From Jalopnik:
Henry Ford is practically revered as the patron saint of American
cars, and the Model T is his holy text. But it wouldn’t have happened if
not for the life, and possibly the death, of two of his biggest rivals:
the Dodge brothers. And if it weren’t for a small complication, such as
the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, our cars might look very
different today.
On Nov. 1, 1916, Henry Ford’s son Edsel
married Eleanor Clay in the home owned by the department store tycoon
J.L. Hudson. It was a small, cozy informal affair
filled with close friends who happened to be members of Detroit’s
elite. This guest list included a pair of fiery, hard-drinking redheaded
brothers named John and Horace Dodge.
The Dodge Brothers weren’t always so welcome in polite society. Both
Horace and John were incredibly prolific drunks and public
rabble-rousers. Horace once started a brawl in a bar and then threatened
to kill the owner of the newspaper that reported it. John knocked a man
out cold on the street when the passerby mocked him for being unable to
crank-start his Ford. And when a Grosse Pointe country club denied John
membership, he built a huge mansion directly across the street with a
12-car garage. They were loud and uncouth, even for a loud, uncouth town
like turn-of-the-century Detroit.
The brothers came up from
working class roots, the sons of a machinist and seamstress, but by the
time the brothers attended Edsel Ford’s wedding they were incredibly
wealthy men with the second most successful car company in America in
their own name—and a 10 percent stake in the Ford Motor Company. On that
chilly joyous day in Detroit, John and Horace celebrated the wedding of
the heir-apparent with Henry Ford and his family.
The very next day, they sued him.
Building a Ford, the Dodge Way
The brothers started a
machinist shop in Detroit in 1900. Their first major job was building
transmissions for Ransom Olds, founder of Oldsmobile. Then in 1903 John
and Horace took a chance on a well-known engineer, entrepreneur and
failure at both named Henry Ford. Duds like the Ford’s Quadricycle and the Detroit Automobile Company had marked Ford as a washout and a loser.
The
Dodges weren’t just auto parts suppliers and stakeholders in Ford’s
businesses; in 1903 they were the only ones willing to do business with
Ford at all.
It was a risky deal, but a canny one befitting of
these two sets of hardheads. Nobody else would make it, but nobody else
succeeded like they did, either.
Every single component of the original, early 1900s Model A was made
by the Dodges, while Ford assembled the cars at his plant on Mack Ave.
(This was before Ford set up his famous moving assembly line, which
wouldn’t enter production until 1913, and before the Dodges made their
own cars.) The Dodges gave up all of their other contracts to focus
solely on the Ford business. Now their fates were tied together.
The
brothers made sure Ford paid dearly for their time and energy. They
were granted a 10 percent stake in Ford Motor Company, and would be the
proud owners of the entirety of its assets should the company fail....
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