Darel Leipold on the History of the Ford Company
Posted by Steve Frazier
on Feb 07, 2012
Our program was presented by our own member and Resident Historian, Darel Leipold. His talk was about the history of the Ford Motor Company, and Henry Ford.
You need a chart to follow all of the ins and outs of the corporate history of Ford Motor Company. It was formed on August 6, 1902 in Detroit. Henry Ford was of English descent, although he was born in Ireland. He built his first horseless carriage in 1896, and had to tear out a wall of the shed it was built in to get the vehicle out.
He built two race cars in 1902, and hired Barney Oldfield as driver of the second one. The Model T was developed in 1907, and assembly of the model began in December, 1908.
In 1922, 50% of the vehicles on the road were built by Ford Motor Company.
Henry Ford at one time owned 51% of the company, but he also owned 100% of a tractor company, Henry Ford & Son, Inc., which made the Fordson tractor line. Operating separately from 1917 to 1920, the Fordson tractor had 70% of the tractor market in the US. The son in the company name, by the way, was Edsel Ford. The company was merged into the bigger company, and the Ford Company made Fordson tractors until 1964. At the beginning, some Minneapolis investors formed a company and built Ford Tractors, but they didn’t get permission from Ford to use the name and dropped their effort after manufacturing a few units. (Story by Tad Shaw)