What was henry ford hobbies

Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, put the world on wheels with his revolutionary Model T. Ford was born in Springwells Township, Wayne County, Michigan, on July 30, 1863, to Mary and William Ford. He was the eldest of six children in a family of four boys and two girls. His father was a native of County Cork, Ireland, who came to America in 1847 and settled on a farm in Wayne County.

Young Henry Ford showed an early interest in mechanics. By the time he was 12, he was spending most of his spare time in a small machine shop he had equipped himself. There, at 15, he constructed his first steam engine.

In July 1891, Ford was hired as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. He became chief engineer on November 6, 1893. Thomas Edison became a lifelong mentor and friend to Henry Ford. In 1888, Henry married Clara Jane Bryant, together they had one child, Edsel Bryant Ford, who was born in 1893. 

On August 19, 1899, Ford resigned from the Edison Illuminating Company and, with others, organized the Detroit Automobile Company, which went into bankruptcy about 18 months later. Meanwhile, Henry Ford designed and built several racing cars. In one of them, called Sweepstakes, he defeated Alexander Winton on a track in Grosse Pointe, MI on October 10, 1901. One month later, Henry Ford founded his second automobile venture, the Henry Ford Company. He left that enterprise, which later became the Cadillac Motor Car Company, in early 1902. In another of his racing cars, the 999, he established a world record for the mile, covering the distance in 29.4 seconds on January 12, 1904, on the winter ice of Lake St. Clair.

Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Company in 1903 with a handful of talented and dedicated employees. In 1908, the first of some 15 million Model T Ford vehicles took to the road. The Model T met the public’s needs perfectly: inexpensive, reliable, easy to repair, and maneuverable on rough and muddy roads. Ford made the

American business magnate (1863–1947)

This article is about the American industrialist. For other people with the same name, see Henry Ford (disambiguation).

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist and business magnate. As the founder of the Ford Motor Company, he is credited as a pioneer in making automobiles affordable for middle-class Americans through the system that came to be known as Fordism. In 1911, he was awarded a patent for the transmission mechanism that would be used in the Ford Model T and other automobiles.

Ford was born in a farmhouse in Springwells Township, Michigan, and left home at the age of 16 to find work in Detroit. It was a few years before this time that Ford first experienced automobiles, and throughout the later half of the 1880s, he began repairing and later constructing engines, and through the 1890s worked with a division of Edison Electric. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 after prior failures in business, but success in constructing automobiles.

The introduction of the Ford Model T automobile in 1908 is credited with having revolutionized both transportation and American industry. As the sole owner of the Ford Motor Company, Ford became one of the wealthiest people in the world.^&#

His Early Life as an Inventor

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. He didn’t even invent the assembly line. But more than any other single individual, he was responsible for transforming the automobile from an invention of unknown utility into an innovation that profoundly shaped the 20th century and continues to affect our lives today.

Innovators change things. They take new ideas, sometimes their own, sometimes other people’s, and develop and promote those ideas until they become an accepted part of daily life. Innovation requires self-confidence, a taste for taking risks, leadership ability and a vision of what the future should be. Henry Ford had all these characteristics, but it took him many years to develop all of them fully.

His beginnings were perfectly ordinary. He was born on his father’s farm in what is now Dearborn, Michigan on July 30, 1863. Early on Ford demonstrated some of the characteristics that would make him successful, powerful, and famous. He organized other boys to build rudimentary water wheels and steam engines. He learned about full-sized steam engines by becoming friends with the men who ran them. He taught himself to fix watches, and used the watches as textbooks to learn the rudiments of machine design. Thus, young Ford demonstrated mechanical ability, a facility for leadership, and a preference for learning by trial-and-error. These characteristics would become the foundation of his whole career.

Ford could have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a farmer. But young Henry was fascinated by machines and was willing to take risks to pursue that fascination. In 1879 he left the farm to become an apprentice at the Michigan Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars in Detroit. Over the next two-and-one-half years he held several similar jobs, sometimes moving when he thought he could learn more somewhere else.

He returned home in 1882 but did little farming. Instead he operated and serviced portable stea

While you can't miss the famous Ford Blue Oval logo outside McLarty Daniel Ford of Bentonville, how much do you really know about the man who started it all? Read on for 10 fun facts about Henry Ford–inventor, innovator, entrepreneur and all-around American genius!

1) Henry Ford made extra money as a pocketwatch repairman when he was in his early teens. A mechanical genius from a young age, Ford taught himself the craft of watch repair by repeatedly taking apart and putting back together a pocketwatch given to him by his father. He even made his own tools to work on watches, including tiny screwdrivers he laboriously filed from old nails, and tweezers made from the spring steel "bones" from a discarded corset.

2) When he was only 20 years old, Ford was promoted to Chief Engineer of the Thomas Edison Illumination Company's main electrical plant in Detroit, which provided electrical power for the city. He worked there for six years before Edison himself encouraged Ford to follow his dreams of creating an affordable, reliable, gasoline-powered automobile.

Learn More About the Ford Mustang

3) Among many, many other innovations Henry Ford brought to his manufacturing plants was a willingness to hire handicapped people, including the blind, deaf and those who had lost limbs in combat or in accidents. By 1919, more than 20 percent of Ford Motor Company's workforce had some form of disability.

4) After being convinced he should seek a life in politics by his friend President Woodrow Wilson, Ford ran for a seat in the United States Senate in 1918. He only lost by 4,500 votes, even though he didn't spend a dime on his campaign.

5) Henry Ford was America's second billionaire, after oil magnate John D Rockefeller.

6) Still an innovator well into old age, Henry Ford debuted a prototype of a plastic-bodied car in August 1941. Even more amazing, the car's body was biodegradable, with the lightweight panels m