Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist and business magnate.
He was born in Michigan and left home at age 16 to find work in nearby Detroit. He had only finished 8th grade in a one room schoolhouse and then attended a bookkeeping class. At age 12 he received and took apart a pocket watch, and he repaired the watches of other people. He worked for a division of Edison Electric and repaired and constructed engines through the 1890s. He worked with Westinghouse steam engines. He became the chief engineer at Edison Electric in Detroit.
With the vast knowledge that he acquired on these new technologies using his acumen and skill with building, he started several companies where he perfected, through refining technique and direction, a motor car company known as the Henry Ford Company which manufactured automobiles.
He developed the assembly line with moving feeds and sequential placements. The price was dropped due to improvements of efficiency.
He had been one of the pioneers of the five-day, forty-hour work week, and he felt that the consumerism of acquiring goods and services made life better and would help bring about world peace. He believed that increasing wages helped as profit sharing and rewarded those who were most productive and of good character. Ford’s company had a department that encouraged good lifestyle and disapproved of heavy drinking, gambling, and dead-beat dads. Henry Ford was a strong advocate for peace.
He had an interest in history and preservation, and in particular in preserving Americana. An important representation of this was Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. In a large way, his life happened within about 5 miles of where he was born—Spring Wells, River Rouge, Greenfield Village.
In 1937, Henry Ford and his son Edsel created the Ford Foundation. This is one of the wealthiest private financial endowment organizations in the world. The mission of the Ford Foundation has five areas of action: economic improvements, education, freedom and democracy, human behavior, and world peace. The Ford Foundation today is dedicated to the advancement of human welfare and has “focus on solving humankind's most pressing problems, whatever they might be.”
Henry Ford has worked long and hard, through skill, experience, and luck, to become one of the world’s wealthiest persons. He has used his wealth in significant and broad ways, to help make the world a better place. Henry Ford has certainly been an example of a Profile in Character.
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Inspiring History is a compendium of people we could recognize for their good traits: knowledge, skills, abilities, and intentions that amount to qualities that have made our world a better place. These Profiles in Character offer us examples that we could emulate ourselves for us to also improve the human condition and the world around us.
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Images from public domain, Portrait by Fred Hartsook, c. 1919, Library of Congress
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Episode 32 8/10/2024
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