Ford’s legacy a lesson for world - 100 years since Ford came to Cork

THE year 1917 was marked by a number of seismic events. 

It was the year when Albert Einstein published his first paper on cosmology, the year of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the year when the United States entered the Great War on the side of Britain and its allies and the year when a global flu epidemic began, killing 50 million people between 1917 and 1919.

It was also the year when Henry Ford established the Ford factory on the Marina in Cork city, a testament not just to his Irish roots but to the global pull of a revolution he had begun less than a decade before in the city of Dearborn, Michigan, in the US where he was born.

Henry, whose father William left Co Cork for America during the Great Famine, rose from being a farm boy to become the world’s richest man by bringing motoring to the masses. While the Industrial Revolution had begun in Britain, it was perfected in the US and the man who came to embody that perfection was Henry Ford, the pioneer of the automobile industry who developed a horseless carriage into a billion-dollar empire.

As we salute a great industrialist, we should also pay tribute to a gracious man. Despite his vast wealth, Ford lived modestly and showed a rare affinity with his workers by setting a $5-a-day minimum wage and an eight-hour, five day week. That is his most lasting legacy.