![]() ‘A work of civilisation’īy the 1920s, the Amazon basin lay in shambles. While he succeeded in bringing some of his smaller urban planning concepts to life, his much larger project, a massive manufacturing city to be built in northern Alabama – 75 miles long, with power supplied by damming the Tennessee river – never got off the ground.Įventually, Ford settled on a location for his ideal city that was a good deal further south than Alabama: the Amazon. He became increasingly convinced that his role in advancing society had to go beyond the factory floor, and encompass entire cities. The Rev Samuel Marquis, one the heads of Ford’s employee relations office, once proclaimed that Ford’s cars were “the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men”.īut some of Ford’s social ideas were highly sinister – most notoriously his anti-semitism, which featured prominently in a newspaper he himself printed, the Dearborn Independent. He took pride in the fair treatment of his staff, and in 1914, to great fanfare, he proclaimed that all Ford workers would receive a daily salary of $5 (the equivalent of $120 (£90) today).įord believed fair treatment would make his workers more responsible citizens and, in the process, solidify a client base for manufacturers. Yet Ford’s greatest innovation was arguably not mechanical, but social. Within a decade of its founding in Dearborn, Michigan in 1903, the Ford Motor Company had revolutionised car production by introducing the assembly line – isolating tasks within the complex process of car assembly, allowing new models of his flagship vehicle, the Model T, to be cranked out faster than ever before, making the company a global success. In his day, Ford’s name was every bit as evocative of the glimmering promise of technological revolution as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg – perhaps even more so. ![]() It is difficult to overstate the reputation Henry Ford had built for himself by that time – whether in Brazil, America, or anywhere else on the planet.
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