Ford, Henry (1863–1947)

The Ford plant in Detroit, Michigan, USA, in the early 1900s. Henry Ford produced the first mass-market car, the Model T, selling 15 million between 1908 and 1927.

In this 1910 photograph, a man demonstrates the ease with which the wheel of a Model T Ford motor car could be changed. Ford's early cars had to be able to cope with rough road conditions and the tyres would often need to be mended.

Henry Ford, Tex Rickard, and Henry's son Edsel Ford, standing in front of a Model A Ford. This photograph was taken in Madison Square Garden in New York, USA, in 1927, the year in which the first Model A rolling prototype was produced. It was not until 1928 that the Model A was commercially manufactured, and replaced the original Model T Ford.

US car manufacturer. He built his first car in 1896 and founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with 11 investors. Ford held 25.5% of the stock, and it was three years before he took a controlling interest and was named president. His first car, the Model A, was sold in 1903. He was a pioneer of large-scale manufacture and his Model T (1908–27) was the first car to be constructed solely by assembly-line methods; 15 million had been sold by the time production ceased. Ford's innovative policies, such as a daily minimum wage and a five-day working week, revolutionized employment practices, but he staunchly opposed and impeded the introduction of trade unions.

Ford launched the Model T (or ‘Tin Lizzie’) in 1908. Having disagreed with his backers that only cars for the rich were profitable, he marketed it as a reasonably priced and efficient car. To meet growing demand, he opened the Highland Park factory in 1910 and in 1913 developed a moving assembly line, which drastically reduced production time for a car to 93 minutes. He set up a dealer franchise system to sell and service cars and by the 1920s there were 7,000 Ford dealers across the USA. In 1914 Ford introduced his minimum wage scheme and reduced the working shifts by an hour to increase productivity. By 1927 he had built a huge, self-sufficient industrial facility on the River Rouge at Dearborn, Michigan, employing over 100,000 staff.

Ford was the eldest of six children born to a farming family in Dearborn. His father was Irish and had emigrated to the USA in 1847 during the potato famine. Disliking farming, the young Ford was apprenticed in 1880 to a machinist in Detroit until he returned home three years later to work part-time for the Westinghouse Engine Company. On his father's farm he experimented in the manufacture of a steam tractor and set up a workshop to experiment with horseless carriages.

Ford married Clara Bryant, the daughter of an Irish immigrant, in 1888 and returned to Detroit in 1891 to join the Edison Illuminating Company, where he was promoted to chief engineer. He first met US inventor Thomas Alva Edison at a convention, and the two later became close friends. With time and money to experiment, he produced the Quadricycle (a gas-powered vehicle with a buggy frame mounted on four bicycle wheels) in 1896. In 1899 he became a partner in the newly formed Detroit Automobile Company and in 1901 began the Henry Ford Company that later became the Cadillac Motor Company. After these two unsuccessful attempts, he incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. While at the Detroit Automobile Company he also built and drove racing cars. Victory in a car race at Grosse Point, Michigan, in 1901 brought him the publicity he sought, and in 1904 he drove his four-cylindered car ‘999’ to a world record of 39.4 seconds for 1 mi/1.6 km over the ice on Lake St Clair.

The arrival of the Model T in 1908 ushered in the motor age. Whereas the automobile had previously been a luxury item for the rich, it was now affordable to ordinary people. In its 19 years on the market, production of the Model T accounted for half of the world output in automobiles, with over 16 million sold.

In 1917 Ford produced the Fordson farm tractor, the world's first mass-produced tractor, which revolutionized agricultural mechanization. The name combined those of Ford and his only son, Edsel Ford (1893–1943). The same year saw the first truck, the Model TT, introduced. He also moved into the civil aviation business, developing the Tri-Motor airplane. He did not bring out a new car design until the Model A (renamed for his first cars), an improved version of the Model T, appeared in 1927. By then Ford, who famously decreed that customers could ‘choose any colour provided it was black’, was facing competition from General Motors, run by Alfred Sloan. Ford's management style was autocratic, and although he had appointed his son as company president in 1919, he remained in tight control. However, having resisted the first attempts to unionize workers at Ford plants in 1933, he finally signed a contract with the United Auto Workers when faced with a general strike in 1941.

Having failed to respond to consumer demand for more style and innovative features in his cars, Ford fell from the world's largest automobile manufacturer to number three in the USA by 1936.

Ford was politically active and a pacifist; he opposed US intervention in both World Wars and promoted his own anti-Semitic views. In 1918 he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate, and in 1923 he considered running for the presidency, but later announced his refusal to stand against Calvin Coolidge. He had made Edsel president of the company in 1919, and in 1936 the two men founded the philanthropic Ford Foundation. When Edsel died in 1943, Henry Ford returned as president, only retiring in 1945 at the age of 82 from the company, then valued at over $1 billion. His grandson, Henry Ford II, then became president.