His vision would help create a middle class in the U.S., one marked by urbanization, rising wages and some free time in which to spend them. When Ford left the family farm at age 16 and walked eight miles to his first job in a Detroit machine shop, only 2 out of 8 Americans lived in the cities. By World War II that figure would double, and the affordable Model T was one reason for it. People flocked to Detroit for jobs, and if they worked in one of Henry's factories, they could afford one of his cars — it's a virtuous circle, and he was the ringmaster. By the time production ceased for the Model T in 1927, more than 15 million cars had been sold — or half the world's output.

Nobody was more of an inspiration to Ford than the great inventor Thomas Alva Edison. At the turn of the century Edison had blessed Ford's pursuit of an efficient, gas-powered car during a chance meeting at Detroit's Edison Illuminating Co., where Ford was chief engineer. (Ford had already worked for the company of Edison's fierce rival, George Westinghouse.)

After the Model T's enormous success, the two visionaries from rural Michigan became friends and business partners. Ford asked Edison to develop an electric storage battery for the car and funded the effort with $1.5 million. Ironically, despite all his other great inventions, Edison never perfected the storage battery. Yet Ford immortalized his mentor's inventive genius by building the Edison Institute in Dearborn.

Ford's great strength was the manufacturing process — not invention. Long before he started a car company, he was an inveterate tinkerer, known for picking up loose scraps of metal and wire and turning them into machines. He'd been putting cars together since 1891. Although by no means the first popular automobile, the Model T showed the world just how innovative Ford was at combining technology and markets.

The company's assembly line alone threw America's Industrial Revolution into overdrive. Instead of having workers put together the entire car, Ford's cronies, who were great tool- and diemakers from Scotland, organized teams that added parts to each Model T as it moved down a line. By the time Ford's sprawling Highland Park plant was humming along in 1914, the world's first automatic conveyor belt could churn out a car every 93 minutes.

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July 25, 1925	Jan. 14, 1935	March 17, 1941
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