Henry Ford - A Biography (William Adams Simonds)

Author: William Adams Simonds, Hardbound, 290 Pages, ISBN: B0006AQVWK, Second Printing, August, 1946 - Second-Hand book in excellent condition !**

This is the biography—and an extraordinarily fascinating one—of one of the world's greatest industrial engineers, the man who gave us "the poor man's car," his work-people the $5.00 daily minimum wage for eight hours' work, the principle of the assembly line which has made his country the greatest exponent of mass production, and countless advances in industrial technology.

William Simonds has been associated with Mr. Ford for nearly twenty years, and it is a friendly and fascinating story: he has written of a man born in the year of Gettysburg who dreamed even as a farm boy of engines which
1- would relieve man of laborious toil; who built one of the first automobile engines, organized a company to make it, and enlarging always on his original idea has built in the sprawling plants of Dearborn more cars, tractors and air'plane motors than any other manufacturer Mr. Simonds tells of Ford the man of peace; but one of the giants in the wartime programme to defend and preserve freedom. He ends his story, a story like a serial "to be continued," with a description of the building of Willow Run, the world's greatest bomber plant.

Ford's interest in Americana, his lifelong encouragement of research, his contribution to the new use of plastics, his programme for "farm-and-work" communities, are all described in this picture of a pioneer who is one of our great contemporaries, whose complete contribution to social and economic progress only history can evaluate. Ford has had his detractors, and Mr. Simonds instances their claims of mistakes and follies as he replies to them. That this last of the rugged individualists has made a greater impression upon his times than any other engineering and manufacturing genius who can doubt?