"I think the wheels were in his head," Margaret Ford Ruddiman explained about her big brother Henry's lifelong mania for tinkering. Indeed, from the early days of his youth, the wheels in Henry Ford's head were turning, in his fascination with farm tools and engines, gadgets and machines, and automobiles. And after that, with business, industry, and society; always, in sum, with how the world, and everything in it, works. Some of the flawed notions his mental gears ground out may detract from Ford's legacy as a human being, but even his worst failings cannot lessen the impact of his brightest ideas or of Ford Motor Company, which he founded to express them. Through the company or his own constant activity, the influence of Henry Ford was felt on American history and on human civilization, for good and ill.

The Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, an Episcopalian minister who for many years would head Ford Motor Company's sociological department, wrote of Henry Ford in 1923, "There are in him lights so high and shadows so deep, that I cannot get the whole of him in the proper focus at the same time." W. C. Cowling, the company's sales manager from 1931 to 1937, likewise had trouble penetrating his boss's mercurial temperament. "I think," Cowling explained in reminiscences taped by the Henry Ford Museum and Library in 1951, "Henry Ford's personality was almost ethereal. You might not see him for months, but the spirit of Henry Ford was in that organization always. His personality dominated people whether he said anything or only sat there. He dominated a group because of his personality, not his money, but his personality I can't describe. I think he would have been the same if he'd only had twenty cents."

As I grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo located on the Maumee River, Henry Ford and his motor company were a part of my life. Every spring, with pronounced regularity, my classmates and I would board a school bus and travel fifty-five miles to the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village for our annual field trip. The collection of buildings in Dearborn is homage to American invention, all of the edifices moved from their original location by Henry Ford. We learned how Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in his New Jersey laboratory, how George Washington Carver experimented with peanuts in his Alabama institute, and how the Wright brothers transformed their Ohio bicycle shop into an airplane design center. Decades later I still have fond memories of wandering around Greenfield Village, having a try at churning butter, watching a blacksmith make harnesses, and putting around the premises in a chauffeured Model T. Ford's goal was to make history tangible, and so he did. But mostly on these field trips we learned about Henry Ford-the tireless mechanic who put the world on wheels.

The Ford dealership closest to my house growing up was in the town of Maumee, just across the Maumee River from Perrysburg, on a bluff where General William Henry Harrison built a fort during the War of 1812. It was owned by a wonderful man named Will Donaldson, who regaled me with incredible stories about being Henry Ford's chauffeur during the Great Depression. Donaldson, whose father worked for Ford Motor, had graduated from the first high school class sponsored by Henry Ford, held in an old nineteenth-century schoolhouse built in Greenfield Village. Ford, with an eye for young talent, employed Donaldson while still a teenager to drive him around metropolitan Detroit to conduct farm and factory inspections. Together they also drove to Boston, excavated an old fort in Georgia, made soybean burgers for dinner, and rebuilt old Model Ts that had been scrapped in a junkyard. Donaldson once showed me the special pass he had granting access to any Ford Motor facility at any time. Captivated by his tales, I did a school paper on the unique relationship he fostered with Henry Ford: it was, essentially, my first oral history project.

During those class trips and casual talks with Will Donaldson, the stranger sides of Henry Ford's multifaceted personality naturally escaped my purview. Ford was, to my uninformed mind, the father of the automobile, a tinkerer extraordinaire in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. In fact, Scotch-taped to my bedroom wall, next to autographed pictures of Detroit Tiger All-Stars Mickey Lolich and Al Kaline, was a Norman Rockwell illustration of the young Henry Ford sitting with his father on a Dearborn workbench, taking machines apart and reassembling them. Purchased at a Greenfield Village gift shop, this poster, titled "The Boy Who Put the World on Wheels," had been commissioned by Ford Motor Company in 1953 to help commemorate the company's fiftieth anniversary (it also appeared in Life magazine). Eventually, as I entered high school, the Rockwell picture came down, replaced by rock 'n' roll posters of the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, but I did occasionally flip through a book called Quotations from the Unusual Henry Ford. Rereading it twenty-five years later, I found two quotes I had underlined in green felt pen. One read: "I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that anyone knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible." Another one, starred, offered this counsel: "Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who feels himself 'settled' is not settled-he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there."

