Henry Ford sold his first Model A runabout to a Chicago doctor in 1903, the same year the Wright Brothers made their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
One hundred years later, facing financial losses that plunged the stock to around $11 a share, the world's second-largest auto company begins a second century with an update of the famous blue oval trademark of the family name.
Despite hard times Ford remains an icon of American business and globalization.
The dynasty began with $28,000 in a converted Detroit wagon factory on June 16, 1903, and continues into the fourth generation with 46-year-old William Clay Ford Jr., a Princeton-educated engineer, self-styled environmentalist, erstwhile vegetarian and founder Henry's great-grandson, firmly in charge as chairman and chief executive officer.
Family members hold 70.9 million Class B shares worth around $800 million, maintaining iron-fisted control of a 40-percent voting block in the company. The special Class B shares, created when Ford made a public offering in 1956, protect the down-on-its-luck industry giant from a hostile Wall Street.
"It prevents Ford from being taken over," Ford said in a recent interview with the Detroit News. "And given where our stock price has been in the past 18 months, it's a high likelihood that that would have happened."
Since 2001, Ford has lost $6.4 billion in the wake of the Explorer-Firestone tire rollover debacle, closed five plants, and cut more than 35,000 jobs in an ambitious restructuring to earn $7 billion in operating profit by mid-decade and remake the company for the 21st century.
Bill Ford, who drives a cobalt blue Mustang to and from his $2.9 million estate near Ann Arbor, Mich., told Newsweek he never wanted to be CEO but accepted the responsibility to save Ford Motor Company from possible bankruptcy.
"I can't fail. That's just not an option," he said. "A family member has run Ford for 80 of its 100 years."
Last Tuesday, Bill Ford went to Norfolk, Va., to drive the first 2004 F-150 pickup off the assembly line. Facing stylish new entries from GM, Dodge, Toyota and the new Nissan Titan, Ford is counting on the re-designed F-Series to remain the nation's top-selling full-size pickup and re-fuel its bottom line.
The red F-150 SuperCab Lariat was powered by the company's 100 millionth V8 engine. Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger once wrote Henry Ford in the 1930s that it was a "treat" to drive the low-priced, 85-horsepower, single-barrel carburetor "Flathead" Ford V8.
The 350,000 employees who remain Ford's extended family are depending on him.
"Our future starts here and it starts now," said Ford.
Industry analysts say Ford has too many North American plants for its shrinking market share, faces billions in unfunded pensions, soaring healthcare costs, and tough contract talks in July with the United Auto Workers.
Ford and Chrysler have had to match nearly dollar for dollar generous no-interest, cash-back offers in an incentive war set off by General Motors to jumpstart sales after Sept. 11, 2001.
Profits have never been more important.
Bill Ford became a company pitchman like Lee Iacocca at Chrysler a generation earlier, earning high praise for a $3 billion ad campaign polishing Ford's image and touting its heritage.
The automaker has an ambitious schedule to introduce new products, from the F-150 to the Ford Five Hundred, Futura sedan, crossover Freestyle wagon, all-new Mustang and limited production $150,000 GT racer, hoping to attract buyers interested in more than cheap, basic transportation.
Ford hopes the days when FORD jokingly meant "Fix Or Repair Daily" are a distant memory.
"If you look at our 100-year history it's clear that our success has always been driven by great products," said Bill Ford. "Our centennial gives us an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to that heritage of outstanding products, and use it to build our future. Our goal is to have an even greater positive impact on people's lives in our second century than we did in our first."
Henry Ford's original Model T sold for $850 in October 1908, bringing affordable motoring to the masses. Before the Model T, cars were toys of the rich. In 1914, the sturdy, utilitarian Model T came in any color as long as it was black.
Mass production dropped the price to $500 in 1913, $390 in 1915, and $260 in 1925, as the time to manufacture a car fell from 12.5 hours in 1912 to 90 minutes in 1914. Ford sold 16.7 million Model Ts in 19 years of production -- half of all the cars made in the world up until that time.
Henry Ford did not invent the automobile.
That was done by tinkerers in Europe and America.
One of eight children, Ford left the family farm at 16 for a job as an apprentice machinist at an electric company. He is credited with pioneering mass production that ever more efficiently put together standardized parts on a moving assembly line, instituting a $5-a-day wage, and revolutionizing the pace of industrialization that fundamentally altered the workplace.
