Henry Ford Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, near Detroit, Michigan on a farm in Greenfield Township.

In 1879, at the age of sixteen, he left home to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. After three years, he returned to the family farm, where he became an expert at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He was later hired by Westinghouse Company to service their steam engines. While working at the company, Ford also studied bookkeeping at Goldsmith, Bryant & Stratton Business College in Detroit. In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company and two years later he was promoted to Chief Engineer, so he had enough time and money to do what he really loved: personal experiments on gasoline engines. He ended up creating a vehicle which he named the Ford Quadricycle. In 1896, he met Thomas Edison, and he encouraged him so much that Ford built a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. He chose to leave the Edison Company and he founded the Detroit Automobile Company on August 5, 1899. Unfortunately, the cars made werent the quality or the price Ford envisioned and the company flopped in January 1901. After an upsetting loss of his company, good came. Ford designed, built, and successfully raced a 26-horsepower automobile in October. With this success, Stockholders in the Detroit Automobile Company formed the Henry Ford Company on November 30, 1901, with Ford as chief engineer. But with more success came bad luck; Ford left the company in 1902. The company was renamed the Cadillac Automobile Company, a popular car manufacturer today. Ford continued working in the racing aspect of cars, but his big break was soon on the rise. The Ford Motor Company was established on June 16, 1903. He was the face of cars racing in the Indianapolis 500 until 1908. On October 1, the famous Model T was introduced. It was nothing like other vehicles on the very small market. Its steering wheel was on the left side, which many companies eventually mimicked. The entire engine, suspension, and transmission were completely revamped. The car was very straightforward to drive, and it was fast and cheap to repair. The base price for a Model T was $850 when it first came out. It did so well on the market that most Americans were expected to learn how to drive it. As if creating the most astounding invention of their time, Ford also introduced something that completely changed the way companies all over the world made product: the assembly line. He introduced the assembly line in 1913, which helped rapidly increase production. It increased so much in fact that sales passed 250,000 in 1914. By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's and the final total production was 15,007,034. But as all trends, the Model T was getting out of style, so Ford introduced the Model A in December 1927, and it sold around 4 million units. Ford died in 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 83 and was buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit. The Model T and assembly line were not Fords only inventions, but the

most remembered. One of the most misconstrued facts about Ford is that he invented the automobile in general. This is false, yet he might as well have, he changed the face of the car industry for the rest of time.

Sources: The Henry Ford: The Life of Henry Ford http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/hf/ Henry Ford Biography http://inventors.about.com/od/fstartinventors/a/HenryFord.htm