Soon Ford became chief engineer for the Detroit Edison Company, sold his first automobile for $200 and attracted the attention of several businessmen. He gathered $10,000 to start the Detroit Automobile Company, but soon left that venture. With another group of investors, he then organized the Henry Ford Company. When that organization also broke up, due to disagreements over his insistence on offering only a low-price car and his refusal to be hurried in his experiments, Ford returned to his own shop and began working on a four-cylinder motor. Intent on having one of his automobiles achieve the speed of a mile a minute, he began building racing cars. Famed racing driver Barney Oldfield won a race with Ford's "999" at the Grosse Point, Mich., track in 1902.

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Meanwhile, companies like Oldsmobile and Cadillac were selling thousands of cars, which enabled Ford to locate new investors. With $28,000, he formed the Ford Motor Company. The Model A Fordmobile, a practical, utility auto, was produced in 1905 as a tough and simple car for a price of $850 (a second, much more sophisticated, Model A came out in 1928). Soon the business was prospering. The Model B was next in the line, and the Model C followed closely. Then came the Model T, Ford's best-known auto, which, as he later recalled, "contained all that I was able to put into a motorcar, plus the material which for the first time I was able to obtain."

The Model T was a noisy, uncomfortable, unattractive but efficient automobile. Within five years, half a million Model Ts were on the road. Strictly utilitarian, the car was the butt of many jokes. Taking the frequent needling about the Model T's appearance in stride, Ford himself joked about the car's color, saying, "Any customer can have any car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black." The Model T's popularity resulted in the employment of 4,000 people in Ford's factory.

Increased demand called for increased speed of production. Ford achieved faster production by introducing the moving assembly belt, which he began to experiment with in 1913. He described it as "the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker, and the reduction of the movement to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement….He must have every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second."

Ford increased the minimum wage for his employees to $5 for an eight-hour day. In 1918, the River Rouge plant was built, and he increased wages to an unheard of $6 a day. By 1924, Ford had manufactured 10 million Model Ts. In 1928, Ford brought out his second Model A, and in 1932 the sturdy V-8 engine appeared.

The Great Depression struck the Ford Motor Company hard. Wages were lowered and there were layoffs, as well. Labor unions were established within the struggling work force. Strikes were rampant, and Ford fought the unions hard, but eventually the United Auto Workers became an effective collective bargaining force.

Ford, a known pacifist, opposed America's entry into World War II. Nevertheless, he agreed to build airplane engines for the British government. In May 1940, he stated: "If it became necessary, the Ford Motor Company could, with the counsel of men like [Charles] Lindbergh and [Eddie] Rickenbacker, under our own supervision and without meddling by government agencies, swing into the production of a thousand airplanes of standard design a day."

It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that inspired Ford to begin a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort. To the west of Dearborn, the giant Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line that was a mile long. The first bomber rolled off the line in May 1942, beginning the effective production of several hundred aircraft a month. Bombers were produced at the rate of one plane per hour, thereby confounding Ford's critics, who had called the plant undertaking "Willit Run." By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, plus 57,851 airplane engines, thousands of engine superchargers and generators, and 4,291 military gliders.

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