Though Henry Ford was responsible for revolutionary advances in manufacturing it is not as often noted that the Ford Motor Company was an unusual leader in the establishment of American big business because of the firm's tightly-controlled and (by general big-business standards) under-capitalized nature. Ford's decision to adapt the assembly line notion to his own product met with enormous success and he was able to outstrip all his competitors very rapidly. The center of Ford's vision, however, was not the use of the assembly line but the idea that cars could belong to anyone and that he could produce and sell a practical, affordable vehicle in mass quantities. The combination of Ford's inventiveness and practicality with his own stubbornness and the skill of his colleagues made the company into a big business that did not, at first, fit the mold. The Ford company is a case study in the practicalities of manufacturing that, when combined with the opportunity to create a major new industry, made it possible to proceed in a different manner than many of the big businesses that emerged in the early part of the century.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) was a trained machinist who was fascinated by the new horseless carriages. He began to experiment with car building in the early 1890s and by 1896 he had built his first car. It was only the sixth gasoline-powered automobile to be built in America. Over the next six years Ford tried repeatedly to get his car into production. In the meantime he built racing cars and became an accomplished race driver. The building of racers, then as now, was considered an excellent source of publicity for fledgling auto makers.
At the time there were literally hundreds of auto manufacturing firms trying to get a start. In 1899 there were 57 establishments producing cars, by 1904 there were 121, and in 1909 there were 265 operating firms. By 1909 there had been, in total, 639 firms that had attemp...