Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company and helped make automobiles affordable for ordinary families. He pioneered the moving assembly line, a way of building products faster and more cheaply that changed factories everywhere, and in 1914 famously doubled his factory workers' pay to $5 a day, a wage high enough that many could afford to buy the very cars they built. His ideas about mass production reshaped how the whole world manufactures things.