Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and inventor of the modern industrial assembly line for mass production of affordable automobiles.

He grew up on a prosperous family farm in Dearborn, Michigan, and in 1879 he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist. Upon his marriage to Clara Bryant in 1888 Ford supported himself by running a sawmill.

In 1891 Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, and after his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the Quadricycle.

After this initial success, Henry Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In 1908, the Ford company released the Model T. By 1918 half of all cars in America were Model Ts. Henry Ford was famous for saying his customers could get a Ford car in any color they liked—so long as it was black.

In 1919, Henry Ford turned the company over to his son Edsel, although still maintaining a hand in its management.

A virulent anti-Semite, Henry Ford went on to publish a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which featured a large number of his own anti-semitic hate tracts. These were later published as bound books: "The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem" (November, 1920); "Jewish Activities in the United States" (April, 1921); "Jewish Influences in American Life" (November, 1921); and "Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States" (May, 1922). The paper is perhaps best known as Ford's vehicle to popularize the infamous (and false) Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford closed the Independent in December 1927.

Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler financial backing when Hitler was first starting out in politics, and prohibited Jews from working in the Ford company's European factories. In July of 1938, Ford became the first American awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by the Nazi regime, the highest award that could be given to a civilian. He was also the only American singled out for praise in Hitler's Mein Kampf, Hitler calling him "the only man in America free from Jewish control." Hitler reportedly kept a picture of Ford on his desk, and once said of him, "We look to Heinrich [sic] Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America."

Ford was a noted anti-intellectual ("History is bunk," he once said).

Ford also created the Ford Foundation, an organisation whose stated purpose was to strengthen democracy and reduce poverty.