- US automobile
manufacturer. He built his first car 1896 and founded the Ford Motor
Company 1903. His Model T (1908-27) was the first car to be constructed
solely by assembly-line methods and to be mass-marketed; 15 million
of these cars were sold.
Ford's innovative policies, such as a $5 daily minimum wage and a five-day
working week, revolutionized employment practices, but he opposed the
introduction of trade unions. In 1928 he launched the Model A, a stepped-up
version of the Model T.
Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan, and apprenticed to a Detroit machinist
1878. He worked for the Edison Illuminating Company 1891-99 and then
for the Detroit Automobile Company before starting his own firm. Victory
in a car race at Grosse Point, Michigan, 1901, brought him the publicity
he sought, and in 1904 he drove his 999 to a world record of 39.4 sec
for 1 mi/1.6 km over the ice on Lake St Clair.
Ford was politically active and a pacifist; he opposed US intervention
in both world wars and promoted his own anti-Semitic views. In 1936
he founded, with his son Edsel Ford (1893-1943), the philanthropic Ford
Foundation; he retired in 1945 from the Ford Motor Company, then valued
at over $1 billion.
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