The Ford Motor Company

8 Pages 1996 Words

Like most great enterprises, Ford’s beginnings were modest. The company had anxious moments in its infancy, balancing precariously on the edge of bankruptcy. But one month after incorporation a ray of hope shone when the first car was sold to a Chicago dentist named Penning. A worried group of stockholders, skeptically eyeing a bank balance that had dwindled to $223.65, breathed easier, and a young For Motor Company had taken its first step.
During the first five years, young Henry Ford, as chief engineer and later as president, directed a development and production program which started in a converted wagon factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit and later moved to a larger building at Piquette and Beaubien Streets. In the first 15 months 1,700 Model of cars chugged out of the old wagon factory.
Between 1903 and 1908, Henry Ford and his engineers used the first 19 letters of the alphabet to assign their creations, although some of the cars were experimental and never reached the public. The most successful of the early production cars was the model (N), a small, light, four-cylinder machine that went on the market at $500.00. The model (K), a $2,500.00, six-cylinder, luxury car, sold poorly.
The model K’s failure, along with Mr. Ford’s insistence that the company’s future lay in the production of inexpensive cars for a mass market, caused increasing friction between Mr. Ford and Alexander Malcomson, a Detroit coal dealer who had been instrumental in raising the original $28,000.00. As a result, Mr. Malcomson left t he company and Mr. Ford acquired enough of his stock to increase his holdings to 58.5 percent. He became president in 1906, replacing John S. Gray, a Detroit banker.
Quarrel among the stockholders did not threaten the young company’s future, as seriously as a man named George Selden did. Mr. Selden had a patent on “road locomotives” powered by internal combustion engines. To protect his patent, he formed a power...