How Henry F o r d M a d e the Ame r i c a n Car Henry Ford was born near Dearborn Michigan U S in July 1863 As a boy he loved to play with watches clocks and machines good experience for the person who would build the first affordable car Cars had already been built in Europe when Ford experimented EA R C H LIG S H T with his first vehicle in 1899 It had wheels like a bicycle’s and a gasoline-powered engine that made it move It was called a Quadricycle and had only two speeds and no reverse Within four years Ford had started the Ford Motor Company His ideas about making automobiles would change history Carmakers at the time used parts others had made and put True or false Henry Ford built the very first automobile them all together Ford’s company made each and every part that went into its cars What’s more the company made sure that each kind of part was exactly the same In 1908 Ford introduced the Model T This car worked well and was not costly It was a big success but the company couldn’t make them quickly enough to satisfy Henry Ford In 1913 he started a large factory that made use of his most important idea the assembly line Instead of having workers go from car to car the cars moved slowly down a line while workers stood in place adding parts to them Each worker added a different part until a whole car was put together This meant more autos could be built more quickly at a lower cost By 1918 half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts Ford’s company had become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world And Ford had revolutionized the process of manufacturing LEARN MORE READ THESE ARTICLES AIRPLANES OIL TRANSPORTATION D I D YO U K N O W is reported to have once said that his customers could get a Henry Ford ike as in any color they Model T i t s b l a c k long as l 8
AUTOMOBILES Henry Ford’s first car was the Quadricycle seen here with Ford driving It had only two forward speeds and could not back up Underwood Underwood Corbis Gottlieb Daimler a German gets credit for building the very first Answer FALSE Henry Ford built the first inexpensiveautomobile automobile 9
S EA R C H LIG H T What modern machine’s name sounds a lot like ornithopter the flapping-wing machine that people tried to fly 10
AIRPLANES The FirstFlights From the earliest times people wanted to fly but no one knew how Some people thought it would help if their arms were more like bird wings So they strapped large feathery wings to their arms Not one left the ground A few even tried machines with flapping wings called ornithopters These didn’t work either DID YOU KNOW In 1986 Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager made the first nonstop round-the world flight in an airplane They did the whole trip without refueling Then in 1799 a scientist named George Cayley wrote a book and drew pictures explaining how birds use their wings and the speed of the wind to fly About a hundred years later two American brothers named Orville and Wilbur Wright read Cayley’s book Although they were bicycle makers they decided to build a flying machine The Wright brothers machine Flyer I had the strong light wings of a glider a gasoline-powered engine and two propellers Then from a list of places where strong winds blow they selected the Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk North Carolina U S as the site of their experiment In 1903 Orville lying flat on the lower wing of Flyer I flew a distance of 120 feet That first flight lasted only 12 seconds The next year the Wrights managed to fly their second aeroplane Flyer II nearly 3 miles over a period of 5 minutes and 4 seconds Soon Glenn Curtiss another bicycle maker made a faster airplane called the 1909 type Not long after that Louis Blériot from France did something no one had tried before He flew his plane across the English Channel He was the first man to fly across the sea The age of flight had begun LEARN MORE READ THESE ARTICLES AUTOMOBILES SHIPS WIND POWER The Wright brothers had read that wind was very important for flying That’s why they chose the windy hill in North Carolina Bettmann Corbis An ornithopter’s means bird wing words means wing A helicopter’s name means whirling wing Answer How about the helicopter The opter part of both 11
