e was a farm boy, born near what is today Dearborn, Mich. As a young man, he worked in the machine shops of Detroit, where he first saw an internal combustion engine. And it became his dream to build a "farm locomotive," a machine to ease the harvesting burden for farmers like his father. So in 1907, Henry Ford built his first tractor prototype, which later led to the Fordson tractor, a hit both in the U.S. and in Soviet Russia. Ford also decided to build "a motor car for the great multitude," as he put it when he introduced the Model T in 1908. It would be "large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for...so low in price that no man making a good salary [would] be unable to own one." Ford thus forever altered both the course of industry and popular culture in America.

     Ford was not the first to come up with a tractor—or a car. Many mechanics were tinkering with "horseless carriages," and German Karl Benz introduced the first four-wheel cars in 1890. Ford triumphed because he figured out how to make autos efficiently, and he created a market for them by paying his workers a living wage and pricing his cars cheaply.

     Ford possessed both business acumen and engineering ability. According to his biographer, Allan Nevins, Ford could tell at a glance which in a line of carburetors was faulty and quickly figure out ways to simplify car parts. But even though he revolutionized industry with the assembly line, he could also be remarkably slow to shift gears when planning business strategy: General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan stole a march on him in the 1920s by offering various models through divisions that operated in a decentralized fashion. In 1927, Ford had to scramble and retool at the giant River Rouge plant in Dearborn to recover sales.

     Ford was complicated—at once a pacifist, a populist, and an autocrat. He crossed swords with financiers on Wall Street, tussled with opponents in court, and investigated his workers' home lives—ostensibly for their benefit—through Ford Motor's "Sociological Department." As his fame and fortune grew, he dabbled in politics, running unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1918 and contemplating a Presidential run a few years later. He shocked friends by publishing an anti-Semitic diatribe in 1920.

     In his lifetime, Ford was both lionized and vilified. In the end, he should be credited with inventing the assembly line and envisioning the mass market, two key innovations of the 20th century. His friend Thomas Edison called the assembly line a "radical invention" that might one day be applied to nearly every business. "Let the public throw bouquets at inventors," wrote Edison, "and in time we will all be happy."

Related Links
Ford Cars, 1903 - 1917
Featuring 1917 silent film of assembly line workers, the Model A and the Model T (TRT: 2:57 min.)

Henry Ford
Featuring silent film of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford posing with the quadricycle, 1945 (TRT: 1:58 min.)