Henry Ford - an American industrialist

Henry Ford, born July 30, 1863, was the first of William and Mary Ford's six children. He grew up on a prosperous family farm in what is today Dearborn, Michigan. His mother died in 1876, when he was only 13. Henry's father wanted him to take over the family farm, although he never actually liked the farm.

He was good at solving math problems in his head. But Henry's greatest love was studying mechanical objects.

On trips to nearby Detroit with his father, Henry had seen steam engines on trains. A common source of power for machines of the day, steam engines burned coal or wood in a boiler to heat water until it created steam.

In 1888, Ford married Clara Bryant and in 1891 they moved to Detroit, where Ford had taken a job as night engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company.This event signified a conscious decision on Ford's part to dedicate his life to industrial pursuits. His promotion to Chief Engineer in1893 gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines.

He became one of the scores of other people working in barns and small shops trying to make horseless carriages. Ford read about these other efforts in magazines, copied some of their ideas, added some of his own and convinced a small group of friends and colleagues to help him. This resulted in his first primitive automobile, completed in 1896. A second, more sophisticated car followed in 1898.

In 1896, Ford attended a meeting of Edison executives, where he was introduced to Thomas Edison. Edison approved of Ford’s automobile experimentation. Encouraged by Edison, Ford designed and built a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. Backed by the capital of Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy, Ford resigned from the Edison Company and founded the Detroit Automobile Company on August 5, 1899.

After one more unsuccessful attempt to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, on June 16, 1903, Henry and 12 others invested $28,000 and created Ford Motor Company. The first car built by the Company was sold July 15, 1903. Henry owned 25.5% of the stock in the new organization. He became president and controlling owner in 1906.

The Ford Motor Company manufactured its first car – the model A – in 1903. By 1906, the model N was in production, but yet Ford hadn’t achieved his goal of producing a simple, cheap car. From 1908 to 1927, the Ford Motor Company sold more than 15 million Model Ts around the world. Henry Ford helped people move beyond the horse and the road engine toward a more modern world filled with fast and powerful cars.

As owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with "Fordism": mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Henry Ford introduced the 40-hour workweek to his factory staff in May 1926 and to his office staff in August 1926.

The most important invention Henry Ford made was the Model T assembly line. He made the assembly line to make the transition of making anything easier that will be purchased. The assembly line was invented while he was making his Model T cars.

Henry Ford died at his residence, Fair Lane Estate in Dearborn, at 11:40pm on Monday, April 7, 1947, following a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 83 years old.
Henry Ford - an American industrialist

Andrew Carnegie - Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist

Andrew Carnegie was an American industrialist who amassed a fortune in the steel industry then became a major philanthropist. Carnegie was into the lower class born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835.

Andrew's father was a weaver, a profession the young Carnegie was expected to follow. The town o Dunfermline, fell on hard times when industrialism made home-based weaving obsolete, leaving workers such as Carnegie’s father, Will, hard pressed to support their families.

Andrew's mother, Margaret, fearing for the survival of her family, pushed the family to leave the poverty of Scotland for the possibilities in America in search of better economic opportunities.

Carnegie and his family immigrated to Pennsylvania, where they lived a better lifestyle. At the age of 13, Carnegie worked from dawn until dark as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, before rising to the position of division superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1859.

In 1865 he founded the Keystone Bridge Company, where he focused on replacing wooden bridges with stronger iron ones. In three years, he had an annual income of $50,000. By 1868 Carnegie, then 33, was worth $400,000 (nearly $5 million today).

In the early 1870s, he entered the steel business, and over the next two decades became a dominant force in the industry with Carnegie Steel Corporation becoming the largest steel manufacturing company in the world.

In addition to the success of his company, Carnegie became a very successful angel investor. Using the money made through his steel company, he invested in various car companies, messenger services, and land that contained oil reserves.

In 1901, banker John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) purchased Carnegie Steel for some $480 million, making Andrew Carnegie one of the world’s richest men. Retiring from business, Carnegie set about in earnest to distribute his fortune. In addition to funding libraries, he paid for thousands of church organs in the United States and around the world.

