The Ford Model T and its Hungarian inventors

József Galamb, along with Jenő Farkas, was a Hungarian engineer who got the chance of working for Henry Ford on his Model T, the most influential Ford Model.

Galamb was born in Makó, a Hungarian town famous for its onions. He received his diploma in mechanical engineering at the Budapest Industrial Technology Engineering Course, (the predecessor of the present-day Óbuda University Bánki Donát Polytechnical College) in 1899. Then he started working at the Steel Engineering Factory in Diósgyőr as a draftsman. He served one year in military service, and afterwards, Galamb worked at the Hungarian Automobile Co., where he won a postgraduate scholarship to Germany, where he ended up at Adler assembling engines.

After finishing his services at the navy, he went to see the world;

he travelled to Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen.

In 1903 he worked in many German cities as a skilled worker, he got the best education at Adler in Frankfurt. He was hired to assemble automotive engines in a process in which each engine was built completely by one man.

When he found out about the 1904 American Auto World Fair in St. Louis, he decided to travel there.

He used his savings to travel to America by ship in October 1903.

After two months in New York, he found employment as a toolmaker at the Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh. Although he planned to go back to Germany in 1904, instead, as his English was getting better, and he wanted to get into the car industry, he joined the Stearns Automobile Company in Cleveland as a carburettor maker.

He visited a friend in Detroit, and eventually, he decided to settle down there. Galamb applied for work at the Silent Northern plant, the reorganised Ford-Cadillac plant and the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, but, at the same time, a colleague from Germany offered him a job at his factory. Cadillac also called him in for a practical test in order to get an $18 job, but by that time, Henry Ford got him for $20.