The Henry Ford

DEARBORN, Mich. — Henry Ford had an idea: America belonged on wheels.

On the morning of June 4, 1896, the young engineer put his idea to the test, rolling out a gasoline-powered machine he had been tinkering with called the Quadricycle. He brought it out of the shed behind his Detroit home, gave it a push — and jumped aboard for a ride into history.

Ford's Quadricycle was not the first car on the road. But, as they will tell you at The Henry Ford, as the first of some 15 million Ford vehicles that would be driven throughout the country during the next three decades, it was certainly one of the most significant.

Not too many years later, Ford had other life-changing ideas: Cars could be made quicker and cheaper through an assembly-line process. And cars should be cheap enough for average people to afford them; workers should be paid enough that they could buy the cars they built.

The Model T came along, and America would never be the same.

Then came Ford's revolutionary business idea that if all the raw materials for an automobile could be produced and gathered at one site, it could cut delays and speed production. The Rouge River plant came into being, and Ford became one of the leading industrialists of his day.

You come to The Henry Ford thinking you will learn about these history-altering developments in transportation and about the man who thought them up — and you do. But you don't get very far down the first hallway before you realize that the whole premise here is not just cars or even just history. The Henry Ford celebrates the power of ideas: creative ideas, audacious ideas, daring ideas, even a few misguided ideas — and how they have been used to change and define our lives.

The Henry Ford is the umbrella name for a complex that includes five separate attractions: the Henry Ford Museum, a collection of objects and artifacts amassed by Ford; Greenfield Village, a gathering of historic properties; the Henry Ford IMAX Theatre; the Ford Rouge Factory Tour; and the Benson Ford Research Center.

It is not surprising that it bills itself as "America's Greatest History Attraction."

The Henry Ford owes its existence to the fact that Ford was an inveterate collector. He was one of the first to see the value of preserving common artifacts from his own era, which was a time of intense change throughout America. But it was not the objects themselves that fascinated Ford as much as how those objects were used, the ideas behind them. "Mankind passes from the old to the new over a human bridge formed by those who labor in the three principle arts — Agriculture, Manufacturing and Transportation," he wrote.