Everyone knows how Henry Ford founded his company, right? Well, there’s a lot more to the story!
Ford was initially employed by the Edison Illuminating Company as an engineer. This was by merit of an eighth grade education. His main interest was the new field of automobiles, which he pursued in a shed on his property. His first car was completed in 1896, which made him the second person in Detroit to produce a vehicle. He sold this car and used the money to invest in a second vehicle. He soon attracted the attention of investors. At this time I’d imagine that anyone producing a vehicle would attract attention, whether they wanted it or not! The investors, with Ford as the superintendent, formed the Detroit Automobile Company.
Unfortunately for his investors, Ford was far more interested in auto racing than he was auto production. The investors brought in Henry Martyn Leland as a consultant, which angered Ford to the point that he left the company. There were those with money who still had faith in Ford, though, but Ford still had to get auto racing out of his system. The company that Ford left behind would become Cadillac, with Henry Leland at the helm.
His racing efforts were successful, with his ‘999’ car breaking one minute for a one mile circle track. This four cylinder engine displaced an incredible 1155.3 cubic inches! Horsepower was reported to be between 80hp and 100hp. Henry managed to get the racing bug out of his system and investors were standing by.
Two Abortive Starts
Coal baron Alexander Malcomson funded a brief endeavor with Henry, in the form of the Ford and Malcomson Company, Ltd. The Fordmobile company, Ltd. was also a short-lived entity, and neither company resulted in any vehicle production. The first Ford Model A runabout was offered in July of 1903.
The A.L.A.M. Saga
The Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers was an organization that existed to enforce the ‘Selden patent’. George B. Selden was an lawyer and inventor who was granted a patent for an automobile in 1895.
Here’s the primary drawing from the Selden patent.
In 1899, the Electric Vehicle Company purchased the rights to Selden’s automobile patent. The patent was deemed flimsy by most of the industry, but the company purchased the rights to guarantee the legality of their new venture, the Columbia Automobile Company. A year later the Electric Vehicle Company turned to the Selden patent as an alternative source of revenue. They set out to have manufacturers pay a 5% royalty on all cars produced.
Henry Ford told the ALAM to go pound sand up their asses (well, my interpretation…) and refused to cooperate with them. He was alone in this regard, with no other automakers following suit. Here is an ‘advertisement’ that was published to promote to the public the concept of buying from an ALAM-member company.
Ford’s willingness to resist the ALAM made him famous. I certainly don’t know what his primary motivation was, whether it be to fight a wrong or simply save money. Regardless of his motivation was, it led to the dilution of influence by the ALAM and its eventual disintegration.
The Early Models
Here are the Ford models prior to the Model T:
- Model A – 1903
- Model AC, B – 1904
- Model F – 1905
- Model K, N – 1906
- Model R, S – 1907
- Model T – 1909
I would assume that the models that were skipped were projects that didn’t make it to production. It should be noted that the Ford Motor Company was very successful in the years prior to the introduction of the Model T.
Lincoln (and Cadillac)
This is the company that had its start with a very young Cadillac. Henry Leland’s first company, Leland, Falconer and Norton, made engines for Oldsmobile. A Leland-designed engine offered remarkable efficiency, but Oldsmobile felt that their fire had put them too far behind schedule to entertain manufacturing changes for a new engine.
Leland was brought in as a consultant by the backers of the first Ford company, to help assign a value to the company in preparation for the backers to bail on the venture. After all, at this early date Henry Ford was seemingly more interested in auito racing than he was auto production. Leland used his new engine design to convince the Ford backers to work with him in a new automobile venture. This was to be named Cadillac, after the French explorer who ‘discovered’ Detroit*.
Background in Precision Manufacturing
Leland had worked earlier for Samuel Colt and for Brown and Sharpe. This cultivated in him a strong belief in the value of precision manufacturing. In 1908 Cadillac was awarded the Dewar trophy for demonstrating their achievements in parts interchangeability. This was the first such award for an American automaker. (Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewar_Trophy)
William Durant of General Motors purchased Cadillac for $5.5M in 1909. Henry Leland and his son remained with the company. The two Lelands were able to put up with Durant until 1917, when both walked out. Henry Leland was said to have been frustrated by Durant’s refusal to convert the factory to the production of liberty aircraft engines for WWI. The company the Leland’s formed, Lincoln, secured a government contract to build liberty engines. However, WWI ended before this could get underway. With their factory and workforce in place, they made the logical decision to produce automobiles instead.
Missteps
For a number of reasons, one of which was Henry Leland’s focus on engineering, another his son-in-laws aged designs, production did not proceed as quickly as it should have and investors lost their patience. The company was sold on February 4, 1922 to one Henry Ford. If you’ve read the Ford Companies Origins, you already know that Henry Leland built Cadillac out of what remained of Ford’s first company. Surprisingly, both Lelands stayed on with the company, but leaving after four months.
*The word ‘discovered’ doesn’t really apply here, as it also very much does not apply to Christopher Columbus relative to what is now America. (Vikings were in North America centuries before Columbus, but that’s a different conversation) Centuries before 1492, North America was populated not only with nomadic indian tribes, but also groups f people who built cities and had cultivated vast maize fields and orchards. The very first contacts with European explorers exposed them to smallpox and other diseases for which they had no natural immunity. Entire groups (‘tribes’) of peoples were decimated. When the explorer Cadillac arrived in what is now Detroit, it likely bore little resemblance to what it had been centuries earlier, pre-contact.
Mercury
This was created by Edsel Ford in 1939 as a companion make to Ford itself, with its models being placed above those of Ford and below Lincoln’s. Incidentally, there were six previous companies that bore the name Mercury, with none being long-lived. Given that this make wasn’t established until some seventeen years after Ford bought lincoln, one has to ask why. Ford clearly was aware of marketing tiers, as seen at Chrysler and GM. The only good answer is that Henry Ford, known to exhibit extreme stubbornness, was averse to the idea. This was a lot of lost opportunity for the company,
