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Henry Ford, the father of the American automobile industry, was born just outside of Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863. The descendent of Belgian and Irish immigrants, Ford attended a one-room schoolhouse and worked on his family’s farm until the age of sixteen when he left for Detroit. By day he worked in a machine shop and by night he repaired clocks and watches. Eventually he landed a job as chief engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. He dabbled in inventions in his spare time—building a horseless carriage and a steam engine tractor—until in 1884 he read a magazine article about the four-stroke internal combustion engine newly invented by German engineer Nicholas Otto. Ford spent the better part of a decade tinkering in a small brick shed in his garden, eventually constructing the “Quadricycle,” a two-cylinder motor affixed to bicycle wheels with no body or means of reversing.

By August 1899, Ford had raised enough money to leave his job at Edison Illuminating with the hope of building “a car for the great multitude.” Whereas the cars of Europe were affordable only to the elite, Ford’s founding vision for the motor company he chartered in 1903 was to give America—its rich and poor alike—the gift of motion. One of the most comprehensive books on American car history is James J. Flink’s The Automobile Age, which documents the meteoric rise of Ford’s empire. In 1908, Ford released his Model T at a cost of $850 ($19,300 in today’s dollars), the first motorcar affordable to the middle class, and one that could be replicated quickly enough to meet large-scale demand. The Model T sold hundreds of units in the first year, but Ford kept pushing his innovation—refining his assembly process and dropping his price.

By 1912, the Model T was selling for $575 ($12,200 today) and the assembly of the chassis took one-sixth the amount of time it had taken just a year earlier. By 1916, the car was priced at $345, and produced at a record-high annual rate of 738,811 units—roughly half the total number of cars then on U.S. roads. And by 1926, “assembling an automobile took only ninety minutes,” wrote Flink, “and cars rolled off [the] four final assembly lines every thirty seconds.” Ford sold more than 15 million cars between 1908 and 1927, at which point the price had been reduced to a record low of $290 ($3,400 today)—a car even bootleggers could afford.

In fact, as mentioned earlier, the roots of stock car racing were formed during the Prohibition era when bootleggers ferried illegal booze throughout the South. Ford became a folk hero to these renegades—no small irony given that he was a puritanical, compulsively disciplined man so opposed to drinking that he made all his employees swear off alcohol consumption. (Ford declined even a taste from the jar of home-made moonshine one fan offered him during a trip to Asheville, North Carolina.)

For all his success, Ford lived in a relatively modest home. His fireplace bore the inscription “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.” He openly questioned the limits of his wealth: “Money means nothing to me,” he said in a 1923 interview. “There is nothing I want that I cannot have. But I do not want the things money can buy.” He wanted, among other things, political power—at one point he contemplated a bid for president—but his reputation as a teetotaler, a corporate autocrat, a religious eccentric (he reportedly believed in reincarnation), and a bigot (he ran anti-Semitic comments in a newspaper he owned) limited his voter appeal.

In truth, Henry Ford probably had more influence on America from outside of Washington than he ever could have had from inside the capital. By far his biggest cultural and economic impact came in the form of the assembly line, which became the basic building block of large-scale manufacturing. “The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile just like another automobile, to make them all alike, to make them come through the factory alike,” said Ford, “just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from the match factory.”

When coupled with a seemingly unlimited domestic supply of coal and oil, Ford’s assembly-line innovations helped propel America’s ascent. In fact, it was the success of the automobile that kept the oil industry alive and thriving. Ford’s cars debuted just as Edison’s invention of the lightbulb was killing the demand for lighting oil. In the nick of time, Ford had unwittingly created a new market for oil—transportation.

In the decades after World War II, America became known as the world’s industrial behemoth, thanks to a combination of abundant energy reserves and the mass production techniques first established and refined at Ford’s Highland Park, Michigan, headquarters. “She sits bestride the world like a Colossus,” the British historian Robert Payne wrote of the United States in 1949; “no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations…Half the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two thirds of the production of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry, and with every day the shadow looms larger, more portentous, more dangerous.”