Henry Ford

Henry Ford.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was a US automobile engineer and businessman who founded the Ford Motor Company and introduced modern mass production using the moving assembly line. Having experimented with gasoline-powered automobiles for a dozen years, he came to understand the need for a widely affordable and rugged automobile to suit the US market. The 1908 Model T Ford fit this need, and sales escalated. To facilitate more efficient production, managers at Ford Motor Company innovated the moving assembly line method of mass production and paid high wages to workers, which became known as "Fordism." An antagonist of big finance and monopolies, Ford earned the respect of common folk throughout the US, who flocked to buy his cars. His hatred of corporate control and high finance led him to turn the Ford Motor Company into a sole proprietorship, an anomaly in the era of modern large-scale business enterprise. He also made Ford Motor Company a vertically integrated company.

Throughout his life, Ford was active in many side affairs such as international peace, historic preservation, tractor and aircraft manufacture, politics, chemical research, race relations, housing construction, railroads, shipping, and publishing. He was vehemently opposed to outside interference in his business affairs whether it came from bondholders, minority stockholders, labor unions, or the US government. As such he violently opposed the organization of the United Auto Workers and refused to participate in New Deal economic recovery programs such as the National Recovery Administration.

In later life, Ford suffered at least two strokes and was incapacitated from about 1941. His son, Edsel B. Ford nominally headed the company as president from 1918 until his death in 1943, but was routinely undermined by his father as CEO. Ford passed management of the company to his grandson Henry Ford II in 1945. He died in 1947 leaving nearly all of his wealth to the Ford Foundation.