Ford, Henry | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Henry Ford

Born July 30, 1863 (Dearborn, Michigan)

Died April 7, 1947 (Dearborn, Michigan)

Industrialist

Automotive executive

American automotive pioneer Henry Ford was one of twentieth-century industry's greatest innovators, and even during his lifetime he was proclaimed as the man who ushered in the modern age. Though he did not invent the gasoline-powered "horseless carriage," as the car was initially called, his inventive ideas about accelerating the manufacturing process made him one of the most important visionaries of the industrial age. Over a twenty-year period, his Ford Motor Company churned out some eleven million Model T cars, the first automobile to be mass-produced. The quick-moving assembly line at Ford's Detroit-area plant, where each worker was responsible for completing a single task, was a model of efficiency and became the standard for the modern factory floor. The concepts Ford first tested there would be widely copied by his competitors and applied to countless other manufacturing processes.

Ford often claimed that his ideas about efficient work habits were the result of his dislike of the farm chores he was forced to do as a child. "My earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place," he wrote in his memoirs, according to Douglas Brinkley's Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress.

Ford, Henry article

Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,098 words (approx. 10 pages at 300 words per page).