It's not hard to fathom why such cracker-barrel wisdom would appeal to a high schooler. I, like many others, responded to Henry Ford's unfettered optimism. After graduation in the summer of 1978, I abandoned the security of Perrysburg for the Haverfield Hall dormitory at Ohio State University. And my own set of "wheels" became my rolling address, a used, gold 1970 LTD four-door hardtop. From 1960 to 1970, Ford Motor Company had manufactured over 411 different body-styles-the reliable LTD, sadly, ranked as one of the least exciting to a teenager. Yet, brainwashed, perhaps, by those field trips to Dearborn, I was proud to drive a Ford. That car, which bounced like a boat on water, was an extension of myself, my personal sanctuary, my trusty friend, which could take me wherever I wanted to go. Known simply as "the LTD," it remains a part of my college years as surely as Ohio State-Michigan football games, Halloween Harvest balls, and buckets of beer at the Varsity Club just off High Street.

Besides my attachment to the LTD, for which I would change spark plugs, put on new fan belts, and pour transmission fluid, I took a general interest in cars. Nearly every month I would purchase Car and Driver, Cars & Parts, and Road & Track from the 7-Eleven just a few blocks from my dormitory. Someday I hoped to drive a red Mustang II built on a 96.2-inch wheelbase with a 302-cubic-inch V-8 engine or a vintage Thunderbird convertible, which to my mind had always been much "cooler" than the Chevrolet Corvette. Some people fantasize about a dream home; I always imagined owning my own dream car.

It was as a history major at Ohio State that I learned some of the more surprising facts of Henry Ford's illustrious career. As a student, I developed a particular passion for studies of the U.S. labor movement, thanks in large measure to the best teacher I've ever encountered, Professor Warren Van Tine. With great conviction, Van Tine regaled his class with stories about Woody Guthrie hitchhiking across America with "This Machine Kills Fascists" carved on his six-string guitar, Mother Jones assailing mine owners for poisoning the lungs of babies, and Samuel Gompers championing the Cigar Makers International Union as a prelude to organizing the American Federation of Labor. As I read books by labor historians David Brody, David Montgomery, Nelson Lichtenstein, and others, I was astonished to discover that Henry Ford was considered one of the bad guys, the man who boldly gave workers the "$5 Day" in 1914 only to become the most impassioned anti-union voice in America during the Great Depression. Suddenly, the Henry Ford I had first encountered through the idyllic history at Greenfield Village and at Donaldson Ford, full of Horatio Alger-like pluck and blessed with a genius for machines, was tainted. But one fact was irrefutable: in 1914 his company-Ford Motor-produced and sold more cars than the combined total sold throughout the rest of the world.

After Ohio State, I went on to earn a Ph.D. in U.S. diplomatic history at Georgetown University. On the side, I read whatever I could about the remarkable Henry Ford, thinking that someday I would write a book about him. Two biographies I particularly enjoyed were Roger Burlingame's Henry Ford and Carol Gelderman's Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist. The most informative book ever written about the sage of Dearborn, however, is David L. Lewis's The Public Image of Henry Ford. It soon became clear just how elusive the Motor Magnate was. Biographers had long grappled with contradictory accounts of Ford's own verbal accounts and his six ghostwritten memoirs, all of which are laced with anecdotes that don't ring quite true. "I've read everything that I could get my hands on about Henry Ford and I've never agreed with any of them in total," W. C. Cowling once grumbled. "I don't know of anybody that really captured him."

