. In 1904, he drove a Ford racer, the 999, to a world record time of 39.4 seconds for 1 mile on a track on ice on Lake St. Clair.
“I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Ford declared in 1908, announcing the launch of the Model T, the vehicle that’s credited with putting the American public on wheels. The new company immediately ran afoul of the powerful Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, a group that controlled the fledgling auto industry. They based their licensing authority on an 1877 patent they held for a rudimentary gasoline engine that was never mass-produced.
Ford eagerly accepted their court challenge. In 1911, an appeals court ruled decisively in his favor, a momentous decision that burnished Ford’s national profile and threw open the American auto industry to widespread competition and innovation.
By this time, Ford had opened a large new plant in Highland Park, where innovations he introduced would revolutionize factory work worldwide. Ford had been studying the best practices of makers of watches, clocks, guns, sewing machines, and meat processors, as well as an early assembly line patented in 1901 by his competitor, Ransom E. Olds.
Drawing on those experiences, in 1913 he introduced a moving assembly line to mass-produce automobiles. Ford’s assembly line dramatically reduced the time it took to build each vehicle to 90 minutes from 12 hours. The speed and stress of the repetitive work on the assembly line, however, forced Ford workers to quit in droves.
To counter their complaints, Ford made what historians say was his boldest move ever — he doubled the daily pay of his assembly workers to $5. In a corresponding move, he created the 40-hour workweek by limiting each worker’s shift to an eight-hour day, five days per week. By ratcheting up the pay scale, Ford also created a new market for his cars, as his workers could now afford to buy the products they made.
His personal experience with dyslexia made him and his company pioneers in hiring disabled workers and paying them the same wage as other employees. Soon, Ford’s mass-production initiatives left his competitors behind, as their business models were based on paying the lowest possible wage and charging the highest market prices for their product.
By the end of its run in 1927, more than 15 million Model Ts accounted for half of the cars on American roads. Millions more were sold abroad. The efficiency of scale allowed Ford to fulfill his pledge to build a car for the multitudes. The Model T that cost $950 in 1908 sold for $290 in 1927.
The success of the Model T made Ford one of the world’s richest men. In 1919, he became the sole owner of the company after paying $127 million to buy out minority stockholders and reorganize the company under a Delaware charter. All shares were owned by Ford, making him the first person ever to have solo control of such a massive operation.
With the freedom to execute his ambitious agenda, Ford drew up plans for a colossal complex that would vertically integrate all aspects of manufacturing, from raw materials for production to assembly and transportation. To that end, he bought controlling interest in 16 coal mines in Kentucky. He also acquired 700,000 acres of timberland, a glassworks factory, a railroad, and a fleet of Great Lakes freighters to ferry ore from his iron mines in northern Michigan and Minnesota to a new plant he envisioned on the Rouge River in Detroit.
The Rouge Plant opened in 1927. Every morning, just the right amount of iron ore needed for that day’s production arrived from Ford mines in Michigan and Minnesota on Ford freighters, was moved by conveyors to the blast furnaces, and made into steel with heat from coal extracted from Ford’s Kentucky mines. The process continued through foundry molds and stamping mills. Similar systems at the plant would convert Ford-owned lumber into floorboards, processed rubber for tires, glass, and other parts.
Twenty-eight hours after a shipment of ore arrived on the Rouge docks, it came off the assembly line as a finished automobile. The company’s supply chain holdings at one time stretched from iron mines in northern Michigan to Brazil, as Ford operated in 33 countries around the world. Even more amazing, Henry Ford never borrowed money to finance his empire, as he paid for it with profits earned by the Model T.
His authoritarian leadership style, however, served to squelch dissent, stifle creative ideas from subordinates, and eventually led to a sagging of the company’s fortunes. Ford ignored pleas from top executives, including Edsel Ford, to modernize the utilitarian Model T, from his “any color as long as it’s black” dictum to its underpowered four-cylinder roots. By the time Henry Ford relented and introduced the Model A in December 1927, Ford was third in sales behind General Motors’ Chevrolet and Chrysler’s Plymouth. Even his unveiling of a revolutionary V-8 engine in 1936 didn’t reverse that slide.
Despite his pacifist views, Ford Motor Co. produced engines, aircraft, and vehicles for the U.S. military during World War II. In the early 1940s, Edsel directed the building of a gigantic factory and assembly line on the site of one of his father’s soybean farms at Willow Run Creek. The Willow Run facility in Ypsilanti Township produced the legendary B-24 Liberator bomber, a crucial aircraft in winning the global conflict.
By war’s end, the Willow Run plant had rolled out 8,685 of the bombers, building to a record rate of one every 55 minutes. After Edsel Ford’s life ended prematurely in 1943 when he died of stomach cancer at age 49, Henry Ford, at age 80 and infirm, ran the company for two more years before retiring and naming his grandson, Henry Ford II, as his successor.
Henry Ford was 83 years old when he died on April 7, 1947, at his home in Dearborn. Today his former residence is known as Fair Lane: Home of Clara and Henry Ford (it’s currently nearing the end of a years-long renovation).
James Couzens, Ford’s former business manager and vice president, and a future mayor of Detroit, once said of his old boss: “You cannot analyze genius, and Ford is a genius.”
