The Ford Motor Company is an American automaker and the world’s fifth largest automaker based on worldwide vehicle sales. Based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, the automaker was founded by Henry Ford, on June 16, 1903.
Ford Motor Company would go on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, as well as being one of the few to survive the Great Depression. The largest family-controlled company in the world, the Ford Motor Company has been in continuous family control for over 110 years. Ford now encompasses two brands: Ford and Lincoln. Ford once owned 5 other luxury brands: Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar, Aston Martin and Mercury. Over time, those brands were sold to other companies and Mercury was discontinued.
During its early years, the company produced a range of vehicles designated, chronologically, from the Ford Model A (1903) to the Model K and Model S of 1907. The K, Ford’s first six-cylinder model, was known as “the gentleman’s roadster” and “the silent cyclone“, and sold for US$2800; by contrast, around that time, the Enger 40 was priced at US$2000, the Colt Runabout US$1500, the high-volume Oldsmobile Runabout US$650, Western’s Gale Model A US$500, and the Success hit the amazingly low US$250.
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. Earlier models were produced at a rate of only a few a day at a rented factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit, Michigan and later at the Piquette Avenue Plant, with groups of two or three men working on each car from components made to order by other companies.
The first Model Ts were built at the Piquette Avenue Plant and in the car’s first full year of production, 1909, just over 10,000 Model Ts were built. As demand for the car grew, the company moved production to the much larger Highland Park Plant in 1910. In 1911, 69,762 Model Ts were produced, with 170,211 in 1912. By 1913, the company had developed all of the basic techniques of the assembly line and mass production. Ford introduced the world’s first moving assembly line that year, and boosted annual output to 202,667 units that year. After a Ford ad promised profit-sharing if sales hit 300,000 between August 1914 and August 1915, by 1920 production would exceed one million a year.
The Ford River Rouge Complex (commonly known as the Rouge Complex or just The Rouge) is a Ford Motor Company automobile factory complex located in Dearborn, Michigan, along the River Rouge, upstream from its confluence with the Detroit River at Zug Island. Construction began in 1917, and when it was completed in 1928, it was the largest integrated factory in the world.
Snippet of History 