Henry Ford Didn't Invent the Car The Real Inventor Is Almost Forgotten

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. The man who did is barely a footnote in America.

Ask who built the first car and most say Ford. But the real breakthrough had already happened an ocean away in Germany, while Ford was still young.

In 1885, an engineer named Karl Benz built the first true automobile, a three-wheeled carriage with a gasoline engine of his own design. People called it a noisy toy. So his wife Bertha secretly drove it over sixty miles to her mother's, fixing it along the way and proving it worked.

So what did Ford do? Decades later, he took a car only the rich could afford and made it for everyone. His 1913 assembly line dropped the Model T's price until his workers could buy one. Ford didn't invent the car. He invented the car for the masses.

Benz gave the world the automobile. Ford put the world behind the wheel. Both changed history, but only one gets remembered.

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