What If

'Frightful' Obstacles

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It took another three months before Ford completed his vehicle. When he took his “Quadricycle” out for a test drive in early June, there were no crowds on the streets waiting to see it, no journalists assembled to write about his invention. In retrospect, this was fortunate because his test run wasn’t nearly as successful as King’s.

The first problem he encountered was almost comical: Ready to roll his car out of his shed, Ford discovered it was too large to fit through the doors. “He grabbed an axe and doubled the opening by knocking out some bricks,” author Steven Watts writes in his best-selling biography The People’s Tycoon. Once the car was out on the streets, the engine broke down in front of the Cadillac hotel.  “An inspection revealed only a minor problem—a spring supporting one of the electrical ‘ignitors’ had failed,” Watts writes. “And a quick repair got the vehicle up and running once again.”

Anyone who chronicles the life of Henry Ford, from biographers to documentary filmmakers, points to Ford’s first ride in his Quadricycle as a triumphant moment for the inventor. More than just about any other event in Ford’s life, this moment marks the beginning of his ascent as an innovator. And yet at the time he surely faced tremendous doubts, too. Doubts that can be easy to downsize when we look back on the great span of his life. Doubts that might’ve amounted to those “frightful things” Ford was referring to in his famous quote about life’s obstacles.

Imagine Ford on that morning in 1896: Back from his maiden voyage in his first hand-built automobile, he had no time to celebrate. First, he rushed to repair the shed, which belonged to the landlord of the apartment he was renting on Bagley Avenue. Then he dashed off to his “day job” as an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, where he helped to maintain the coal-fed steam engines that generated electricity for the city of Detroit. He was scrambling to pay for the parts he needed for his Quadricycle, so much so that his wife Clara “wondered many times if she would live to see the bank account restored.” 

A Late Bloomer

At the age of thirty-three, Henry Ford was far from achieving the kind of success he admired in one of his heroes, Thomas Edison. Edison was 22 when he received the first of his 1,093 U.S. patents, and by the time he was in his early thirties, he’d invented the phonograph and a long-lasting practical light bulb in his Menlo Park Laboratory.

"People don't realize that Henry Ford was kind of a late bloomer," says Bob Casey, former Curator of Transportation at The Henry Ford. "He left home when he was sixteen. He went to Detroit. He grew up on a farm but he didn’t want to be a farmer. He was interested in machinery and got a job in a machine shop…then he got fired from a couple of jobs. Sometimes he left on his own. But he was always learning, always doing stuff, and he built up this store of practical knowledge."

'Why Innovators Get Better With Age'

Henry Ford helps to dispel the myth that innovators make their mark on the world when they are young. Certainly this is true for some, including modern-day icons like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. But genius flourishes well past the age of twenty, as best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell helped to point out in his well-known 2008 New Yorker essay "Late Bloomers". More recently, a 2013 New York Times article (“Why Innovators Get Better With Age”) by Tom Agan noted that Nobel Prize winners typically make significant breakthroughs in their thirties. 

Looking back through time, historians document many signature achievements in Henry Ford’s life—from his Model T, assembly line, and Five Dollar Day incentive to his monumental River Rouge plant—that mark him as one of America’s greatest innovators. He is celebrated for his ability to see before practically anybody else that he could transform modern America by building a durable, affordable car for ordinary citizens. What’s just as important to remember is that his genius was coupled with what Gladwell calls "forbearance and blind faith", and what others might call "grit". In other words, he never ever gave up. If ever there was a defining moment in his life when he first realized he possessed these resilient resources, it might’ve been those three months in 1896, when another engineer won recognition for building the first automobile in Detroit. 

Inventors vs. Innovators

Ford’s vision for building an affordable,  self-propelled vehicle was partly fueled by his desire to relieve the burden of hard farm labor, particularly plowing the fields, which was the life of his father and might’ve been his if he hadn’t followed his dreams. He also hoped automobiles would help to end the inherent isolation of rural, farm living. Ultimately, with the durable design of the Model T, Ford’s cars were capable of traveling across heavily rutted farm roads (and later, of course, he went on to produce tractors). Ford’s first prototype, the Quadricycle, was not only functional but considerably more lightweight than the car designed by Charles Brady King.

As those who study the lives of innovators know, there is an important distinction between invention and innovation. “An invention is something that is new and interesting,” says Casey. “An innovation is something new and interesting that gets widely adopted. If you can’t get it widely adopted, it may be cool, but it’s not an innovation because it’s not really affecting the lives of very many people.”

When we step into the mindset of an innovator, we can now imagine Ford’s pursuit of King and his vehicle through the cobblestone streets of Detroit in a very different light. We don’t see him as an inventor chasing after another inventor’s success. We see him as an innovator who knew that what might look like failure to some is really innovation about to bloom.