One of the most influential trailblazers of all time, Henry Ford perfected the assembly line and developed the first mass-produced car, revolutionising manufacturing and transportation and laying the foundations for the modern age.

The so-called people's tycoon became the richest person on the planet and was hailed as an industrial genius – but Ford had a dark side that overshadowed his extraordinary achievements. Read on to discover the incredible story behind the flawed innovator's life and legacy.

All dollar amounts in US dollars.

The first surviving son of William and Mary Ford, Henry was born on 30 July 1863 on the family farm near Dearborn, Michigan.

His father had come to the US from Ireland to seek a new life, while Henry's mother was born in the Great Lake State to Belgian immigrants who died when she was a young child.

Growing up, Henry attended one-room schools from the age of seven to 15, but he hated formal education. A shockingly poor student, he barely learned to spell and write intelligible sentences but was good at arithmetic. The future carmaker helped out on the farm particularly during harvest time but loathed that too – though he did learn to respect the value of hard work, however menial. 

There was one thing the farmer's kid did love doing: tinkering with mechanical objects. Henry's fascination with machines intensified at the age of 12 when he observed a steam engine in action and was gifted a pocket watch, which he took apart to figure out its inner workings.

In no time at all, Henry was repairing watches for family and friends. Obsessed with all things mechanical, the practical-minded youngster had set up a workshop area where he'd spend hours. It was here that Henry built his first steam engine at age 15, an impressive feat for someone so young.

A year later, the go-getting teenager walked eight miles to Detroit and secured an apprenticeship at a machine shop within a shipbuilding firm.

His wages of $2.60 a week, the equivalent of around $80 (£61) today, didn't cover the cost of his room and board, so the ever-resourceful Henry turned to fixing timepieces on the side to make ends meet.

Having completed the apprenticeship, Henry had a stint setting up and repairing Westinghouse steam engines in southern Michigan. There, he discovered the marvels of the internal combustion engine before returning to the family farm in 1882, somewhat disappointing his father by spending enormous amounts of time working on his beloved machines rather than concentrating on the business.

In 1888, Henry married Clara Bryant, who had been raised on a nearby farm. In 1891, the pair decamped to Detroit, where Henry was hired as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company. His brilliance was swiftly recognised and he was promoted to chief engineer in 1893, the same year that the couple's only child, Edsel, was born. Henry is pictured to the left in this photograph.

Henry set about creating a commercially viable horseless carriage powered by an internal combustion engine. While he was on call 24 hours a day, his role at the Edison Illuminating Company allowed him to work on the project since he had plenty of time to kill between call-outs.

By the end of 1893, he'd built his first petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine. Encouraged by this success, Ford continued developing his product, completing his first car in 1896. He christened it the "Ford Quadricycle".

The rudimentary automobile comprised a four-horsepower petrol engine attached to a lightweight metal frame and four bicycle wheels – hence the name.

Buoyed by encouragement from Thomas Edison – Henry met the pioneer at a meeting in 1896 where he told him about the Quadricycle – the rookie inventor dedicated every spare moment to improving the vehicle. Lifelong friends, the pair are pictured here in the late 1920s.

Henry promptly sold the prototype and began working on an improved version with the financial backing of Detroit mayor William C. Maybury. By this point, his invention was generating a lot of buzz and attracting the interest of powerful investors.

Henry had also been awarded his first patent for a carburettor. The prolific inventor would be granted 161 patents during his lifetime.

Following a successful demonstration drive from Detroit to Pontiac and back again, lumber merchant William H. Murphy agreed to help Henry form an enterprise to manufacture motorcars. In 1899, the entrepreneur resigned from his job at Edison and founded the Detroit Automobile Company.

Unfortunately, the business soon ran into various difficulties, from costs to quality issues. It went bust in January 1901 after producing only a handful of vehicles. Undeterred, Henry pivoted to designing and producing a blisteringly fast racing car, having come down with “racing fever”.

In the meantime, the backers of the defunct Detroit Automobile Company formed the Henry Ford Company. Its namesake was hired as superintendent of production.

Henry didn't take to the role, and mechanical engineer Henry M. Leland was bought in as a result, but the pair clashed, beginning a lifelong rivalry.