Upon his death in 1919, Carnegie had an estimated net worth of $350 million, which, in 2021 dollars, would be worth nearly $5.5 billion.
Andrew Carnegie - Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist

William Hesketh Lever: British businessman and founder of Lever Brothers

William Hesketh Lever was born into a comfortable middle-class family, the seventh of ten children and the elder of two boys, on the ninth of September, 1851, in Bolton, Lancashire, a town described by Engels as one of the worst industrial towns in England.

His father James Lever was a hardworking man who ran a successful wholesale grocery business in Manor Street, Bolton and the family values were based upon their strict Congregationalist background.

In 1867, at the age of sixteen, William Lever entered the family grocery business instead of continuing his studies to become a medical doctor, as William's mother had wished.

In 1879, Lever expanded his father's grocery business by buying out a failing wholesale grocer in Wigan, and under his personal management turning this into a branch of Lever and Co. of Bolton. By 1884 the Lever wholesale grocery business had grown to be the largest in the North West outside Manchester and Liverpool.

In 1885, along with his brother James Darcy Lever, he established Lever Brothers and brought soap to the masses. William borrowed £4,000 from his father for starting capital. After much market research and international travel, they began to corner the market: Sunlight Soap, the world’s first packaged and branded laundry detergent, was born.

They were one of the first companies to make soap from vegetable oils rather than tallow, which enabled the soap to lather much more freely.

Lever Brothers was made a limited company in 1890 with capital of £300,000, and by 1894, the company went public with £1,500,000 in capital. By the turn of the century, Lever Brothers became the leading soapmakers in Britain.

Lever died at his London residence in Hampstead on 7 May 1925. Lever at the time of his death was one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom and was the nation's second largest landowner after the crown. He rose to such prominence on the profit gained from the manufacturing of soap, the most famous of his brands being the Sunlight.

William Hesketh Lever: British businessman and founder of Lever Brothers

Henry Clay Frick (December 19, 1849 – December 2, 1919)

Henry Clay Frick was born in December 1849, in West Overton, Pennsylvania to a poor family. One of six children, his parents were John W. Frick, a farmer, and Elizabeth Overholt Frick, the daughter of a whiskey distiller and flour merchant. Frick ended his formal education in his late teens, and began work as a clerk at an uncle's store in Mt. Pleasant, Pa.

Frick began building and operating coke ovens in 1870, and the following year he organized Frick and Company. Taking advantage of the difficult times following the financial panic of 1873, he acquired extensive coal deposits and supplied Pittsburgh with the coke required for its steel and iron industry. In 1871 he also invested in the 10-miles long Mount Pleasant Broadford Railroad (later absorbed into the B&O) which was being built from Broad Ford up the Morgan Valley to Bridgeport at the southeast corner of Mount Pleasant. Coal mines and coke ovens were being erected all along the railroad route including a number in Bridgeport.

In 1881 he decided to undergo a merger with Carnegie. Frick soon lost control of his company’s stock to Carnegie. Friction continued to develop as Carnegie tried to express his pro-labor sentiment in opposition to Frick’s strike suppressing beliefs.

For the remainder of his life, however, Frick continued to be a fixture in industrial and financial circles in America. He served as a director of United States Steel Corporation, and of various railroads, banks, insurance companies, and invested in property in and around Pittsburgh, as well as in Massachusetts, New York, and Indiana. He also served on the boards of cultural, educational, and charitable organizations, including the American Academy in Rome, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Princeton University.
Henry Clay Frick (December 19, 1849 – December 2, 1919)

George Everett Haskell of Beatrice Food

Born in 1864 in Osage, Iowa, George Everett Haskell was one of five children and was left fatherless at age four, when Josiah Haskell died from an illness contracted during his service in the Civil War. 

Subsequently, Gilbert Rice, owner of a mill in Cedar Rapids, sent him to Cedar Valley Seminary, a combination high school and junior college that also numbers Hamlin Garland as an alumnus.

