Ford, Edison Forged Friendship, Changed World
This week in 1899, Henry Ford quit a well-paying job as a chief engineer to start up his own automobile company. His employer was none other than Thomas Edison, prolific inventor and founder of Edison Illuminating Company. Edison was sorry to see Ford go, but he encouraged the younger man to pursue his dream. It would become the start of a lifelong friendship.
Edison was already known as America’s greatest inventor when Henry Ford took a job as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit in 1891. Edison had patented the light bulb, the phonograph, the electric generator, a system for electric lighting, and much more. He was a big deal. Edison Illuminating built and operated electrical generating stations in several cities, including New York, Boston, and a number of towns in Pennsylvania.
Ford quickly showed his skill for machine work. The son of immigrant Irish farmers living in Michigan, he knew that he didn’t want the farm life. Ford was a tinkerer from an early age, and in 1879 moved to Detroit to apprentice with machinists. He later went to work for Westinghouse servicing steam engines.
Ford moved up the ranks at Edison. In 1894, he was promoted to chief engineer, which meant that he was on call 24 hours a day to help keep the city’s electricity flowing. But Ford was not settled on working for an electrical company the rest of his life. He had dreams of horseless carriages rolling around in his head, and he wanted to make that dream a reality.
Ford spent what free time he could find working on a four-wheeled gas-powered invention he called a quadricycle. By 1893, he had perfected an engine, and by 1896, he had the vehicle for it to power.
Ford met Edison face to face that same year at a gathering of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies in New York. The talk inevitably turned to machines, and Ford told Edison about his quadricycle. Edison liked what he heard and urged the young engineer to “keep at it.”
Other business leaders in Detroit also took note of Ford’s work. In 1898, he built a second automobile and began attracting investors who encouraged him to go into business, but Ford didn’t believe he was quite ready to start selling his invention. The next year, he built a third version with more improvements, brakes being the big addition.
In August 1899, a group of investors pulled together $150,000 to back Ford’s automobile and established the Detroit Automobile Company. Ford resigned at Edison, which offered a $1,900-a-year salary and a general superintendent title to get him to stay. Ford went with Detroit Automobile, and went on the books for $150 per month.
There were dozens of upstart automotive companies at that time; all competing for a tight luxury market with vehicles that were not all that different from one another. The Detroit Automobile Company folded after only a couple of years. Ford was not discouraged and neither were his investors. Out of the ashes, they formed the Henry Ford Company in 1901, which reincorporated as the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In 1908, the Model T was introduced, and Ford never looked back.
Ford quickly became the biggest automaker in the world, and with that reach came tremendous wealth. He corresponded with Edison regularly. Their families began yearly vacation excursions in the Florida Everglades the early 1910s, and in 1916, Ford bought a vacation home next door to Edison’s winter home there. They went on road trips that were heavily followed in the papers, and along with Harvey Firestone, founder of Firestone Tire and Rubber, they became known as “the vagabonds.”
These so-called vagabonds were among the most powerful men in America at the time. Their wealth was beyond the comprehension of the average person of the time, and their influence over business in America was unmistakable. It seems only natural that their friendship, along with their lives and their work, became a part of history.
