Henry Ford - "The Founder of the Ford Motor Company"

Birth: 30 July 1863 Greenfield Township, Dearborn, michigan, U.S.

Father's Name: William Ford

Mother's Name: Mary Ford

Death: 7 April 1947, Fair Lane, Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.

Henry Ford was born on 30 July 1863. His fahter was William

Ford and mother was Mary Ford. They had a farm on which they

grew prosperous. Henry was the first child of William and Mary Ford among six childrens. His maximun childhood time was passed in the one room school and doing farms routine task. But his main interest was in mechanical things. So in 1879, when he was 16 yrs old he left home for

the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist. But occasionally he did the farm

work.

In the year 1888, he got married with Clara Ala Bryant. Henry supported himself and his wife by running a swamill. She always used to stay with Henry. They had a single child Edsel Bryant Ford.But he died before Henry Ford.

Henry Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating

Company in Detroit in 1891. This event was most signified for Henry to dedicate his life to industrial pursuits. He was promoted to Chief Engineer in 1893. Due to this, he had enough time and money to gave to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. These experiments reached at the highest point of completion in 1896 of his self-propelled vechicle 'The Quadricycle'. But he was not the first to build a self-propelled vechicle with a gasoline engine. However, he was one of the several automotive inventors who helped this country become a nation of motorists.

He established a company to manufacture automobiles, but was unsuccessful twice. But in 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated with Henry Ford. He was the Vice-president and chief engineer of the company. At the starting, the company produced only few cars a day at the Ford factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit. He realized that his dream come true of producing an automobile. Which was reasonably priced, reliable and efficient. He introduced the Model T in 1908.The Model T was easy to operate, maintain, and handle on rough roads. So Model T became huge success.

The demand of the Model T was grawing, so Henry Ford opened a large factory at Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910. Ford's production of Model T made his company the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. The Ford company was the world's largest industrial complex along with the banks of the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan during 1910 and 1920. Later on in september 1927, all steps in the manufacturing process from rifining raw materials to final assembly of the automobile took place at the huge Rouge Plant, it was Henry Fords dream of mass production.

Henry Ford opposed war, he thought that was a waste of time. But he and Adolf Hitler admired each others achievement. Adolf Hitler kept a full sized portrait next to his desk. And the message on that was "I regard Henry Ford as my Inspiration."

Due to ill health, in September 1945, Ford give up the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II and went into retirement. In 1947 Henry Ford was died due to a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 83 in Fair Lane, and he was buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.