QI The Book of the Dead

process, keeping costs down and radically reducing production times. But the real stroke of genius was to keep prices down too. Every worker was a potential customer and the profits would come from volume. It worked. In 1908 the first Model T Fords began rolling off the line, priced at $825 dollars. By 1914 the price had fallen to $360 (equivalent to a very affordable £4,500 at today’s prices). By 1918 half the cars in America were Model Ts and when production finally stopped a decade later, 15 million had been produced – more than any other car except for the Volkswagen Beetle.
    Ford had managed this through some bold innovations, all of them designed to centralise control. The eight-hour shift allowed three sets of workers to keep the production line running twenty-four hours a day. In 1913 the introduction of the first-ever conveyor-belt-driven ‘moving production line’ reduced the time it took to produce the car’s chassis from six hours to just ninety minutes. At the same time, a network of Ford dealerships was established, which not only made the dealers themselves wealthy, it also meant Ford cars were visible in every American city, helping to create yet more demand. At the other end of the supply chain, Fordlooked to buy – or form strategic alliances with – the companies producing parts, glass and rubber, to improve consistency of delivery and drive production costs down further. This was to become the template for the modern manufacturing corporation and Ford did it all without accountants. He didn’t like employing people who weren’t directly involved inmaking or managing: in his lifetime, the Ford Motor Company was never audited.
    Ford’s other major innovation was to do with staff. In 1914 he introduced a minimum wage of $5 a day, a huge leap from the previous rate of $2.34. It was an instant success, attracting thousands of highly motivated workers to Detroit and ending the high staff turnover problem overnight. But there were conditions. To qualify for the minimum wage meant conforming to Ford’s social vision: no heavy drinking, no smoking, no divorce, no union talk. He set up a Social Department under the ex-boxer and tough guy Harry Bennett. Bennett had a team of fifty investigators gathering information about the personal lives of the workforce. Anyone who failed to meet the standards of the Ford Motor Company forfeited their right to the minimum wage. Bennett also made sure union activity was disrupted at every turn, employing thugs and ex-criminals under the guise of a crime rehabilitation programme. He was the ultimate fixer and he enjoyed Ford’s complete trust, picking his boss up and dropping him home every day for over twenty years. Once, when a newspaper suggested to him that he would paint the sky black if Ford asked him to, he replied:
    I might have a little trouble arranging that one but you’d see 100,000 workers coming through the plant gates with dark glasses on tomorrow .
     

    The Social Department hints at the darker side to Ford’s character. He was an autocrat who couldn’t bear dissent. Bennett himself captured this perfectly. Practically the first thing Ford said to him was ‘Harry, never try to outguess me.’ ‘You mean never try to understand you?’ replied Bennett. ‘That’s close enough.’ Those that tried to defy him, including his own son Edsel and his grandson Henry Ford II, found themselves overruled or expelled. This ruthlessness was one of the reasons that Hitler kept a lifesized picture of Ford next to his desk. (He would later claim that the Ford Service Department inspired him to set up the Gestapo, just as the Model T had influenced the Volkswagen Beetle.) And this wasn’t all that Hitler had in common with Ford. In the 1920s, he was the proprietor of the Dearborn Enquirer , a newspaper that had published a series of anti-Semitic tracts including the notorious (and fake) ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’. Ford later disowned the paper and claimed he was unaware of its racist content, but all the evidence points to these apologies as window dressing. Even in his final weeks he was still grumbling about Jewish bankers having caused the Second World War.
    In June 1916 the Chicago Tribune published an article headlined ‘Ford is an Anarchist’ which claimed, incorrectly, that the company was refusing to pay employees called up by the National Guard. Ford sued and the paper was found guilty, but fined only six cents –