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Henry Ford's father, William Ford (1826-1905), was an Irish immigrant who married Mary Litogot, the daughter of Belgian immigrants. The couple settled on a farm west of Detroit, Michigan, in an area that is now the city of Dearborn. Henry was the eldest of five siblings born during the ten-year period between 1863 and 1873. His mother died when he was only thirteen years old. As a boy, he was not attracted to farm life, even though his father probably expected him to eventually take over the family's acreage. By the time Henry left the Dearborn area in 1879 to work as a machinist in Detroit, he had developed a local reputation for his ability to repair watches. His childhood interest in mechanical devices, however, soon drew him to the workhorse engines of the late nineteenth century: steam engines. When he married Clara Ala Bryant (1865-1950) in 1888, he had been employed by Westinghouse as an engineer (self-trained) responsible for maintenance of the company's steam engines.

Within a few years, he changed over to another well-known pioneer firm, the Edison Illuminating Company, filling responsibilities there as chief engineer by 1893. It was apparent, however, that the thirty-year-old Ford wanted to dedicate himself to the emerging field of gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.

By 1896, Ford had succeeded in building his first gasoline motor-driven vehicle, the Ford Quadricycle. After Thomas Alva Edison himself encouraged him to perfect the Quadricyle, only three years passed before Ford sought capital backing from Detroit businessman William Murphy and cofounded a first, though not very successful, company, the Detroit Automobile Company.

Even though the company folded in 1901, Murphy continued to support Ford's efforts, forming another short-lived company (this time bearing Ford's name). Ford's first real success, however, was only indirectly related to his experience building motor vehicles for commercial sale. It would come as he approached middle age and would associate the name Ford with the emerging competition for high-performance racing cars.

In 1902, one year before the independent Ford Motor Company was founded, Ford was involved in a partnership with a Detroit coal dealer, Alexander Malcomson, who was interested in Ford's original designs of racing cars. Ford's association with racing cars bore some of the attributes of his approach to marketing in later stages of his career. The young inventor not only drove his racing car in public demonstrations and made a fanfare each time a new speed record was set but also contracted one of the earliest symbols of car racing as a sport, Barney Oldfield, to tour the country, making certain that--even if onlookers would not be prospective buyers of racing cars--the name Ford would gain wide popular recognition.

In short, when Ford turned his focus to the challenge of building motorcars for the general public, he had already begun to develop business skills that would characterize his entire career. Ford knew, for example, that rapid expansion of passenger automobile production would require expansion of sales outlets for his cars. He thus pioneered a business method that eventually came to characterize the automobile industry as a whole: establishing franchise agreements that allowed private contractors to open Ford agencies in every major city in the United States. Very early on, Ford's Model T (nicknamed the "Tin Lizzie"), which began production in 1908, began to attract not only American but also foreign buyers. Channels for marketing would extend to Canada and Europe (starting in 1911, when an agency opened in Great Britain, and the 1920's, when cars were sold in Italy, France, and Germany). In 1927, Ford Motor Company began production of the Model A. By 1929, there were dealerships on every continent of the world.

Probably the most outstanding example of Ford's industrial production skills was the River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Construction of this plant complex, known locally as "The Rouge," took nearly a decade, between 1917 and 1928. The size of the complex surpassed all previous automobile production sites--covering a total surface of 1 by 1.5 miles and containing nearly one hundred buildings--and the site incorporated complementary infrastructure into its planning. Ford improved the factory's access to the Rouge River (and therefore to the Great Lakes themselves) by extensive dredging and built an internal network of railroad tracks so that company-owned trains could link all key facilities to points of out-shipment. At various stages of the company's development, Ford decided to diversify company assets by acquiring interests in companies involved in providing key raw materials, including rubber and steel. . .

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