> HENRY FORD

Overview

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century industry. He did not invent the automobile, but he made it affordable, reliable, and central to modern life. By reorganizing the factory floor around the moving assembly line and paying his workers high enough wages to buy their own cars, Ford helped create the consumer economy that defined the United States and much of the world.

Early Life

Ford was born in 1863 on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, the eldest of six children. He disliked farm labor but was fascinated by machines from childhood, famously taking apart and reassembling pocket watches for neighbors as a teenager. At sixteen he left home for Detroit to apprentice as a machinist, and by his late twenties he was a senior engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, where he developed a friendship with Thomas Edison. In his spare time he built his first gasoline-powered vehicle, the Quadricycle, which he completed in 1896.

The Model T and Assembly Line

After two failed ventures, Ford co-founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Five years later he introduced the Model T, a sturdy, simple car priced far below its competitors. Demand quickly outstripped his factories' capacity. In 1913 Ford and his engineers installed a moving assembly line at the Highland Park plant, reducing the time needed to build a Model T from more than twelve hours to about ninety minutes. In 1914 he stunned American industry by offering workers five dollars a day — roughly double the prevailing wage — in exchange for accepting strict discipline and the relentless pace of the line. By the early 1920s, more than half the automobiles on the planet were Model Ts.

Legacy

Ford's methods, later known as Fordism, influenced manufacturing everywhere, from Soviet tractor factories to postwar Japanese carmakers. His career also had troubling chapters: he published antisemitic tracts in the 1920s that drew international condemnation and were later cited approvingly by the Nazi regime. He lived long enough to see the company he founded pass to his grandson, and he died in 1947. Today the Ford Motor Company remains a global manufacturer, and the assembly line Ford refined is still the backbone of mass production.

Did You Know?

• Ford's first car, the Quadricycle, was too wide to fit through his workshop door, so he knocked the wall out.
• The Model T was produced for nineteen years with relatively few design changes.
• Ford pioneered the forty-hour, five-day workweek in 1926.
• He collected historical buildings and relocated them to his Greenfield Village museum in Michigan.