Ford, USA  

Ford, USA  

The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 by Henry Ford and eleven partners in Detroit, Michigan: their intention was to start a serial production of a passenger car invented by Ford and since 1893 gradually tested and improved by him.

The first big success of the company came in 1908, when it started with the serial production of Ford Model T, which was then made until 1927. In 1905, Ford decided to venture also in tractor production and created a small team to develop a prototype, which was completed two years later. His partners, however, did not put their faith in the tractor programme, which is why Henry Ford in 1915 founded in Dearborn, Michigan, a joint-stock company Henry Ford and Son Inc., which was registered two year later. In 1919, Ford had bought out his shareholders and took over the management of both of his factories personally. One year later, he established a separate Ford and Son company, which made the first tractors already in 1915 but serial production started only in 1918.

These tractors were not called Ford like the automobiles: they were called Fordson, since the Ford brand was already in existence. (It was used by the factory of Paul Ford in Minneapolis, where tractors were also made in 1915–1918, but after Fordsons came on the market, this company went bankrupt.) The first tractors made by Ford and Son were made with various spare parts for the Model T passenger car. This approach was at that time used not only by Henry Ford but also other producers in the United States and Great Britain, including Henry Ferguson, who had a business representation for the Waterloo Boy tractor. Immediately after the First World War, Fordson tractors were in large numbers supplied to England and other European countries. For the Germans, however, this was quite unpalatable, although technical parameters spoke in Fordsons’ favour and these tractors cost just one-third of German-made ones. Fordsons started to make inroads into the German market only after mid-1920. Over time, they became dominant and conquered a larger share of the market than German-made machines.

In 1922, Ford had bought the England-based Lincoln Motor Company. In the second half of the 1920s, branches of the Ford Motor Company had opened first in Berlin and later also in Cologne. In 1928, Ford’s mother factory had closed but production started in the following year in the Irish Cork and in 1933 in the English town of Dagenham. One year after that, Ford introduced a new Model N and, in 1939, a Model 9A with Henry Fergusson’s hydraulic system and three-point attachment.

In 1959, Ford developed a new Dextra type. In 1962, the Ford Company had created a specialised tractor division, which focused on the development of farming machinery. In the 1960s, Ford had opened two new factories, one in Basildon, England, and one in Antwerp, Belgium, where new series 2000, 4000, and 6000 were produced. The trademark red-and-grey company colours were changed to the current white-and-blue, and the tractors were now labelled Ford instead of Fordson. 

In 1982, Ford developed a new tractor generation Ford 10 Series with three- or four-cylinder engines and output of 30–90hp. In 1983, it introduced to the market tractors with six-cylinder turbo engines and power of 132 and 186hp.