YOUNG HENRY FORD WAS FIRED AND EXACTS SOME RETRIBUTION YEARS LATER

It was Henry's company, all right. It even bore his name. But in the business world, your investors own you. So, Henry's investors owned him. 

There were five of them, in fact, each having put up ten thousand dollars to get Henry's company started. "You're the designer," they told him. "You're the expert." In return for his designs and expertise, his backers awarded him a thousand shares of his own company's stock. Then, they stepped back and awaited results.

But here was the problem: everywhere Henry had gone in the past, he had a habit of working on his own personal projects during company time. Now, he was doing it again. The company had his own name on it, but as before, he was caught conducting personal business when he was supposed to be attending to corporate affairs.

Henry's investors, deeply concerned for the security of their investment, sought the advice of a much-respected local manufacturer named Leland. Mr. Leland agreed to visit Henry's company, assess the situation, and make a recommendation. And he did. The bottom-line result was that Henry was forced out of his own business.

If you think it's complicated up to here, it's going to get more so. But stay with me.

His backers, after forcing him out, gave Henry a $900 cash settlement on the condition that his designs stayed with the firm. Then, they showed him the door. The company was promptly renamed, and that, it seemed, would have been that.

But Henry, stung by this bitter setback, was nevertheless more determined than ever to succeed in his chosen field—the fledgling automobile industry. Six years later, in 1908, he presented to the American public the car that made him famous: the Model T.

Yes, of course. Henry was Henry Ford.

But this is the rest of the story.

Ford's first automobile company—the Henry Ford Company, the one he lost in 1902—continued to operate based on his own automotive blueprints. In other words, they kept making Ford cars, but they didn't call them Fords. One of the leading figures of that very company was Mr. Leland—Henry Leland—the Detroit manufacturer who had helped to oust Ford in the first place.

Well, Leland eventually left that corporation and started one of his own: the Lincoln Motor Company. But late in 1921, The Lincoln Motor Company filed for bankruptcy. Nobody wanted to bid on the assets.

Except, that's right—nobody wanted them except Henry Ford.

And there's something else you may have guessed: after acquiring The Lincoln Motor Company, Ford had its founder, Henry Leland, voted out and—quite rudely—evicted from the premises, personal belongings and all. Fair play, Ford decided; that was the way he himself had been treated by Leland.

Yet the poetic turnaround did not stop there.

You see, when Ford's early backers, in league with Henry Leland, had bounced him out of his company in 1902, they kept his automotive designs but changed the name. The Henry Ford Company was reborn as the Cadillac Automobile Company.

So now you see: the most prestigious Ford product, the Lincoln, came from the man who built the first Cadillac. But the first Cadillac was really a Ford.

And now you know… the rest of the story.