Henry Ford — Assembly Line, $5 Day, Model T

**Henry Ford** did not invent the automobile. He did something far more consequential: he made it affordable to the people who built it. Born in 1863 on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford grew up with an instinctive genius for machinery and an abiding hatred of the drudgery of farm labor. He left the farm at 16, apprenticed as a machinist in Detroit, and spent the next two decades tinkering with internal combustion engines while working as an engineer for Edison Illuminating Company. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 (after two failed earlier attempts) and in 1908 introduced the Model T — the car that would change the world.