Henry Ford
Henry Ford is famous for making cars easier for most people to buy. He did this by producing the cars using an assembly line.
Henry Ford was born in 1863 in Michigan. He had 4 siblings, and his family owned a farm. He worked on the farm when he was young, but he soon discovered that he loved taking things apart to see how they worked, and then putting them back together again.
He worked on watches a lot and ended up helping many people fix their watches. In 1879, when he was 16 years old, he moved to Detroit to start working with machines, though he did come home and work on the farm a little, too.
Ford got married to Clara Bryant in 1888 and worked in a sawmill. He eventually became an engineer.
Ford worked for the Edison Illuminating Company and even got to meet Thomas Edison! Edison encouraged him to keep working on his plans for his horseless carriage, powered by a motor.
Ford’s gasoline-powered horseless carriage was called the Quadricycle. He sold the Quadricycle and started his own company to continue his work making vehicles.
He did not stay with the first company for very many years but eventually started the Ford Motor Company. He spent many years developing cars, which were made only a few at a time.
Ford was not the first person to create a car, but he was the one who began to make them accessible to a lot of people in the United States.
His “Model T” car, released in 1908, was easy to drive and repair, which made many people want one.
He needed to make a lot of cars very quickly. His company, Ford Motor Company, hired skilled workers to work on an assembly line. The car would move through the line, and each worker had a job along the line.
One worker might put on the steering wheel, while at a different spot on the line, another worker put on tires. Every Model T was painted black. The company could make many cars at a time this way, which made them cheaper to produce.
In addition to using the assembly line to produce cars, Ford was also known for paying his workers fair wages.
Henry Ford died in 1947, but his company is still around and making cars today.
