Rolls-Royce History: Started by a 10-Year-Old Paperboy

Full transcript

Rolls-Royce was started by a boy who sold newspapers at ten.

His name was Henry Royce. His father's flour mill went bankrupt, and his father died when Henry was nine. So Henry went to work, selling newspapers on the street and then delivering telegrams. By the age of fifteen, he had spent just one year in school.

Henry taught himself instead. As a teenager he became an apprentice at a railway workshop, and he studied at night. By twenty-one, he had started his own small company, making electric doorbells.

Then, in nineteen oh three, he bought a used French car. He found it full of faults, so he built his own. In the spring of nineteen oh four, it worked. A friend showed it to Charles Rolls, the son of a lord, who sold French cars in London. Rolls went to meet Royce in Manchester and drove the little car. He agreed to sell every car Royce could build.

Three years later, their new car had to prove itself. They called it the Silver Ghost. It drove from London to Glasgow and back, again and again. Officials from Britain's main motoring club checked every mile. The plan was ten thousand miles. It ran so well that they kept going to fifteen thousand. That year, it was called the best car in the world.

Royce had one rule for all of it. Take the best that exists, and make it better. That is exactly what he did with a used French car.

A boy with one year of school took the best car he could find, and made it better.