Autobiography: My Life and Work

Overview
Henry Ford’s 1922 autobiography blends personal narrative, factory-floor detail, and a blunt philosophy of business and society. Written with journalist Samuel Crowther after the explosive success of the Model T, it explains how a farm-bred tinkerer built a system for making complex machines simple, cheap, and reliable, and why he believed service to the public is the only legitimate aim of industry. The book moves from childhood experiments through the Ford Motor Company’s rise, using episodes to illustrate principles: eliminate waste, standardize, trust the power of volume, and let price cuts create demand rather than treat them as a last resort.

Beginnings and Experiments
Ford recalls growing up on a Michigan farm fascinated by mechanisms more than crops. Apprentice work in Detroit machine shops taught precision, while the Edison Illuminating Company gave him flexible hours and a laboratory wage to pursue the gasoline engine. The 1896 Quadricycle, built from scrap and bicycle parts, serves as the emblem of his method: test quickly, learn from failure, simplify, and try again.

Building a Car for the Multitude
After false starts with earlier ventures, Ford Motor Company (1903) aligned manufacturing with sales by emphasizing a single model perfected over time. The Model T (1908) embodied lightness, strength, and interchangeability. Standardizing on few variants and even on black paint, which dried fast, allowed parts to flow and costs to fall. The moving assembly line, introduced in stages by 1913, rearranged work so material moved to the worker, reducing motion and idle time. Speed came not from rushing people but from designing the job so that each small operation fit naturally into the next.

Principles of Production
Ford insists that complexity is waste in disguise. He preaches the gospel of flow: straight-line processes, minimal handling, and tooling that favors repetition. Price is treated as an output of design; make the product simpler and the price will come down, widening the market and raising total profits through volume. He favors buying no more capital than needed, avoiding debt, and reinvesting earnings to remove bottlenecks. Every by-product is a potential revenue stream; clever salvage of scrap, heat, and chemicals becomes a quiet profit engine.

Labor, Wages, and Management
The famous five-dollar day and the eight-hour shift are presented as business logic rather than benevolence. Higher base pay, shorter hours, and stable schedules reduce turnover, improve skill, and cut training cost. Ford argues against elaborate managerial hierarchies and expert mystique, urging foremen to measure by facts on the floor. His Sociological Department, which probed employees’ habits and home life, reflects a paternalism he defends as protecting both the worker and the enterprise, though he stresses that the real incentive is meaningful, efficient work.

Integration, Dealers, and Service
Vertical integration, mines, forests, ships, steel, and the River Rouge complex, aims to secure steady flow and cost control, not to strangle competition. He treats the dealer network as an extension of the factory, obligated to provide parts, maintenance, and fair terms. Advertising has a place, but the best advertisement is a low price and a product that starts every morning.

Society, Education, and Government
Ford champions practical education, shop experience, and learning by doing. He distrusts speculation, excess credit, and legalistic tangles that add no value, preferring transparent prices and quick settlement. He believes that industry, by multiplying useful goods and steady jobs, advances peace and public welfare more effectively than charity, which he views as a stopgap when opportunity is lacking. The tractor and farm improvements symbolize his hope to lighten drudgery beyond the city.

Legacy and Tone
The narrative is brisk, aphoristic, and combative toward orthodox finance and theory. Beyond the story of the Model T, it leaves a manual: start with service, design for flow, cut the price, share gains with workers, and let volume do the rest.