A New York Times Notable Book • This detailed history chronicles the rise of Ford Motor Company and the man who revolutionized the automotive industry In this monumental work, one of our finest historians reveals the riveting details of Ford Motor Company’s epic achievements, from the outlandish success of the Model T and V-8 to the glory days of the Thunderbird, Mustang, and Taurus. Brilliant innovators, colorful businessmen, and clever eccentrics, as well as the three Ford factories themselves, all become characters in this gripping drama. Douglas Brinkley is a master at crafting compelling historical narratives, and this exemplary history of one of the preeminent American corporations is his finest achievement yet. "A comprehensive and briskly paced account of the man, the machines, and the company that dramatically influenced the course of 20th-century America... highly readable and engrossing." — BusinessWeek "[A] comprehensive and highly readable...first rate corporate history." — The New York Times Douglas Brinkley is a distinguished professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. His books include  The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House ,   Rosa Parks: A Life , and   Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War . INTRODUCTION I think the wheels were in his head," Margaret Ford Ruddiman explained about her big brother Henry's lifelong mania for tinkering.1 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."2 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."3 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 burg