Henry Ford Named Century's Top Businessman

DETROIT - Henry Ford, who transformed the automobile from a rich man's toy into the working man's necessity, is Fortune magazine's Businessman of the Century, beating out Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Ford was selected from a series of profiles on 20th-century business leaders published in Fortune over the past six months.

The magazine said Ford "was a builder of industry that transformed the very land we live on; the first to create a mass market as well as the means to satisfy it; as great an entrepreneur as we've ever seen. His was the kind of genius that endures."

The other three finalists were Alfred Sloan Jr., who as General Motors chairman organized the structure of what would become the world's largest corporation; Thomas Watson, who built IBM into a computer giant; and Gates, 44, the richest man in the world.

Ford founded Ford Motor in 1903 at age 40. Five years later, he introduced the Model T, which would be produced until 1927 as its price fell from $850 to $290. In 1913, he adapted the moving assembly line for auto production and drastically lowered the cost of cars.

At that time, Ford paid his workers a then-lucrative $5 a day, giving them economic access to the market he was creating.

"As Ford adapted the emerging principles of mass production to the automobile and hired tens of thousands of workers to put those principles into practice, he gave rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the blue-collar middle class," the magazine said.