Henry Ford is an American industrialist, inventor, and founder of the Ford Motor Company, who revolutionized the global automotive industry. By creating the first mass-produced Ford Model T (1908) and introducing assembly line production, he made the car affordable for the middle class, reducing the assembly time from 12 hours to 1.5 hours.
Henry Ford built his empire on two key principles. On the one hand, to ensure strict control over the cost of products, huge vertically integrated structures were created, such as the River Rouge full-cycle plant in Dearborn. On the other hand, Ford created production facilities outside the United States, believing that international trade and cooperation would contribute to the establishment of lasting peace. Ford Motor's first foreign enterprise was a factory in Canada opened in August 1904, and by 1929 Henry Ford's empire had branches on all continents except Antarctica. In the early 1930s, almost every third car in the world was produced at Ford factories. After the collapse of the USSR, Ford became the first foreign automobile company to open production in Russia (2002).