Horace Elgin Dodge Sr. (May 17, 1868 – December 10, 1920) was an American automobile manufacturing pioneer and co-founder of Dodge Brothers Company.
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Early years and business
He was born in Niles, Michigan, on May 17, 1868. His father owned a foundry and machine shop. Horace Dodge and his elder brother John Francis Dodge were inseparable as children and as adults. The pair was noted for personal initiative and once built a working high-wheel bicycle from scrap materials.
In 1886, the Dodge brothers moved to Detroit, Michigan, where they took jobs at Murphy Boiler Works, a boilermaker plant owned by a marine engineer named Thomas Murphy. In 1894, they went to work as machinists at the Canadian Typograph Company across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.
In 1896, Horace Dodge married Anna Thompson in Windsor, Ohio. She was a Scottish immigrant born in Dundee and came from a working class family. The couple had a son, Horace Jr., and a daughter, Delphine. Thompson later married actor Hugh Dillman after the death of Dodge.
While brother John Dodge was the sales-oriented managerial type, Horace was a gifted mechanic and inveterate tinkerer. He invented the first dirt-proof ball bearing. In 1897, John arranged a deal for them to join with a third-party investor to manufacture bicycles. Within a few years, they sold the business and, in 1901, used the proceeds of the sale to set up their own machine shop in Detroit. During their first year in business, the Dodge brothers' company began making parts for the automobile industry. This company secured a contract to produce transmissions for Oldsmobile and for the newly chartered Ford Motor Company.