Henry Ford

Biography

Henry Ford was born on a farm in Michigan on 30 July 1863. He finished his first two-cylinder car in 1892 and test-drove his Quadricycle on 4 June 1896. Two early companies — the Detroit Automobile Company of 1899 and the Henry Ford Company of 1901 — did not last; Ford Motor Company, incorporated on 16 June 1903, did.

The Model T went on sale on 1 October 1908. Ford patented its transmission in 1911, and from 1913 moving assembly lines ran through his plants. On 5 January 1914 he announced a new, much higher daily wage for qualifying workers. When the Model A replaced it in December 1927, 15,007,034 Model Ts had been built. In 1922 Ford also bought the Lincoln Motor Company.

In the 1920s Ford was associated with antisemitic publications, among them The Dearborn Independent and The International Jew. He took back the company presidency after the death of his son Edsel in 1943 and died at his Fair Lane estate in Dearborn on 7 April 1947, a year after his induction into the Automotive Hall of Fame.