On a rainy summer morning in 1896, with his wife watching expectantly, a 33-year-old engineer for the Edison Illuminating Co. in Detroit, Mich., took his preposterous-looking “quadricycle” for its maiden spin. In a gesture characteristic of the impatience Henry Ford (1863-1947) would exhibit throughout his career, the farmboy turned inventor knocked down the bricks surrounding his shop’s narrow entrance when he realized that the door was too small for his new horseless carriage. Using the same principles of this four-cylinder, brakeless box on wheels — constructed in his spare time — Ford went on to create, 12 years later, the first full-size car designed for the masses, the Model T. The Ford Motor Co., which Ford founded in 1903 with $28,000 from a local coal dealer, devoted itself to turning out this incredibly sturdy, inexpensive, and reliable vehicle after abandoning several less profitable models. It was to be — in the mind of this dedicated entrepreneur — “a car for the great multitude,” one that “no man making a good salary will be unable to afford.” Within a year of its introduction, there were some 10,000 Model Ts on the roads. By 1920, with one out of every two cars in the world a Ford, he had succeeded far beyond his dreams.

Only a few years after the legendary black “Tin Lizzie,” as the model T was nicknamed, first rolled out of Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Mich., the company was producing one car every three minutes. Improved production methods soon reduced the Model T’s original price of slightly under $900 to around $500. The inventor became a billionaire and his “universal cheap car” began to transform the physical, social, and economic fabric of American life. Available for a mere $290 by 1924, the Model T quickly transformed rural America, bringing the newspaper, prosperity, and the world to the farmer’s formerly distant doorstep and effectively ending rural isolation. It vastly expanded the farmer’s market by creating the country’s first national commercial network, and it carried the city dweller into the countryside. In a few decades a complex web of highways created cities and sprawling bedroom communities where there had once been pasture. The automobile changed the land, and how Americans worked and played.

Ford’s most important contribution to the 20th century was his introduction of the assembly line in 1913. With this innovation — inspired by a device for moving cows’ carcasses used by packing houses — Ford ushered in the age of full-scale mass production, complete with moving conveyer belts and standard design and parts, all operating with the support of an efficient mass distribution and spare parts system. While none of these individual elements was uniquely Ford’s, he alone combined them. The assembly line’s speed, economy, and technological precision came to symbolize America’s industrial preeminence in the world. Ford represented the ultimate American success story: The poor farm boy repairing watches in his humble room became a powerful tycoon who could take part in his own government — or choose to challenge it. Ford did both, running unsuccessfully for United States senator from his home state of Michigan in 1918 and facing down Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 by refusing to abide by the president’s National Recovery Act auto industry code.

Ford remained popular even when, in his naivete, this ardent pacifist chartered an ocean liner known popularly as “the peace ship” and sailed to Europe in 1915 to try to stop World War I. His hero’s stature with the public survived his failed senate race and his million-dollar libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, which called him an anarchist. His court testimony revealed a man so woefully ignorant of widely known historical facts that a rumor spread that he could neither read nor write. The public even absolved him when his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, printed anti-Semitic material, which he tried to excuse by professing ignorance of the paper’s contents. When Ford strongly resisted unionization, the public forgave him that, too. But after the so-called 1937 Battle of the Overpass, in which labor organizer Walter Reuther and three other strikers were brutally beaten, and the United Automobile Workers strike of 1941, Ford was finally forced to capitulate to the union.

Ford could even claim a bit of glamour: To interest financial backers in his automobile research, he broke speed records driving his own racing cars. He spoke engagingly of the machine’s role in liberating both the worker and farmer from lives of drudgery, emphasizing his own crucial part in this noble venture. When Ford raised his employees’ minimum wage to an unprecedented $5 a day — almost twice the going rate — reduced their workday, and gave them Saturdays off, fellow industrialists gasped in dismay, while workers cheered. But Ford was merely demonstrating his shrewdness: He recognized that mass production could not succeed unless there was also mass consumption. By giving average workers the means to pay for the cars they built and the leisure time in which to enjoy them, Ford created a mass market, which in turn fed the need for greater production. Ford’s invention changed nothing short of everything in American life.