Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, on a farm next to a rural town west of Detroit, Michigan, from William Ford Mary Litogot Ford, born in Michigan and Mary Litogot Ford, the youngest child of Belgian immigrants, who died when he was still young, in 1876.

He was the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production and as owner of the it he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world.

His career began in 1891, when he became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. In 1893 he get promoted Chief Engineer and he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on gasoline engines, which culminated with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the Ford Quadricycle in 1896.

In the same year, during a a meeting of Edison executives, he was introduced to Thomas Edison, who approved of Ford's automobile experimentation. Encouraged by it, he designed and built a second vehicle, which was completed in 1898.

On August 5, 1899 he resigned from Edison and founded the Detroit Automobile Company, but the company didn't have a loto of success: automobiles produced were of a lower quality and higher prices than Ford wanted to be. The company issolved in January 1901.

Thanks to Alexander Y. Malcomson, he received the backing of an old acquaintance, and on June 16, 1903 he founded the Ford Motor Company.

The first model the company introduced was the Model T, in October 1908. By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's, thanks also to his new way of production, which took his name, the Fordism, which permitted to decrease the costs of production and increase the marginal productivity.

But by the ‘20s competition increased and it convinced him to make a new model,Ford Model A, which was introduced in December 1927 with a total output of more than 4 million.

Ford married Clara Ala Bryant in 1888 and they had a single child: Edsel Bryant Ford, who died of stomach cancer in 1943.

In ill health, he ceded the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II in September 1945 and went into retirement. He died in 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 83 and he is buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.