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Henry Ford Research Paper

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Like most great enterprises, Ford's beginnings were modest. The company had anxious moments in its infancy, balancing precariously on the brink of bankruptcy until cash inflows from sales began. The earliest record of a shipment is July 20, 1903, approximately one month after incorporation, to a Detroit physician. With the company's first sales, came a ray of hope. A worried group of stockholders, skeptically eyeing a bank balance that had dwindled to $223.65, breathed easier, and a young Ford Motor Company had taken its first step. During the next five years, young Henry Ford, as chief engineer and later as president, directed a development and production program which started in a converted wagon shop on Mack Avenue in Detroit and later …show more content…

Forced to choose between closing the doors or fighting a battery of attorneys who already had whipped bigger companies into line, Henry Ford and his partners decided to fight. Eight years later, in 1911, after incredibly complicated court proceedings, Ford Motor Company won the battle which freed it and the entire auto industry from Selden's strait jacket. Despite harassment from Selden's syndicate, the little company kept improving its machines, making its way through the alphabet from its first model, the original Model A, until it reached the Model T in 1908. A considerable improvement over all previous models, this car was an immediate success. Nineteen years and more than 15 million Model Ts later (1927), Ford Motor Company was a giant industrial complex that spanned the globe. Its cars had started an urban revolution. And the Ford assembly line ignited an industrial revolution. Pre-World War II Expansion During those years of hectic expansion, Ford Motor Company: Began producing trucks and tractors (1917); Became wholly owned by Henry Ford and his son, Edsel, who succeeded his father as president in 1919 after a conflict with stockholders over the millions to be spent to build the giant Rouge manufacturing complex in Dearborn, Mich.; Bought the Lincoln Motor Company (1922); and, Built the first of 199 Ford Tri-Motor airplanes used by America's first commercial airlines

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