Together with Leland, the company's backers rapidly became exasperated by Henry's meticulous way of working, which they perceived as inefficient and detrimental to the business' progress. He left the company in March 1902.

Five months later, the enterprise was renamed the "Cadillac Motor Company" after the founder of Detroit.

Henry poured all his efforts into designing and building racing cars. The fruit of his labours, the Ford 999, went on to break the land speed record and win race after race, helping to establish the Ford name across the country.

Henry (right) is shown here in 1902 with legendary automobile racer Barney Oldfield. Meanwhile, the auto pioneer's thoughts were turning to developing a simple, affordable car.

In August 1902, Henry entered into partnership with Detroit coal dealer Alexander Malcomson to do just that. Within months the alliance had designed and built its first car, which Malcomson named the "Fordmobile".

Seriously impressed, a number of investors joined the fray and the Ford Motor Company was incorporated the following year with an initial investment of $28,000, or around $1 million (£762k) in today's money.

Henry received a 25.5% stake in the company. He soon got to work and quickly developed the firm's first vehicle, the Model A, with the first unit sold in July 1903.

By October,195 more had been snapped up, and the business became profitable. However, the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM) threw a spanner in the works.

The organisation had obtained the 1895 US patent for the petrol combustion engine and demanded that Ford pay a royalty for each vehicle produced.

Henry declined to pay up and was refused a licence to manufacture cars, but carried on regardless. The saga led to years of legal wrangling, with Ford eventually emerging victorious in 1911.

In 1906, Ford introduced the Model N. The car retailed at a highly affordable $500, which is around $20,000 (£15k) in 2024 money, undercutting its arch-rival, the Oldsmobile Runabout, by $150.

In the meantime, Henry was clashing with Malcomson over the direction the company was taking, with Malcomson keen to produce more expensive, higher-end automobiles.

Desperate to remove his partner from the company, Henry shrewdly created an independent firm to produce Ford's engines and other components, which had the desired effect of funnelling profits away from Malcomson and freezing him out.

Rendered powerless, Malcomson had no choice but to sell his stock to Henry, giving the company's namesake and now Ford's president, a controlling interest.

Ford's fortunes went from strength to strength with the Model N selling 13,250 units between 1906 and 1908. But it was the vehicle's successor that proved to be the blockbuster hit and real game-changer. The first Model T was shipped on 1 October 1908 and the rest is history.

Starting at a reasonable $825 – around $30,000 (£23k) today – "Tin Lizzie", as the car was nicknamed, was super-reliable, easy to repair and packed with advanced features that belied its affordable price tag. To paraphrase Ford's advertising blurb, no other car under $2,000 offered more. Suddenly, vast swathes of the American population could afford a decent automobile.

During the first fiscal year, Ford sold 10,666 units. Sales didn't take off in a major way until 1913 when the company installed the first moving assembly line for the production of an automobile.

This remarkable innovation slashed the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to just over an hour and a half. Also in 1913, Henry and his family moved into Fair Lane, their lavish custom mansion in Dearborn.

The following year, Henry doubled his workers' wages to a bumper $5 a day, $150 (£114) in today's money, in a bid to reduce staff turnover, attract the best talent, and boost the number of middle-class Model T consumers. The audacious move had the desired effect, but there were strings attached for staff.

To qualify, Ford employees had to tick a number of boxes ranging from abstaining from alcohol to keeping their homes scrupulously clean. Strongly paternalistic, Henry set up the Ford Sociological Department, a sort of benevolent secret police as one writer puts it, to monitor staff and make sure they were adhering to his moral code. Employees put up with the intrusion but resented it all the same, and the department was wound down in the 1920s.

In addition to introducing the moving assembly line and solving the staff turnover issue, Henry had streamlined operations by the mid-1910s and was well on the way to achieving vertical integration – that is, bringing all stages of the production process in-house – cutting costs dramatically.

This combination of mass production of an inexpensive product and high wages was dubbed "Fordism".

While the auto pioneer raised eyebrows for his pacifism during World War I, it did nothing to dampen sales of the Model T, which in 1916 was priced from just $345, around $10,000 (£7.6k) in 2024 money.

Almost half a million units rolled off the assembly line that year. By 1918, half of the cars on America's roads were Model Ts.

