Henry Ford perhaps shaped America more than any other scientist of the modern day.  His assembly line formula is in everything--from hamburgers to toy manufacturing--but what do we really know about Henry Ford?  Perhaps our biggest guess can be that his Detroit, Michigan is much different than the one we know today. Douglas Brinkley's Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress tells the story of Ford, his company and his life.

Henry Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan in 1863. Throughout his childhood, Ford was interested in machines. In 1879, he left his family’s farm for Detroit to work as a machinist and engineer. creating his first vehicle, a quadricycle, or a bicycle with four wheels, in 1896.

Ford’s goal was to make a “car for the great multitude.” Originally, Ford made a horseless carriage. He sold to get money to improve upon the original, which became the extremely popular Model T.  In 1908, the Ford Company began selling this car for nine hundred and fifty dollars.

The Model T was a sensation. By the time the Ford Company stopped producing the Model T in 1927, more than fifteen million five hundred thousand were sold in the United States alone and the price was reduced to two hundred and eighty dollars. The popularity of the car was something the world had never seen. When Ford’s new car, the Model A, came out, forty thousand customers ordered the vehicle sight unseen.

Henry Ford sped up and improved the productivity of his car assembly lines. Ford bettered the process of producing car bodies. Ford’s assembly line could produce a car body in ninety-three minutes opposed to seven hundred and twenty eight minutes it took to produce one in earlier times. The way Ford treated his employees was very unusual. Ford wanted to “give as many people as [he could] a chance to be prosperous.” At the same time, Ford doubled his workers’ pay to a minimum wage of five dollars per day and reduced their hours.

Ford’s business practices were also unorthodox. Ford said he would give buyers a fifty-dollar refund on their cars if the Ford Company sold enough cars. This practice went along with his theory a company would make profits if a high amount of a low cost product was sold.

Ford was a philanthropist. Because of his opposition to American involvement with the Great War in Europe, Ford created Peace Ship, a group to find a solution to the Great War and keep Americans away from the war.In 1936, Ford created the Ford Foundation. This foundation gave more than seven and a half million to the Henry Ford hospital in Detroit and created the Edison Institute, a museum with a replica of an American colony, in Ford’s hometown.

At age forty, Henry Ford had only accumulated twenty eight thousand dollars, but after twenty-three years in the automotive business, he turned those twenty eight thousand dollars into nine hundred million for the Ford Company. Even though Henry Ford died in 1947, he was certainly affecting to modern Midwesterners and Americans. Henry Ford took his love for mechanics, his good business sense, and his sensible people skills and turned them into one of the most successful businesses in American history. But do we approve of where he took us?  That remains to be seen.