Henry Ford

Henry Ford took the automobile, a plaything for the rich, and put it within reach of ordinary families, remaking transport and industry in the process. Born on a Michigan farm in 1863, he left home at sixteen for Detroit, tinkered with engines through the 1880s and 90s, and after early failures founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The Model T of 1908 changed the world. His Sun in Leo is the born entrepreneur and innovator, the lion who builds his own kingdom and puts his name on it, and as sole owner he became one of the wealthiest men alive. Yet that Sun sits in the twelfth house, the hidden, unknowable realm, so his identity was bound up with grand impersonal ideals rather than the personal limelight.

His Moon in Aquarius is the collective psyche, the out-of-the-box systems-thinker: Fordism, the assembly line, the five-day week, the dream of mass prosperity. His Virgo Ascendant wore the mask of the exacting, efficiency-obsessed engineer who saw every flaw to be optimised.

The chart also shows the shadow. Aquarius at its worst curdles into group narcissism and "my way is the highway" certainty, and Ford used his newspaper to spread vicious antisemitism. A natal signature describes temperament; it never excuses a person's choices, and the harm he did was his own.