His assembly line was based on the ruthless efficiency of Chicago's meat making industry, where the Swift and Company plant used a conveyor system to move animal carcasses from the killing floor to butchering and packaged meat to shipping in ice-cooled rail cars.
Ford's improvements and innovations moved America from an agricultural society to a mechanical one, transforming the lives of millions by his death at 83 in 1947.
His personal stock holdings went to the Ford Foundation.
The auto industry is one of the cornerstones of the world economy, representing about one-eighth of U.S. gross domestic product.
Making cars requires raw materials, iron ore, steel, rubber, glass, plastic, paint, fluids; workers make the parts assembled into vehicles by wage earners and sold by dealers to consumers who buy gas, pay taxes, tolls, drive on public roads and superhighways and travel places for business and pleasure.
David Cole, director of the Center for Automobile Research in Ann Arbor, estimates the average auto company job generates $300,000 in contributions to the economy compared to a $79,500 contribution of any other job.
When Ford built the huge River Rouge plant in Michigan in 1927, the company owned forests, coal mines, a sawmill, a railroad, a fleet of Great Lakes ore carriers and a glassworks, in a feat of vertical integration that gave Ford total control of its manufacturing process.
More than 100,000 people were expected at a five-day bash at the Henry Ford II World Center in Dearborn, Mich., that began Thursday afternoon when a caravan of vintage Tin Lizzies and a few Model As motored to Michigan ending a 100-city, 3,000-mile cross-country road tour from California.
They joined 1920s Ford Tri-Motor airplanes, tractors, classic Thunderbirds, Mustangs, Tauruses, sport utility vehicles, muscle cars, monster trucks, Volvos, Jaguars, Land Rovers, Austin Martins and the original Batmobile (a Lincoln concept car) on display at the 152-acre world headquarters.
Henry Ford's antique 1896 Quadricycle, a four-horsepower buggy on four bicycle tires, is parked near a Ford MA zero-emission concept electric-powered sports car.
Ford sold his first horseless carriage to build an improved second and third version, and then built racing cars including Barney Oldfield's famous "999" racer.
A 1957 Edsel sedan, the company's biggest flop, also is on display.
Before Ford offered $5 a day in 1913, workers would show up one day and not the next. The $5-a-day living wage was double what most laborers earned, attracted thousands of immigrants and African-Americans, and is credited with helping establish a black middle class.
The daily wage rose to $7 in 1929 but was cut to $4 a day in 1932.
Ford was one of the first companies to hire disabled World War I veterans.
In 1916, Ford Motor Co. employed people representing 62 nationalities and more than 900 people with disabilities, and in 1920 had more black workers than any other automaker. The company hired its first black manager in 1924 and promoted the first African-American to plant foreman the same year.
"We want to create for everybody the best life conditions possible, a high level of opportunity -- a life that people will be glad to live," Henry Ford wrote in a 1926 book "Today and Tomorrow."
Henry Ford introduced profit sharing and supported an eight-hour day and five-day week. The company negotiated its first contract with the UAW in 1941 that prohibited discrimination based on "race, color, national origin or creed."
Contradictory and highly paternalistic, Ford also used company thugs, labor spies and violence to thwart unionization. He sued the Chicago Tribune for calling him an anarchist and "ignorant idealist" in a 1919 editorial, winning 6 cents damages. He lost a 1918 bid for U.S. Senate as a Democrat.
He bought the Dearborn Independent and published a series of attacks on the "International Jew," a mythical moneylender he blamed for financing World War I.
Ford suspended passenger car production between 1942 and 1945 to make B24 Liberator Bombers, 57,000 aircraft engines and more than 250,000 tanks and Jeeps for World War II allies.
"The internal combustion engine is not going away any time soon," said Bill Ford. "But for the first time in 100 years, there are potential alternatives, such as hybrid-electric and fuel-cell vehicles, that offer an opportunity to substantially increase fuel economy and reduce or eliminate emissions without sacrificing any of the other features that customers want.
"In the 20th century we made automobiles economically affordable. In the 21st century we want to make them affordable in every sense for the word -- economically, environmentally and socially."
