Ford Motor Company

The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 in Detroit by Henry Ford, born in 1863 on a Michigan farm to William Ford, who had emigrated from Ballinascarty, County Cork, in 1847 during the Irish Famine, and Mary Litogot, an American of Belgian descent. Henry rejected the farming life, apprenticed as a machinist, and rose through Detroit’s nascent automobile industry. In 1908 he launched the Model T, a $850 car that within a decade had been driven onto millions of American roads at a price ordinary workers could afford. The moving assembly line that Ford perfected at Highland Park in 1913 reorganised global manufacturing. The company remains under the partial control of the founding family through a dual-class share structure.