Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, and from his earliest memory he hated the drudgery of farm work, not the effort, but the waste, the inefficiency, the brute labor that machines could do better. At twelve, he saw a steam-powered road engine and was transfixed; at sixteen, he walked to Detroit to apprentice as a machinist. He married Clara Bryant, built his first horseless carriage in a shed behind their house in 1896, and drove it through the streets of Detroit at two in the morning, terrifying horses and delighting himself. He founded two automobile companies that failed before the Ford Motor Company succeeded in 1903. The early cars were expensive, hand-built, unreliable, playthings for the rich. Ford had a different vision: a car so simple, so reliable, and so cheap that every farmer and factory worker could own one.