Ford
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young," Said Henry Ford to one reporter for the Work Employment Society. Ford was born on a prosperous farm in Springwells Township, now known as the city of Dearborn, Michigan. William Ford (1826-1905) and Mary Litogot, Ford's parents, were immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. The family was evicted from their land in Somerest, Ireland. During the summer of 1873, Henry saw his first self-propelled road machine, a stationary steam engine that could be used for threshing or to power a saw mill. The operator, Fred Reden, had mounted it on wheels connected with a drive chain. Henry was fascinated with the machine. Henry took this passion about mechanics into his home. His father had given him a pocket watch in his early teen years. By fifteen, he had a reputation as a watch repairman, having dismantled and reassembled watches of friends and neighbors dozens of times.
His mother died in 1876. That devastated young Henry. His father expected Henry to eventually take over the family farm. But Henry hated farm work, with his mother dead, there was no reason to keep him on the farm. He later said, "I never had any particular love for the farm. It was the mother on the farm I loved." www.hfmgv.org. In 1879, he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co. In 1882, he returned to Dearborn to work on the farm and became very good at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. This led to his being hired by Westinghouse Company to service their steam engines. In 1888, he married Clara Bryant and they had a single child, Edsel Bryant Ford (1893-1943). For the next three years he supported his family by farming and running a sawmill.
In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company,...
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