HENRY FORD, founder of Ford Motor Company, was born on a Wayne County, Michigan, farm on July 30, 1863. The eldest of six children, his father, William Ford, was a native of county Cork, Ireland, who came to America in 1847.
Young Ford showed an early interest in mechanics. By the time he was 12, he was spending most of his spare time in a small machine shop he had equipped himself. There, at 15, he constructed his first steam engine.
He became a machinist’s apprentice in the Detroit shops of James F. Flower and Brothers and in the plant of the Detroit Dry Dock Company. Completing his apprenticeship in 1882, he spent a year setting up and repairing Westinghouse steam engines in southern Michigan. He became an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit in 1891 and was named chief engineer two years later.
In 1888, he married Clara J. Bryant of Greenfield, Michigan, the daughter of a Wayne County farmer. Ms. Ford died in 1950 at the age of 84. They had one son Edsel Bryant Ford born in 1893.
Mr. Ford’s career as a builder of automobiles dated from the winter of 1893 when his interest in internal combustion engines led him to construct a small one-cylinder gasoline model. The first Ford engine sputtered its way to life on a wooden table in the Detroit kitchen of the Ford home. A later version of that engine powered his first automobile—essentially a frame fitted with four bicycle wheels. This first Ford car was completed in June 1896.
He resigned from Edison Illuminating Company in 1899 and, with others, organized the Detroit Automobile Company. He took one-thirteenth of its stock (100 shares) and became its mechanical superintendent. The company went into bankruptcy a year and a half later.
Meanwhile, Henry Ford designed and built several racing cars. In one of them, he defeated Alexander Winton in a notable race on a track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1901. In another car, the famous 999 racer, he established a world record for the mile, covering the distance in 39-2/5 seconds on January 12, 1904, on the winter ice of Lake St. Clair.
On June 16, 1903, Mr. Ford helped organize the Ford Motor Company, capitalized at $150,000 of which only $28,000 in cash was paid in. The first car built by the company was sold July 15, 1903. Henry Ford owned 25-1/2 percent of the stock in the new organization. He became president and controlling owner in 1906. In 1919, Mr. Ford, his wife, and his son, acquired the interest of all minority stockholders for $105,820,894 and became sole owners of the company. Edsel, who succeeded his father as president in 1919, occupied that position until his death in 1943, when Henry Ford returned to the post.
In September 1945 he resigned the presidency for the second time and recommended his eldest grandson Henry Ford II for that position. The board of directors complied.
In collaboration with Samuel Crowther, he wrote My Life and Work (1922), Today and Tomorrow (1926), and Moving Forward (1930), which described the development of Ford Motor Company and outline his industrial and social theories. He also wrote Edison, As I Know Him (1930), with the same collaborator.
Henry Ford died at his residence, Fair Lane in Dearborn, on April 7, 1947. He was 83.