Flashback, August 1896: Henry Ford Meets Thomas Edison

When the obsessed 33-year-old tinkerer Henry Ford met Thomas Edison for the first time in mid-August 1896, he found encouragement from the older businessman for his gas-powered enterprise—planting the seeds for friendship that lasted to the death of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Perhaps the most famous public instance of their interaction was their 1921 road trip, when they were joined for part of the way by President Warren Harding—an event depicted in Mark St. Germain’s 1995 play, Camping with Henry and Tom.

But I became far more fascinated by their mutual admiration society—and each man did to create and maintain it—while reading Edmund Morris’ 2019 biography Edison.

The occasion for their first encounter was the annual meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, an organization founded by Thomas Edison and associates in 1885 to encourage research and the exchange of technical information, ideas and solutions.

Already employed for the last five years at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Ford first approached his hero surreptitiously, snapping a picture of the straw-hatted inventor asleep on the porch of the meeting’s venue, the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach (now the location of the Kingsborough Community College’s Marine and Academic Center Building).

Later that night, he seized his chance for a more open encounter as more than 40 business executives, drinking and puffing cigars inside at a banquet, were conferring about the possibility of electric-powered vehicles. This represented a natural new area of interest for Edison, who was already changing society with, among other innovations, the electric light bulb and the electric power plant.

At one point Alex Dow from Detroit Edison pointed out Ford, his chief engineer, to the great man, and said, “There’s a young fellow who has made a gas car.”

Two months, a drive through the streets of Detroit with his new "Quadricycle" had already demonstrated Ford’s gift for self-promotion. He further evidenced it as he sat by and laid out his plan to the hearing-impaired Edison.

Despite his own interest in a storage battery for horseless carriages, Edison recognized the practical of the proposal he was hearing, telling Ford, “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I see a great future.”

It wasn’t until 1912, though, that their friendship became closer, when Ford, flush with his burgeoning success with the “Model T,” invested $1.2 million into the Edison Storage Battery Co. as a potential triggering device for automobile self-starters.

A few years later, Edison invited him down for a visit to his Fort Myers, FL, winter home, and for more than a decade the two went off on cross-country auto excursions, usually in the company of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and/or the naturalist John Burroughs.

What drew the two men into a closer friendship. The most obvious commonality, present in their first encounter, was a Midwestern plain-speaking style. But Morris also points to their “shared disdain for Ivy Leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new.”

They differed in subtle ways in their relationships with families, and more significantly in how they viewed politics.

While Edison maintained a complex, often demanding, even bumpy relationship with his sons, Ford was positively abusive to Edsel, publicly humiliating his ideas in front of other employees and subjecting him to so much stress that he suffered for years from severe ulcers before finally dying from stomach cancer at age 49.

And, while the workaholic Edison often neglected his two wives (and even disclaimed knowing anything about women at all), Ford, many biographers believe, engaged in adultery with his secretary, a relationship that may have resulted in a son out of wedlock.

Furthermore, although Edison expressed the sporadic anti-semitic remark, he employed Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities in his labs. 

In contrast, Ford was not content to vent virulent attitudes on camping trips with Edison and other friends, but through distributed a paper he bought, the Dearborn Independent, circulated through his company’s dealership a 91-part series based on the vicious and fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ford passed along this material to his friend, Edison sent back a note acknowledging the gift, Morris notes, while being careful not to endorse its views.

From the mid-1920s on, even as many ordinary Americans began to eye Ford more critically than when he had been a rising folk hero, the auto magnate led the nationwide celebration for Edison as the grand old man of American inventive genius. In October 1929, he and President Herbert Hoover attended "Light's Golden Jubilee," a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Edison's incandescent lamp.

Ford paid homage to his friend that day by announcing the Thomas Edison Institute, an initiative in which he bought, dismantled, and reassembled hundreds of historic buildings and artifacts—including, notably, the legendary Menlo Park lab complex.  

Now Greenfield Village, it continues to give tourists and students, together with the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a vivid sense of the worlds that these two industrial giants left behind and created.