HENRY FORD

Introduction
-Henry Ford was an
American industrialist and business magnate. 
-He was the founder of Ford Motor Company, and chief
developer of the assembly line technique of mass
production.
-Young Henry 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.
Early life
-Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, on a farm in Springwells
Township, Michigan
-His father, William Ford was born in County Cork, Ireland, to a
family that had emigrated from England
-His mother, Mary Ford was born in Michigan as the youngest
child of Belgian immigrants
-His father gave him a pocket watch when he was 12. At 15, Ford
dismantled and reassembled the timepieces of friends and
neighbors dozens of times, gaining the reputation of a watch
repairman
Career
-In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating
Company of Detroit. 
-Promoted to Chief Engineer in 1893-he had enough time and
money to devote attention to his experiments on gasoline
engines. 
-Starting with 1896, with the completion of a self-propelled
vehicle, which he named the Ford Quadricycle. 
 -Ford attended a meeting of Edison executives, where he was
introduced to Thomas Edison. Encouraged by Edison, Ford
designed and built a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. 
-Backed by the capital of  William Murphy, Ford founded
the Detroit Automobile Company. However, the automobiles
produced were of a lower quality than Ford wanted. Two years
later,the company was dissolved.
Business
-He opened Ford assembly plants in Britain and Canada in 1911, and
soon became the biggest automotive producer in those countries
-In 1912, Ford cooperated with Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat to launch the
first Italian automotive assembly plants. The first plants in Germany
were built in the 1920s with the encouragement of Herbert Hoover and
the Commerce Department
-In 1929, Ford made an agreement with the Soviets to provide technical
aid over nine years in building the first Soviet automobile plant
near Nizhny Novgorod The contract involved the purchase of
$30,000,000 worth of knocked-down Ford cars and trucks for assembly
during the first four years of the plant's operation, after which the plant
would gradually switch to Soviet-made components.
Racing
-Ford maintained an interest in auto racing from 1901 to 1913
and began his involvement in the sport as both a constructor and
a driver, later turning the wheel over to hired drivers.
-On October 10, 1901, he defeated Alexander Winton in a race
car named "Sweepstakes"
-In "My Life and Work" Ford speaks of racing in a rather
dismissive tone, as something that is not at all a good measure
of automobiles in general. Throughout the book, he continually
returns to ideals such as transportation, production efficiency,
affordability, reliability, fuel efficiency, economic prosperity,
and the automation of drudgery in farming and industry,
but rarely mentions, and rather belittles, the idea of merely
going fast from point A to point B.