Henry Ford(1863–1947)

Henry Ford was born on the family farm at Greenfield Township, Wayne County, Michigan, on the thirtieth of July 1863, eldest son of William Ford, an Irish-Protestant immigrant from County Cork who had emigrated as a child to the Michigan farmlands in 1847, and Mary Litogot, the adopted daughter of a Belgian Dutch immigrant family. He was raised on the eighty-acre Greenfield Township farm, was schooled at the local one-room schoolhouse, and at sixteen left the farm to take an apprenticeship at the James F. Flower and Brothers machine shop in Detroit. He worked across the next eight years at successive Detroit machine-shop and engineering positions, took a steam-engine service-engineer's job with the Westinghouse Engine Company through the late 1880s, and in 1891 in his twenty-eighth year joined the Edison Illuminating Company at Detroit as engineer.

He rose to Chief Engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company by 1896, met Thomas Edison personally at an Edison company convention in August 1896 in his thirty-third year and received Edison's direct encouragement to pursue the gasoline-engine automobile that Ford had been working on in his spare time. He completed his first working prototype, the Ford Quadricycle, in June 1896 at his Bagley Avenue workshop in Detroit; the prototype ran on the four-stroke gasoline engine he had built, with bicycle wheels, a tiller steering, and no reverse gear. He left the Edison Company in August 1899 to take the chief-engineer position at the Detroit Automobile Company, the first of two unsuccessful early ventures.

On the sixteenth of June 1903, in his fortieth year, he founded with eleven backers the Ford Motor Company at a rented Mack Avenue carriage works in Detroit, with twenty-eight thousand dollars in starting capital. He served as Vice President and Chief Engineer (and from 1906 as President), brought out the Model A (1903), the Models B, C, F, K, N and R across 1904 to 1907, and on the first of October 1908 introduced the Model T. The Model T was the central single industrial commercial product of the early twentieth century. Designed to be simple, robust, repairable by farm-mechanics, and priced for the working family, it sold initially at eight hundred and twenty-five dollars in 1908 and was driven down through Ford's manufacturing-cost reduction to two hundred and sixty dollars by 1925. Fifteen million Model Ts were built across the production run of October 1908 to May 1927, the longest single-model production run in American automotive history and the single-model record until the Volkswagen Beetle overtook it in 1972.

The introduction of the moving assembly line at the Highland Park plant on the seventh of January 1914 was the central single industrial-engineering innovation of the twentieth century. Ford and his manufacturing engineers (Charles Sorensen, Clarence Avery, Peter Martin and the team that became known as the Highland Park production-engineering staff) reduced the per-Model-T chassis assembly time from twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes in the static-station system to one hour and thirty-three minutes on the moving line, a productivity gain of eight times within eighteen months of the line's introduction. The technique was adopted across the next decade by every industrial manufacturer in the developed world and is the foundational method of modern mass production. He paired the manufacturing innovation with the famous Five Dollar Day announcement of the fifth of January 1914: a doubling of the standard Ford daily wage from two dollars and thirty-eight cents to five dollars, the highest industrial wage in the world at that date, on the calculation that better-paid workers would produce better-quality output and would themselves become consumers of the cars they built.

He opened the River Rouge complex at Dearborn, Michigan, in 1928, the largest single integrated industrial complex in the world (the complex took raw iron ore at one end and produced finished cars at the other across two thousand acres of factory floor), introduced the five-day work week at Ford Motor Company in 1926 (the first major American industrial employer to commit to a forty-hour week), and on the death of his only son Edsel in 1943 returned to active company management for the wartime production years 1943 to 1945. The Ford Motor Company under his leadership produced fifteen million Model Ts, the Ford GP and Ford GPW utility vehicles (the wartime Jeep), the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber production line at the Willow Run plant (one bomber per hour at the wartime peak), and the four wartime Sherman tank production lines. He retired in 1945, handed the company to his grandson Henry Ford II, and died at his Fair Lane estate at Dearborn on the seventh of April 1947 in his eighty-fourth year. The Ford Motor Company continues today as one of the leading global automotive manufacturers, has produced over four hundred and fifty million vehicles across its history, and remains under the active control of his great-grandchildren the Ford family through their special-class shareholding. The Ford name in modern industry carries the weight of the Model T, the moving assembly line and the Five Dollar Day.