[thereddaikon]

Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.

[mulmen]

Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.

[thereddaikon]

I'm not even sure I would compare ford to Jobs or Woz. Woz is a talented engineer. Jobs was a great product guy. I've always thought of Ford as process/production expert. The Model T wasn't a particularly great car compared to its competition. What made it and Ford succeed was his production process made it cheaper than the competition. But his processes also allowed him to make it faster and he came up with the franchise system which gave Ford national reach at a time when every other car maker was regional. The Model T wasn't just cheaper than the competition, in many parts of the country it was realistically the only car you could buy for awhile.