Crazy Henry
“Honk, Honk,” “Screech,” “Drive slow-poke,” “Slow down crazy driver.” These are some of the sounds that are heard and the phrases that people often yell while driving on the roads and highways these days. There are more than 117 million automobiles, 31 million trucks, 5 million motorcycles, and 500,000 buses that are traveling on the roads and interstates on average each day (Altschiller 21). In large part we can thank Henry Ford for this development in our present day society. As a farm boy he knew from first-hand experience that farming could be backbreaking work, and he knew that machinery could ease the burden. He saw the automobile as a piece of machinery (Sorensen 17). He envisioned the car, not as a luxury vehicle for the rich, but as a means for the average man to make his life –and his family’s easier and happier. It soon became apparent that the car would not only ease man’s burden, but that it would also enable him to enjoy a fuller life (Sorensen 17). Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863 on a forty-acre farm in Dearborn, Michigan. His parents were William and Mary Ford who were Irish immigrants shipped to America as refugees following the Irish potato famine in Southern Ireland. They
Ford’s success in making the automobile a basic necessity turned out to be but a prelude to a more widespread revolution. The development of mass-production techniques, which enabled the company eventually to turn out a Model T every 24 seconds; the frequent reductions in the price of the car made possible The Model T was the first car that was produced by mass-production by The Ford Motor Company. The Model T was to transform the face of America. “I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to have fun with and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces” (Lacey 87). This is a quote from Henry Ford in 1907. The Model T sold for $290, the lowest price ever for a Ford automobile. Simplicity, durability and affordability were its distinctions, and between 1908 and 1927 more than 15 million were produced – to set a record unsurpassed in American automobile production (Sorensen 31). With the Model T, the motor age arrived owing mostly to Ford’s vision of the car as the ordinary man’s utility rather than as the rich man’s luxury. Once only the rich had traveled freely around the country, but now millions could go anywhere they wanted. The Model T was the chief instrument of one of the greatest and most rapid changes in the lives of the common people in history, and it affected this change in less than two decades. Farmers were not longer insolated on
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Approximate Word count = 1179
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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