Yet Ford's story hardly needed embellishment: he lived through fascinating times, and did as much as any other individual to make them so. Ford entered the world on July 30, 1863, just under seven months after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the United States, and just four years after French engineer Jean-Joseph-Etienne Lenoir built the first practical internal combustion engine, as well as the first vehicle to be powered by one. Although only five hundred of the temperamental Lenoir engines were ever built, they inspired budding engine designers throughout Europe. Even so, Lenoir's achievements were seen as no more than just another couple of sparks in the technological explosion that was redefining Western civilization throughout the last third of the nineteenth century. It was not until Henry Ford's day that the masses would begin to see the possibilities for a "horseless carriage."

Science and engineering burst forth, fueled by the enthusiasm of myriad thinkers and tinkerers in Europe and in North America. In Boston, Scottish-born American inventor Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent on the telephone revolutionized human communication. Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, New Jersey, poured out a stream of world-changing inventions, including his 1877 phonograph and his 1879 lightbulb. Slowly but surely, the automobile was coming, too.

In 1878, Germany's Nikolaus August Otto improved on Lenoir's internal combustion engine by using an electric spark to ignite a mixture of coal, gasoline, and air into enough of an explosion inside a cylinder to push a piston and turn a drive wheel. In 1885, Otto's collaborator Gottlieb Daimler developed a gasoline-fueled, high-speed internal combustion engine that could propel a small motorcycle, and, a year later, the first gas-powered four-wheel car. Daimler's work not only predated Henry Ford's by a full decade but provided the basic mechanics for it as well. The pioneering French car manufacturing firm Panhard et Levassor, which issued a catalogue describing its gasoline-fueled automobile line, added to the fundamentals the American inventor would later draw on.

For Henry Ford, being young in an age of prodigious invention meant being alive to share in the bounty of the day's innovations. Even better, he was part of a capitalist nation with an abundant supply of natural resources, the most advanced techniques for extracting them, and the biggest, richest, and least thrifty market of eager consumers in the history of human civilization. In retrospect, Henry Ford's career appears in part to be the product of an uncanny combination of fortuitous circumstances that put a Michigan mechanic of certain obsessive predilections in precisely the right places for him to meet exactly the right people at just the right times. In this way his natural talents were able to express themselves to the fullest.

In his 1855 masterwork Leaves of Grass, poet Walt Whitman offered a celebratory hymn to the doers in American life, those driven by the urgent potency of the dawn of the twentieth century: "A worship new I sing," Whitman rhapsodized. "You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours / You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours." Indeed, when Henry Ford was growing into manhood, many of America's most durable heroes were bold individualists whose careers had melded science with commerce. Their inventions described their achievements: Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Robert Fulton's steamboat, Cyrus McCormick's reaper, Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, John Deere's steel plow. The young Henry Ford aspired to join their ranks.

Populist to his core, Ford preferred fortunes born of production rather than the paper-shuffling kind that benefited only the stock manipulators and financial speculators who contrived them. He disdained men like railroad baron Jay Gould for being greedy "city slickers" helpless in a machine shop, research laboratory, or manufacturing plant. "Did you ever see dishonest calluses on a man's hands?" Ford once asked. "Hardly. When a man's hands are callused and women's hands are worn, you may be sure honesty is there. That's more than you can say about many soft white hands." Ford, like his fellow automotive pioneers, had to either thread every rod and bore every cylinder himself or get an associate to do it. He also had to invent his own ignition system, and he did it all with midnight zeal. Ford saw himself as heir to a tradition of innovation that started with Benjamin Franklin, changing our national character and the world with it. As historian Willis M. West put it, "The American invents as the Greek chiseled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian sings."

Anybody interested in understanding the inventor Henry Ford and his car company must begin by reading historian Allan Nevins's indispensable three-volume study, written between 1954 and 1963. Nevins, working with Frank Ernest Hill, was given unprecedented access to the Ford Motor Company Archives. A combination of group biography and business history, the Nevins trilogy profiled such underappreciated figures as James Couzens, Alexander Malcomson, Charles Sorensen, and Percival Perry.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Wheels for the World by Douglas G. Brinkley Copyright © 2003 by Douglas G. Brinkley
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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