But Midwestern myopia, a run of bad luck, complacency, lacklustre design in the face of ferocious competition and some catastrophically inept public relations have brought this enormous global enterprise within sight of the abyss. Even unexcitable commentators are asking whether Ford can survive.The Ford story began in 1879, when a 16-year-old Henry Ford left the family farm in Michigan, walked eight miles to a Detroit machine-shop and began to change the world. German scientists had pioneered automobile technology, but it was Henry Ford who realised the universal appeal of the motor car. Poetically, he said he had to create the "gasoline buggy" to escape the stultifying tedium of the Midwest, but people all over the planet felt exactly the same.

So Ford created the industry of all industries: his mighty River Rouge plant in Detroit, immortalised in Charles Sheeler's intensely romantic paintings, was a symbol and a source of the American dream.Ford's backers said he should build a car for the rich But Ford's vision was significantly different. "I will build a car for the great multitude," he said in 1907, a year before the Model T appeared, "so low in price that no man will be unable to own one." Soon every man did.Fifty years before Ray Kroc's hamburgers, Ford understood consumerism (although McDonald's' own stumbling fortunes may suggest that this totalitarian vision of the consumer may be losing its vitality). But, at the time, what Ford proposed was a revolution in life's possibilities for anybody who could afford the $850 he charged for his epochal Model T. This car looks now like a flimsy contraption, but it employed ingenious engineering. Vanadium steel and special heat treatments made it light and strong And, typically American, it was ingenious commerce. In raising the levels of Model T production to unprecedented heights, Ford was doing more than building cars; he created a whole business system. Annual orders included 12 million billets of hickory for wheel spokes and 400,000 hides.

Ford was a money machine."Henry Ford's mark in history is almost unbelievable," said Lee Iacocca, a former president of Ford. Campaigns for gas stations and better roads led to the interstate network, which changed America from a rural to an urban nation. In 1914, when the average daily wage in Detroit was $2.34, Ford raised the pay of his men to $5. The Wall Street Journal called this "an economic crime", but Ford knew better-paid workers would buy his cars.