Henry Ford

Ford was a working engineer who built the Quadricycle himself in 1896, and he stayed involved in the design of the Model T, though Childe Harold Wills, Joseph Galamb and Eugene Farkas did much of the drafting. His fixation on one simple, repairable car drove the moving assembly line and the price cuts that followed. The same stubbornness nearly broke the company in the 1920s, when he resisted replacing the ageing T until rivals had overtaken him.