Henry Ford was a pig. He was a racist nazi sympathizer. It disgusts me how he is portrayed as some great man. His contribution with bringing affordable automobiles to the masses and his contribution to production line manufacturing are both great accomplishments but it doesn't change the fact that he was a racist, nazi, scumbag.
The greatest gift Henry Ford gave to the world was the cookout.
He hated waste. If he could find a use for anything he did. He had two things laying around that drove him nuts: tons of saw dust from wheel manufacturing and tons of coal dust from the boilers at the factories.
So he made what we today call 'charcoal brickets' out of it all. Every new Ford came with a bag of charcoal along with instructions on the packaging on how to use it in place of wood for cooking.
And the great outdoor cookout was born.
Ford's greatest blunder was, no doubt, his venture into rubber. He hated giving someone else any money as he was sure there was nothing on earth he couldn't do himself. So he decided to start his own rubber tree farm. He bought a shit ton of land in Brazil, a shit ton of rubber trees and hired a bunch of people to do it all and called the place 'Fordlandia'.
The one person Henry Ford didn't hire: A botanist.
The place was a disaster. He lost millions on it.