The startup lessons of a mechanic who built a $24B company.
At 22, with £20 in his pocket, he founded a company worth $23.91B today.
At the age of 4, he got paid to scare birds. At 9, he got paid for delivering newspapers and telegrams. He had no formal education. At 17, he was forced to drop out of apprenticeship because his family could not afford it. He learned the mechanics of trains by working on a railroad. He taught himself about electricity, so that he could work on street lights and theater lighting. He taught himself to build tools, and to manufacture cranes. He taught himself to design and build car engines. When the opportunity arose, he then taught himself to design and build aircraft engines. He never cut corners, and never bowed down to commercial pressure to compromise quality. What mattered to him was the caliber of the product and the caliber of the people working on it. An engineer’s engineer, his machines were vehicles of perfection, symbols of enduring reliability and matchless longevity, with parts that simply didn’t wear and tear.
An inventor, a tinkerer, a pioneer, a self-taught mechanical engineer, a self-taught electrical engineer, a self-taught automotive engineer, a self-taught avionics engineer, a toolmaker, a designer, a craftsman, this man called himself a “mechanic,” to the end.
I’ve never aspired to sit in a Rolls-Royce—until the “mechanic,” Henry Royce, inspired me.
The Five Roles of Royce.
On 4 May, 1904, Charles Rolls met Henry Royce at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Of the historic meeting, Rolls said, “I have found the greatest engineer in the world.”
Royce brought tenacious perfectionism and ingenuity. Rolls brought daredevil flair and social connections. Claude Johnson (the self-titled “hyphen” in Rolls-Royce) brought marketing and business savvy. Together, the trio of Rolls, Royce, and Johnson were responsible for catapulting the brand to early and sustained stardom.
Royce was an engineering genius—obsessive in his work ethic, demanding of himself and others, and sweating every little detail of his creations.
I am inspired by the origins, the ideals, and the inner drive of Henry Royce. Here’s what I’ve taken away from reading about his life.
- Do whatever it takes to keep the lights on. In the early struggling years of the company (as with any company), Royce kept all of his machines running. With his own hands. Unable to count on his workers to show up, he showed up for himself and his company. He said, “For many years I worked hard to keep the company going through its very difficult days of pioneering, personally keeping our few machine tools working on Saturday afternoons when men did not wish to work.” His company was in a precarious financial position in its early difficult years, and so he kept diversifying. He manufactured street lights, dynamos, winches, and cranes, and sold them to cotton mills, shipping, and other industries.
- Be fanatical about good engineering. Royce had an uncanny ability to observe machines and phenomena, to get to the heart of these machines ticked, and to engineer a way to make those machines even better. He famously said, “Take the best that exists and make it better.” He didn’t invent the automobile, the engine, the chassis, the valves, or the transmission mechanism. But, he studied the components of the contemporary cars on the market at the time, and understood their engineering weaknesses and limitations. He attacked each of these problems methodically by understanding them down to their inner workings. He then strived to improve and re-design every automotive part with meticulous, personal attention to detail and mechanical beauty, so that these re-designed parts could be assembled into the perfect vehicle. His careful, painstaking way of undertaking engineering design, by perfecting each part into an overall excellent whole, was light years ahead of his time. He knew his products, and he knew every part of the why and the how of his products.
- Make the user feel the difference. At the time, cars came with their rattling engines that were considered to be an unavoidable part of their operation. Not to Henry Royce. He considered noise to be a weakness, and he sought to eliminate every source of the unnerving vibrations and jangling exhibited by cars. Part by part, he re-engineering each car part to eliminate noise, so that the result was a car whose interior felt like the reverent silence of a cathedral. The driving experience was a marvelous and unbelievable contrast to the cars of the time. This silent running of a vehicle impressed drivers and journalists the most. In his advertising copy for Rolls-Royce, David Ogilvy touted, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”
- Pick a product, and focus. With the explosive demand for cars, both within the U.K. and overseas, Royce could have easily manufactured dozens of different models at different price-points for different segments of consumers. Again, his engineering spirit shows. He didn’t want to dilute his attention. Early into their foray into the automotive market, the company made the critical decision to go with a one-model approach. This was in sharp contrast to his competitors at the time. In a world full of watered-down options, Royce sought to concentrate on bringing one perfect model to the market, instead of spreading himself thin and compromising his quest. This one-perfect-model approach produced the legendary Silver Ghost that set Rolls-Royce apart and that cemented its reputation as the ultimate luxury car.
- Build things to last. Royce sought to engineer machines that lasted. He wanted to build machines whose parts didn’t need subsequent nursing or replacement. His standards weren’t just high. His standards were those of an idealist, seeking longevity and matchless reliability, and he pushed himself and his engineers to achieve them. Royce stated, “The quality will remain long after the price is forgotten.”.
Royce ran long, continuous experiments to verify the functionality of his many research prototypes, to evaluate their reliability, to remedy any faults, and to make certain of their performance before he approved their release into large-scale manufacture. He designed components in his head, put them down on paper, and sent them off to be built by his technicians, and would often re-design them after he held them in his hands. Even on his death-bed, he was busy dashing off a component design to the lab. Royce field-tested in the lab before field-testing in the field. He designed a “bumping machine,” that produced an accelerated-aging test for cars, by simulating the effect of thousands of miles of road in the space of a few days in the lab. Of testing his creations, Royce wrote, “We do not believe that it is possible to test them to destruction, but we should very much like to do so, if any satisfactory means can be found of repeating the load thousands of times.” His testing instructions were so hallowed that they were captured in The Rolls-Royce Bible, a set of instructional company memos authored by Royce, and compiled to serve as an example to Rolls-Royce engineers for all time.
Sir Henry Royce died on 22 April, 1933, and his passing was noted by Hugo Massac Buist in the London Morning Post.
“Sir Henry Royce, the man who gave the world not only a motor-car, but also a new word to express superlative excellence, died on Saturday after a lifetime spent in the pursuit of an ideal. Mechanical perfection was that ideal, and Sir Henry Royce allowed nothing to stand in the way of its attainment. When it came to a point in design, whether of motor-car or aero-engine, his sole criterion was merit.”
Today, we use the phrase, “the Rolls-Royce of something,” to refer to “the highest-quality example of a particular type of product.” It denotes the magic of a gold standard — the gold standard—of that type of product.
I want to sink into the seats of a Rolls-Royce someday and to be enveloped in its cathedral of silence, not for the trappings of luxury, but to be moved by the peerless spirit of Henry Royce — the Rolls-Royce of engineers.
