My Life And Work - The Autobiography of Henry Ford - Written in collaboration with Samuel Crowther - First published in 1922 - On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring of 1893.It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I still feel about farming. There is a legend that my parents were very poor and that the early days were hard ones. Certainly they were not rich, but neither were they poor. There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all otherfarms of the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took meinto mechanics-although my mother always said that I was born a mechanic.