After graduating in 1884, he worked for two years as a clerk before going ‘west’ from Osage to Fremont, to take a position as a bookkeeper for the Fremont Butter and Egg Company.

In 1889, Haskell by then a bookkeeper of the Fremont firm, opened branch for the company in Beatrice, Nebraska. Haskell purchased the company’s Nebraska plant when the company folded in 1891. He renamed it the Beatrice Creamery Company of Iowa.

In 1901 the company adopted the trademark Meadow Gold for its butter. From the early date, Beatrice was a leader and innovator in the dairy business.

It is reported to have been the first company to package butter in sealed cartons. The company pioneered the use of aluminum foil milk caps and was an early innovator in the marketing is homogenized milk.

In 1909, Beatrice purchased the plant of the Lincoln Ice & Col Storage Company. By the 1930s, its 32 plants produced 27 million gallons of milk and 9.5 million gallons of ice-cream per year.

George Haskell’s great service to the dairy industry and his country ended in 1919, when he died at age fifty-four.
George Everett Haskell of Beatrice Food

Soichiro Honda – Japanese engineer and industrialist

Soichiro Honda (November 17, 1906 – August 5, 1991) was born in Yamahigashi, which is located in the center of the Japanese mainland. It was near his home that he first saw an automobile coming down the country road.

He father Gihei was a blacksmith.  Form the time he was a small child, Soichiro was always around his father, observing him at work. At the tender age so 15, he began an apprenticeship as a mechanic in Tokyo. Since he was diligent and industrious, he mastered all the techniques of auto repair in four years.

At 21 years of age he opened his own repair shop. He then moved into manufacture, starting with an initially unsuccessful venture in making position rings – he lacked necessary knowledge. Honda’s love of cars extended to racing them, and he set a new record speed record in 1936.

He then developed his own design of piston ring in 1938 and won the contract with Toyota. However during World War 2, his entire piston manufacturing facilities was destroyed. Then he started a new company and attached the engine to the bicycle which cheaper and efficient.

In October 1946, after the end of the war, Soichiro established the Honda Technical Research Institute the forerunner of the Honda Motor Company in the city of Hamamatsu.

The organization’s main project was refitting small wartime surplus engines to bicycles. This project soon led Soichiro to manufacture his own motorcycle.

In 1948, Soichiro teamed up with Takeo Fujisawa, an investor and businessman to launch the Honda Motor Company, with Soichiro as the president. Soichiro retained responsibility for engineering, while Fujisawa dealt with marketing and sales.
Soichiro Honda – Japanese engineer and industrialist

Philippe Suchard (1797-1884)

Philippe Suchard is credited with being the creator of the image of Swiss chocolate.

Suchard was born at Boudry, Switzerland.  He had first encountered chocolate when his ailing mother sent him to an apothecary in Neuchatel Switzerland to secure a pound of that product to incorporate into a tonic she was taking to improve her health.

He began his career as an apprentice confectioner in his brother’s confiserie in Bern.

He opened his first confectionary shop in Neuchatel in Switzerland in 1825.  He produced between 25 to 30 kg of chocolate bars each day with help of a single assistant.

A year later Suchard moved into an empty mill in nearby Serrieres and there built his own chocolate factory. Suchard pioneered the building of houses for his workers. He also designed his own chocolate-making equipment and harnessed water power to drive the machines.

When the railway reached Serrieres in 1860, his business was given a substantial boost.

In 1878 Philippe Suchard applied for his first British trademark for Chocolat Suisse. Growing demand from other countries led to the first Suchard chocolate factory outside Switzerland being built in 1880 in Lorrach, on the German side of the Swiss border.

Milk chocolate was introduced by Suchard in the 1890s and in 1901 the trademark Milka was registered in Britain.

After the First World War, when exports were hindered by the reimposition of high tariffs and currency restrictions, the company opened chocolate factories in the US, the UK, Argentina, Sweden and South Africa.
Philippe Suchard (1797-1884)