Henry Ford

Henry Ford is remembered as the man who put the world on wheels, but the company that bears his name was his third try at building automobiles. His first two ventures collapsed. The Detroit Automobile Company, founded in 1899 with backing from lumber merchant William H. Murphy, produced only a handful of vehicles before dissolving in early 1901. Ford’s reputation as an unreliable tinkerer, more interested in perfecting machines than shipping them, nearly ended his career before it began.

With his backers losing faith, Ford did something unexpected: he turned to racing. On October 10, 1901, in a stripped-down racer he built with associate Ed “Spider” Huff, he beat the famous Alexander Winton at the Grosse Pointe track outside Detroit. The upset victory rebuilt his name overnight and drew fresh investment, leading to the Henry Ford Company in November 1901. But that venture, too, slipped away. When investors brought in machinist Henry M. Leland to impose discipline, Ford left in 1902. The firm became Cadillac.

Ford doubled down on speed. With Tom Cooper he built the brutal 80-plus-horsepower “999,” which daredevil Barney Oldfield drove to fame in 1902. The publicity finally won Ford the capital he needed. On June 16, 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated with roughly $28,000 in paid-in capital. Within five years came the Model T (1908), then the moving assembly line (1913) and the five-dollar day (1914).

By the 1920s Ford was one of the richest men in the world, his company building half the cars in America. The arc from twice-failed mechanic to industrial titan is one of the most consequential second acts in business history, even as his later years carried a darker legacy of labor strife and antisemitic publishing that history records alongside the achievement.

Soichiro Honda

Soichiro Honda (November 17, 1906 – August 5, 1991) was a self-taught mechanic who built a successful wartime manufacturing business, watched it be destroyed within a single year, and then founded one of the world’s largest vehicle companies from the wreckage. In 1937 he established Tokai Seiki to make piston rings, eventually supplying Toyota; by World War II it was a substantial industrial operation employing thousands.

The fall came in 1944 and 1945. A U.S. B-29 bombing raid destroyed the Yamashita plant in 1944, and the 1945 Mikawa earthquake collapsed the Iwata plant. With his facilities in ruins, Honda sold what remained of Tokai Seiki to Toyota for about 450,000 yen in 1945 and walked away from the company he had built.

After what he called a “human rest period” of roughly a year, Honda re-entered manufacturing. In October 1946 he founded the Honda Technical Research Institute and began bolting small surplus engines onto bicycles to create cheap motorized transport for a fuel-starved, war-ruined Japan. In 1948 he incorporated Honda Motor Co., Ltd., and in 1949 partnered with businessman Takeo Fujisawa, who handled finance and sales while Honda focused on engineering.

That division of labor powered an extraordinary ascent. The Super Cub of 1958 became the best-selling motor vehicle in history, Honda grew into the world’s largest motorcycle maker, then broke into automobiles and, in the early 1980s, became the first Japanese automaker to manufacture cars in the United States. Honda died in 1991, his name on engines and vehicles across the globe.