Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 7, 1947, at the age of 83. Henry was the first surviving son of William and Mary Ford, who owned a farm in Dearborn, Michigan. Henry left home at age 16 for Detroit. While in Detroit he found apprentice work as a machinist. He returned to Dearborn and work on the family farm after three years, he continued to operate and service steam engines and work occasional stints in Detroit factories. Henry married Clara Bryant in 1888. Henry ran a sawmill for several years after the marriage. In 1891 he returned with Clara to Detroit, where he was hired as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. He was promoted to chief engineer two years later. At around the same …show more content…
He received backing from various investors over the next seven years, some of whom formed the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. Henry’s partners were growing frustrated with him. While Henry wanted to have a constant need to improve, his partners were eager to put a passenger car on the market. Ford left his namesake company in 1902(Cadillac Motor Car Company) and established the Ford Motor Company. The model T was an immediate success and Ford soon had more orders than the company could satisfy. As a result, he put into practice techniques of mass production that would revolutionize American industry. Henry used large production plants; standardized, interchangeable parts; and the moving assembly line. Mass production significantly cut down the time required to produce and automobile. In 1914, Ford also increased the daily wage for an eight-hour day for his workers to 5$, setting a standard for the industry. By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T’s. In 1919, Ford named his son Edsel as president of Ford Motor Company, but he retained full control of the company’s operations. Henry Ford bought out all minority stockholders by …show more content…
He gave old-fashioned dances at which capitalists, European royalty, and company executives were introduced to the polka, the Sir Roger de Coverley, the mazurka, the Virginia reel, and the quadrille; he established small village factories; he built one-room schools in which vocational training was emphasized; he experimented with soybeans for food and durable goods; he sponsored a weekly radio hour on which quaint essays were read to “plain folks”; he constructed Greenfield Village, a restored rural town; and he built what later was named the Henry Ford Museum and filled it with American artifacts and antiques from the era of his youth when American society was almost wholly agrarian. In short, he was a man who baffled even those who had the opportunity to observe him close at hand, all except James