Henry Ford Reading Comprehension Lesson

From Farm to Factory

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan. His father was an Irish immigrant farmer who hoped Henry would take over the family farm, but Henry had little interest in farming. From childhood, he was fascinated by machinery. He taught himself to repair and disassemble watches, and neighbors brought their broken clocks and watches to him for repair. At age 16, he left the farm and walked to Detroit, where he worked as an apprentice machinist and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company.

While working at Edison, Ford spent his evenings and weekends in a small shed behind his house, experimenting with gasoline engines. In 1896, he completed his first self-propelled vehicle, which he called the Quadricycle — a simple frame with four bicycle wheels, powered by a two-cylinder gasoline engine. Ford drove it through the streets of Detroit at 2 a.m. to avoid traffic. When he met Thomas Edison at an engineering conference and described his gasoline-powered carriage, Edison was enthusiastic, telling Ford to “keep at it.” This encouragement from his idol spurred Ford to press forward with his experiments.

Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with a group of investors. His early cars were sold to wealthy buyers who could afford them. But Ford had a different vision: he wanted to build a car that ordinary working Americans could afford. “I will build a car for the great multitude,” he declared. The result was the Model T, introduced in 1908. It was simple, reliable, and easy to repair. In its first year, Ford sold 10,000 Model T’s. But the price was still high — Ford knew he needed to find a way to manufacture cars faster and cheaper.

The Moving Assembly Line

In 1913, Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant in Michigan. Instead of workers moving from car to car to perform their tasks, the cars moved along a conveyor belt and each worker performed one specific task as the car passed in front of them. The idea was inspired partly by slaughterhouses Ford had seen in Chicago, where carcasses moved along overhead lines and workers each performed one specific cut. Applied to automobile manufacturing, the moving assembly line reduced the time to build a Model T from over 12 hours to about 93 minutes.

The assembly line allowed Ford to dramatically cut the price of the Model T. In 1908, a Model T cost $850. By 1925, the price had fallen to $260 — less than three months’ wages for the average American worker. Millions of Americans bought Model T’s, transforming the country. Paved roads were built, suburbs began to grow, gas stations and roadside restaurants appeared, and American life became organized around the automobile in ways that persist to this day. By 1927, when the Model T was discontinued, Ford had sold more than 15 million of them.

Ford also famously raised his workers’ wages to five dollars a day in 1914 — roughly double the prevailing wage — and reduced the workday from nine hours to eight. He argued that well-paid workers could afford to buy the cars they built, creating a virtuous cycle of production and consumption. Ford’s labor practices were widely admired, though he also fiercely opposed labor unions and used company security forces to intimidate union organizers. Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947, at the age of 83. His legacy is the industrial system that made mass-produced consumer goods affordable for ordinary people everywhere.

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