Why is Henry Ford a giant? Because he put the world on wheels. Henry Ford did not invent the motor car, nor did he invent the assembly line or mass production. But more than anyone before or since he is remembered as the man who almost singlehandedly took an expensive contraption of doubtful utility and recast it as a machine which changed the world forever. A Michigan farmer's son who became a dollar billionaire, a ruthlessly single-minded autocrat who became a folk hero, a pacifist who went on to inspire Adolf Hitler—he was a boss who paid his workers twice as much as his competitors yet waged an unrelenting war on unions and badly abused the power he had worked so hard to attain.