Needless to say, Henry had become incredibly wealthy as a result of the Model T's success. Published in 1918, the first Forbes list of America's rich pegged the auto entrepreneur's net worth at $100 million – approximately $2 billion (£1.5bn) in 2024 dollars – the eighth highest in the country at the time.

Around this time, Henry's antisemitism came to the fore. In 1918, he started funding The Dearborn Independent. Distributed to every Ford franchise in America, the newspaper disseminated anti-Jewish propaganda to hundreds of thousands of readers.

Its infamous tirades went on to inspire a litany of Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, who praised Henry in his Mein Kampf book.

Henry shut the publication down in 1927 after a libel suit was brought against it. With his antisemitism harming Ford, he issued an apology, recanting the views espoused in the newspaper.

Still, the auto pioneer accepted Nazi Germany's highest honour for a foreigner in 1938 and whether he genuinely regretted his stance is up for debate. However, it's alleged that he suffered a stroke when confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust.

In 1919, Henry hatched a cunning plan to gain full control of Ford. He resigned in favour of his son Edsel and threatened to set up a rival firm unless the remaining shares were sold to him. The bluff worked, and Henry managed to buy out all of the minority shareholders.

By the mid-1920s, Ford was on top of the world and Henry's fortune had swelled to an estimated $1.2 billion, equivalent to around $20 billion (£15.2bn) today. A staggering 10 million Model Ts had been sold by 1925, when the ubiquitous vehicle's price had plummeted to $260, which works out at around $5,000 (£3.8k) today.

That same year, Edsel convinced his father to branch out into aviation. Ford built the world's first purpose-built aircraft factory, and in 1926, the company launched the Trimotor, the first plane used by America's commercial airlines.

Nicknamed the "Tin Goose", the aircraft played an important role in aviation history, mimicking the Model T, which had democratised motoring by opening up air travel to the wider public.

In 1927, Ford's River Rouge Complex, the biggest factory on the planet, was completed, and the business had achieved full vertical integration.

Henry attempted to take it to the next level by creating a model community in Brazil called "Fordlandia" that would produce the rubber for his vehicles' tyres. However, the project, which kicked off in 1928, was a failure and abandoned after six years.

By this point, competition from General Motors and other auto companies was growing, and the Model T was becoming outdated. Having shifted 16.5 million units – the car would hold the record for most units sold until the 1970s – the best-seller was replaced by the Model A, which shares its name with the first car Ford produced.

Henry had slashed the working week to just 40 hours over five days but all was not well in Ford's factories, including the colossal River Rouge Complex.

As well as harbouring antisemitic beliefs, Henry is said to have exhibited racist attitudes towards Black people. While he was lauded for paying his African American workers relatively high wages, they tended to be assigned the hardest work and were largely segregated from their white colleagues.

Employees were also barred from joining trade unions. Henry was vehemently against the organisations, which he believed to be controlled by a malevolent global Jewish cabal. Violent heavies were hired to suppress union activity. In 1932, four people were killed and over 60 injured when protestors were fired upon at the River Rouge Complex.

Henry eventually relented, but not before threatening to shut down the business. He finally allowed the staff to join a union in 1941. 

Tragically, Edsel died of stomach cancer in 1943 aged just 49. By this time, the company, which had struggled during the Great Depression, had lost market share to rivals General Motors and Chrysler.

Henry, who had always been the real boss of Ford with veto power over all decisions, assumed his son's formal leadership role, but having suffered a series of strokes, his health was in rapid decline along with the formerly sharp business titan's decision-making skills. Henry finally threw in the towel in 1945 and was replaced as Ford boss by his grandson, Henry II.

Henry went downhill thereafter and died on 7 April 1947 of a brain haemorrhage at his Dearborn estate, aged 83.

He was estimated to have a peak net worth of around $200 billion (£150bn) in today's money, which would have made him the richest person in the world at the time. The lion's share of his fortune was bequeathed to the Ford Foundation, together with Edsel's bequest.

One of the world's best-endowed foundations, the Ford Foundation has contributed billions of dollars over the years to good causes, from higher education establishments to HIV charities and civil rights groups.

While Henry's reputation is stained by antisemitism, racism, and violence towards unions, the auto pioneer's incredible achievements are undeniable, and his legacy in shaping the world as we know it today is far-reaching.

Now discover what happened to the Ford fortune and find out what Henry's descendants do today