Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863 in the city called Dearborn in Michigan. Henry's grandfather was Irish and he immigrated to the United States in 1847. Henry is the eldest of six children and is raised by his mother, Mary Litogot and his father William Litogot to take over the family farm.

Henry was really bad at school, he even had trouble reading and writing. He was passionate about mechanics. It was for this reason that he decided to leave school at 15 years old.

Henry stayed on the farm to help the family until he was 17 years old. Then he went to Detroit; he became an apprentice mechanic in Detroit at James F. Flower and Bros.'s stores and at the Detroit Dry Dock Co. factory.

After his apprenticeship in 1882, he spent a year tuning and repairing Westinghouse steam engines in southern Michigan. Henry had not abandoned his dream of designing a "car without horses".

In 1891, Henry a nd his wife Clara moved to Detroit and Henry began working for Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. In December 1893, he became chief engineer for the company, and he took the opportunity to continue his experiments. It was while working for this company that Henry Ford met Thomas Edison.

After discussing his ideas with the great inventor, Thomas suggested that Henry's ideas had merit. Henry then left the job he had to start his own business. He created several before creating June 16, 1903 the "Ford Motor Company" with a dozen investorsIn.

In October 1908 Henry created the Ford T which became for 10 years the best-selling car. It costed $ 950, it was a robust model, cheap and easy to use.

Henry Ford was the first to introduce chain assembly in his factories. It decreased the assembly time from 12 hours to 2 hours. The Ford company got out a vehicle every 10 seconds. Henry Ford was also helping to raise the standard of living by paying more for his workers than in other factories, and decreasing working hours per day to 8 hours.

In 1942, the production of passenger cars stopped in the USA; Ford became one of the largest arms industries and began to build bombers. At the end of the war, the government demanded that Henry Ford, who was 80 years old to avoid an economic crisis, was removed from the position of director to avoid an economic crisis. Henry's little son, Henry Ford 2 took over the business and became its director. Ford died in his Fair Lane home in Dearborn on April 7, 1947.

...