One of the main goals of our Office is to encourage critical thinking and fact checking. It is especially pleasing to see when a student has done exactly that! I received an email from Kaden Bickmore, a grade 11 student at Osgoode Township High School in Ontario, pointing out a mistake in my article on Henry Ford.
Here is his correspondence:
Recently I was reading an article by the title of "Henry Ford - A Stained American Icon" from Ď㽶ĘÓƵ, I believe that this article was written by you. I found this to be a very interesting article but, while I was reading it I noticed a piece of information that I believe to be inaccurate.
During the first paragraph of the article you had made a statement of "At the age of thirty-six he resigned and founded the “Detroit Automobile Company,” later to become the "Ford Motor Company."" I interpreted this to mean that Henry Ford had founded "Detroit Automobile Company" and that same company had later rebranded and became "Ford Motor Company". After cross referencing this information to multiple other sources I believe it to be false.
From what I understand, the professional business life of Henry Ford looked slightly different. I believe that Henry Ford after working as a chief engineer for "Edison Electric Company" he went on to start "Detroit Automobile Company" but, this company 2 years later went bankrupt in January of 1901. After this business failure Henry Ford started "Henry Ford Company" in November of 1901. Later that year Henry Ford was forced to leave due to a dispute between Henry Ford and his investors. The "Henry Ford Company" after Henry Ford's departure was reorganized to become the "Cadillac Motor Company". After these two business ordeals Henry Ford started the "Ford Motor Company" which is the company that Henry Ford ended up known for.
Kaden is totally correct and I have accordingly altered the sentence in question.
Henry Ford was rich and famous. It is not hard to understand why. After all, he converted the automobile from an expensive novelty into a vehicle affordable for the middle class and in the process sparked Americans’ enduring love affair with their cars. His introduction of the assembly line that churned out the celebrated model T revolutionized transportation. Ford had no formal education but he was a whiz when it came to tinkering with machinery. He had become infatuated with the “horseless carriage” at the age of twelve when he saw a primitive version and within two decades while working as an engineer in the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit he had built a self-propelled “Ford Quadricycle.” That, however, was not what propelled him to fame. It was his founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 that made his name recognizable around the world. At the age of thirty-six he resigned and founded the “Detroit Automobile Company,” later to become the “Ford Motor Company.”
Ford’s interests extended beyond automobiles. He was a sort of environmentalist ahead of his time. From scraps of the wood used in his cars, Ford formulated charcoal briquets and partnered with Thomas Edison to research botanicals that could produce rubber in America. He believed that plants were capable of furnishing useful materials and he became particularly interested in soybeans.
Ford had grown up on a farm and early in his career had developed an interest in what he called "chemurgy," the science that looked for ways to find new industrial uses for crops. By the 1930s Fords' researchers had determined that the soybean was an excellent candidate for such uses because it produced a versatile oil and a protein that could be turned into fibrous materials. Soybean processing was an established practice in China at the time and Ford sent his representatives to study the Chinese methods. They learned how the oil and the protein were isolated and also reported that the Chinese workers wore minimal clothing. This aspect of the technology did not appeal to Ford but it may have given him the idea of making fabrics out of soybeans which he did manage to do. On special occasions Henry would be seen sporting his suit made completely out of soybean fibers.
On a more practical basis, Ford’s researchers found ways to use soybean oil in the enamel paint for cars and soybean meal was moulded to make horn buttons, gearshift knobs, door handles and even acceleration pedals! Robert Boyer, Ford's main soy researcher, even developed plastic sheets made from soybeans that would replace steel. He installed a soy trunk lid on one of Henry's personal automobiles and the magnate delighted in assembling skeptics and smashing the car with an axe. He invited them to do the same to their car. None took up that challenge.
Then the war came and automobile construction was practically stopped as car factories cranked out military equipment. The war also triggered a great deal of research into plastics and by the time it ended plastics from petroleum had become commonplace. They were easier to produce than soy products and of course at the time nobody worried about running out of petroleum or the environmental consequences of the new technologies. But given the current climate, we may yet see the rebirth of the soybean car and suit.
Although Henry Ford is revered as an American icon, he had one very large skeleton in his closet. He was a flagrant anti-Semite, writing in one article in 1922 that “if fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball they have it in three words-too much Jew.” The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper Ford owned, published a series of articles on “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” It is no wonder the Nazis loved Ford. In 1938 he was awarded Germany’s Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a medal given to foreigners sympathetic to Nazism. He seems to have recanted his views in a 1942 letter to the Anti-Defamation League in which he stated that "My sincere hope that now in this country and throughout the world when the war is finished, hatred of the Jews and hatred against any other racial or religious groups shall cease for all time." That hope has not materialized.
