Henry Ford

Research on Henry Ford illustrates that he was born for invention and loved the process of engineering from young on. You can have research written on Henry Ford from a biographical, scientific or engineering perspective.

Henry Ford once said:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude...constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise...so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

And it should be duly noted that Ford made good on that prediction with the Model T. The Model T put America on wheels, but the real revolution was the production technique developed in 1913. Ford Motor Co.'s moving assembly line, and the rapid spread of its mass-production methods, kicked the industrialization of America into overdrive and profoundly changed the way people work and live worldwide.

• Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863 in Dearborn just outside Detroit, Michigan.
• Ford was the oldest of six children, and the grandson of Irish immigrants who had arrived in America in 1847.
• Ford was raised with the intention that he would take over the family farm when he grew up, but from his early years took a keen interest in, and would eventually study engineering.

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863 on a well-to-do farm in Michigan near today's city of Dearborn. Although latter nineteenth century America mostly rural, from an early age Ford was not interested in farm work, but rather showed a curiosity about mechanical things. When he was only sixteen, he left the family's farm to go to Detroit for work as an apprentice machinist. After three years, he returned to the farm. With his apprentice training, Ford ran and repaired steam engines and occasionally worked in a Detroit factory. Putting in some time with farm work, he also spent as much time as he could repairing and overhauling his farther farm machinery. In 1888, Ford married Clara Bryant and ran a sawmill to support the two of them.

In 1891, Ford took a job as an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. He took this job to make a break with farming and become more involved in the growing industrialization of businesses and society. His first experiments with the internal combustion engine which was to be the foundation for the cars produced by the Ford Motor Company business he would later found came in 1893 when he was promoted to Chief Engineer. In 1896, he completed his experimental work on the Quadricycle, a self-propelled, one-person vehicle. This Quadricycle had four wheels resembling heavy bicycle wheels and a tiller-like lever for steering. It had two forward speeds with no reverse. Ford's Quadricycle was not the first self-propelled vehicle using a gasoline engine. But it put him in the small group of engineering pioneers developing such a vehicle and gave him the knowledge and experience for later founding the Ford Motor Company.