ABSTRACT
Early Life Using money that belonged to his wife Mary (nee Litogot), William Ford, an Irish immigrant, bought a farm in Springwells township, near Dearborn, Michigan, and on July 30, 1863, Henry Ford was born there. In those years, the nation was divided by civil war: Abraham Lincoln was president of the twenty-four states of the Union, while Jefferson Davis was president of the eleven states of the Confederacy. Although content as a boy on the prosperous family farm, Henry did not want to spend his life as a farmer, and his independence and mechanical skills steered him in other directions. His interest in machines began early. He was never an inventor but rather someone who loved to tinker with anything that had moving parts. He would disassemble anything in the home to find out how it worked and then put it back together. At thirteen, Henry repaired his first watch, and he became obsessed with watch repair, fixing more than three hundred without ever charging a fee. Once he took a shingle nail and sharpened it on a grindstone to create a screwdriver. Then he made a pair of tweezers from one of his mother's discarded corset stays. With these homemade tools, he took a watch apart, discovered the problem, and fixed it. Throughout his life he enjoyed repairing watches, and even as president of Ford Motor Company he delighted in repairing the watches of his visitors.
