Henry Ford

His father gave him a pocket watch in 1875, when he was 12, and the same year he watched a Nichols and Shepard road engine move under its own steam. By 15 he had taken apart and reassembled the timepieces of half the neighborhood. His mother, Mary Litogot, herself an orphan raised by neighbors, died in 1876. The farm never held him afterward. He wrote later that he had never loved it, that it was the mother on the farm he loved. He finished eighth grade in a one-room school and never went to high school. In 1879 he went to Detroit and apprenticed as a machinist. He married Clara Bryant in 1888 and by 1893 was chief engineer at Edison Illuminating.

He built the Quadricycle in a shed and ran it through Detroit on June 4, 1896. Two companies then failed under him: the Detroit Automobile Company dissolved in January 1901, and the one carrying his own name became Cadillac after he walked out in 1902. Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903 on 28,000 dollars from friends and neighbors, was the third attempt. What that company did to work, wages and the automobile is BriefHistory's territory. What is left over is a man who could not read a blueprint and would not be contradicted.

Ford handed his only son Edsel the company presidency in December 1918 and then spent 25 years reversing his decisions. He kept Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, in charge of a Service Department that spied on employees and broke up organizing. On March 7, 1932, Dearborn police and Ford security fired on unemployed men marching to the Rouge and killed five. On May 26, 1937, Bennett's men beat Walter Reuther and other organizers on an overpass at the plant, and the photographs ran everywhere the next morning. Ford was the last Detroit manufacturer to recognize the union, and he came close to breaking up the company rather than sign, until Clara told him she would leave him if he did. Edsel died of cancer in May 1943, at 49.

In 1945 Clara and Edsel's widow Eleanor held three-quarters of the stock and told him to give the company to his grandson or they would sell. He gave in, and Henry Ford II fired Bennett on his first day. Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Fair Lane on April 7, 1947, and as many as 5,000 people an hour filed past the casket at Greenfield Village. Most of the fortune went to the Ford Foundation, which became one of the largest philanthropies in the world. His name is still on the company, the museum and the village. The scholarly verdict has never settled, and the record that will not go away is the one he printed himself.

Henry Ford's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ford Quadricycle invention
  His first running machine, driven through Detroit on June 4 1896
• Ford Motor Company company
  Started with 28,000 dollars from friends and neighbors 1903
• Ford River Rouge Complex building
  Integrated to the point of making its own steel 1928
• Greenfield Village and the Edison Institute building
  His museum of the world the automobile displaced 1929
• Ford Foundation company
  Received most of his estate in 1947 1936
• Willow Run bomber plant building
  9,000 B-24s, half of every one built 1941

• 1875 aged ~12 Gets a pocket watch and sees a road engine move without horses He was 12, and named both as the events that decided him.
• 1876 aged ~13 His mother dies
• April 11, 1888 aged 24 Marries Clara Jane Bryant
• June 4, 1896 aged 32 Test-drives the Quadricycle through Detroit
• January 1901 aged 37 The Detroit Automobile Company is dissolved His second company became Cadillac after he left it in 1902.
• 1903 aged ~40 Founds the Ford Motor Company
• March 7, 1932 aged 68 Police and Ford security fire on the Ford Hunger March Five marchers were killed at the gates of the Rouge.
• May 26, 1937 aged 73 Bennett's men beat Walter Reuther on the Rouge overpass
• April 7, 1947 aged 83 Dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Fair Lane

• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. employer and mentor
• Walter Reuther 1907–1970
  United Auto Workers leader who helped build organized labor into a major economic and political force. beaten by his men
• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. fellow America First board member
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. wrote a novel about him
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. built bombers for