Wheels for the World
Book

Wheels for the World

Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress

Douglas Brinkley
Penguin, 2004
First Edition: 2003
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

It would be difficult to conceive of a more detailed corporate history. Author Douglas Brinkley offers an interesting, lucid narrative of Henry Ford’s early experiments with the automobile, and his first, unsuccessful companies. He promises and delivers a “warts and all” picture of Ford’s history. Brinkley is at his strongest discussing Ford’s origins. But the book is also sprawling, diffuse and unfocused, with a somewhat confusing tendency to jump back and forth along the twentieth century timeline. It is more than a biography of Henry Ford, but less than a thorough history of the Ford Motor Company. The author nods in the direction of the technological, managerial and financial forces that have shaped Ford since the 1950s, though he presents the history of Ford (both man and company) earlier history in vivid detail. Henry Ford's impact still shapes industry in the United States.  

Summary

Taking Apart His Toys

Henry Ford was born in 1863 on one of the wealthiest farms in Michigan, not far from the town of Dearborn. He was no scholar. In fact, he may never have learned to read very well. But he had a mechanical genius that manifested at an early age. He could follow the technical logic of any machine, and loved to take toys apart to see how they worked. His siblings hid their wind-up toys from him to avoid finding them in pieces. When he was of age, his father sent him to be an apprentice at the James Flower & Brothers Machine Shop in Detroit. The apprenticeship paid less than the cost of his room and board, so he also repaired watches and clocks part-time. When he was almost 20, he got a job with Westinghouse, servicing steam engines. Meanwhile, he studied mechanical drawing, typing and accounting at night school. In 1888, at 25, he married pretty, "sober-minded" Clara Bryant, age 22.

Steam-powered engine-driven vehicles were on the roads by then, but they were rare, perhaps because they required an open fire and a supply of coal. Ford was intrigued by Westinghouse’s "silent Otto" engine, because it used an electric spark to ignite gasoline and ...

About the Author

Douglas Brinkley, professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, is the award-winning author of ten books. His other books include John F. Kennedy and Europe, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War and The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House. He also co-wrote two books with his "friend and mentor," historian Stephen Ambrose: The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation and Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1939.

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