 forward to Henry Ford's own story. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's own story, how a farmer boy rose to the power that goes with many millions yet never lost touch with humanity. By Rose Wilder Lane. Forward by Rose Wilder Lane. Fifty-two years ago, July 30, 1863, a few farmers' families near Greenfield, Michigan heard that there was another baby at the Fords, a boy. Mother and son were doing well. They were going to name the boy Henry. Twenty-six years later, a little neighborhood on the edge of Detroit was amused to hear that the man Ford, who had just built a little white house on the corner, had a notion that he could invent something. He was always puttering away in the old shed back of the house. Sometimes he worked all night there. The neighbors saw the light burning through the cracks. Twelve years ago, half a dozen men in Detroit were actually driving the Ford automobile about the streets. Ford had started a small factory with a dozen mechanics and was buying material. It was freely predicted that the venture would never come to much. Last year, January 1914, America was startled by an announcement from the Ford factory that ten million dollars would be divided among the eighteen thousand employees as their share of the company's profits. Henry Ford was a multi-millionaire and America regarded him with awe. Mankind must have its hero. The demand for him is more insistent than hunger, more inexorable than cold or fear. Before a race builds houses or prepares food with its hands, it creates in its mind that demigod, that superman, standing on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, more admirable, more powerful than the others. We must have him as a symbol of something greater than ourselves, to keep alive in us that faith in life which is threatened by our own experience of living. He is at once our greatest solace and our worst enemy. We cling to him as a child clings to a guiding hand, unable to walk without it, and never able to walk alone until it is let go. Every advance of democracy destroys our old hero, and hastily we build up another. When science has exercised jove and real estate promoters have subdivided the Olympian Heights, we desert the old altars to kneel before thrones. When our kings have been cast down from their high places by our inconsistent struggles for liberty, we cannot leave those high places empty. We found a government on the bold declaration. All men are born free and equal, but we do not believe it. Out of the material at hand we must create again our great ones. So, with the growth of big business during the last quarter of a century, we have built up the modern myth of the big business man. Our imaginations are intrigued by the spectacle of his rise from our ranks. Yesterday he was a farmer's son, an office boy, a peddler of Armenian laces. Today he is a demigod. Is our country threatened with financial ruin? At a midnight conference of his dependence, hastily called, he speaks one word. We are saved. Does a foreign nation, fighting for its life, ask our help? He endorses the loan. We contemplate him with awe. In one lifetime he has made himself a world power. In twenty years he has made a hundred million dollars, we say. He is a big business man. Our tendency was immediately to put Henry Ford in that class. He does not belong to it. He is not a big business man. He is a big man in business. It is not strange, with this belief of millions of persons, that the men who had been at the head of our great business development are greater than ordinary men, that most of them believe in themselves and act on that assumption. Henry Ford does not. His greatness lies in that. With millions piling upon millions in our hands, most of us would lose our viewpoint. He has kept his, a plain mechanics outlook on life and human relations. He sees men all as parts of a great machine in which every waste motion, every broken or inefficient part means a loss to the whole. Money doesn't do me any good, he says. I can't spend it on myself. Money has no value anyway. It is merely a transmitter, like electricity. I try to keep it moving as fast as I can for the best interest of everybody concerned. A man can't afford to look out for himself at the expense of anyone else, because anything that hurts the other man is bound to hurt you in the end the same way. The story of Henry Ford is the story of his coming to that conclusion, and of his building up an annual business of one hundred and fifty million dollars based upon it. End of forward. CHAPTER I by Rose Wilder Lane. It was a hot sultry day in the last of July, one of those eastern summer days when the air presses heavily down on the stifling country fields, and in every farmyard the chickens scratch deep on the shady side of buildings looking for cool earth to lie upon, panting. This weather won't hold long. William Ford said that morning, giving the big bay a friendly slap and fastening the trace as she stepped over. We'd better get the hay under cover before night. There was no sign of a cloud in the bright hot sky, but none of the hired men disputed him. William Ford was a good farmer, thrifty and weather-wise. Every field of his three hundred acre farm was well cared for, yielding richly every year. His cattle were fat and sleek, his big red barns the best-filled in the neighborhood. He was not the man to let ten acres of good Timothy and Clover hay get caught in a summer shower and spoil. They put the big hay-rack on the wagon, threw in the stone-water jugs filled with cool water from the well near the kitchen door, and drove out to the meadow. One imagines them working there, lifting great forks full of the Clover-scented hay, tossing them into the rack, where, on the rising mound, the youngest man was kept busy shifting and settling them with his fork. Fence hoppers whirred up from the wind-rows of the dried grass when they were disturbed, and quails called from the fence-corners. Now and then the men stopped to wipe the sweat from their foreheads and to take long swallows from the water-jugs, hidden for coolness under a mound of hay. Then, with a look at the sky, they took up their forks. William Ford worked with the others, doing a good day's task with the best of them and proud of it. He was the owner, and they were the hired men, but on a Michigan farm the measure of a man is the part he takes in man's work. In the cities where men work against men, let them build up artificial distinctions. On the farm the fight is against nature, and men stand shoulder to shoulder in it. A dark cloud was coming up in the northwest, and every man's muscles leaped to the need for getting in the hay. Only they heard a clang from the great bell hung high on a post in the home door-yard, and used only for calling in the men at dinner-time or for some emergency alarm. Every man stopped. It was only ten o'clock. Then they saw fluttering apron at the barnyard gate, and William Ford dropped his fork. I'll go, get in the hay," he called back, already running over the stubble and long strides. The men stared a minute longer and then turned back to work, a little more slowly this time with the boss gone. A few minutes later they stopped again to watch him riding out of the home yard and down the road, urging the little gray mare to a run. Going for dock-haul, they surmised. They got in a few more loads of hay before the rain came, spattering in big drops on their straw hats and making a pleasant rustling on the thirsty meadows. Then they climbed into the half-filled rack and drove down to the big barn. They sat idly there in the dimness, watching through the wide doors the gray slant of the rain. The doctor had come. One of the men unhitched his horse and led it into a stall, while another pulled the light cart under the shed. Dinner-time came and passed. There was no call from the house, and they did not go in. Once in a while they laughed nervously and remarked that it was a shame they did not save the last three loads of hay. Good hay, too, ran a full four tons to the acre. About two o'clock in the afternoon the rain changed to a light drizzle and the clouds broke. Later William Ford came out of the house and crossed the soppy yard. He was grinning a little. It was all right, he said. A boy. I believe they had up a jug of sweet cider from the cellar in honor of the occasion. I know that when they apologetically mentioned the spoiled hay, he laughed heartily and asked what they supposed he cared about the hay. What are you going to call them, Ford? One of the men asked him as they stood around the cider jug, wiping their lips on the backs of their hands. The wife named him already. Henry, he said. Well, he'll have his share of one of the finest farms in Michigan one of these days, they said. And while William Ford said nothing, he must have looked over his green-rolling acres with a pardonable pride, reflecting that the new baby boy need never want for anything in reason. Henry was the second son of William Ford and Mary Litigate Ford, his energetic, wholesome, Holland-Dutch wife. While he was still in penifors, tumbling about the house or making daring excursions into the barnyard, the stronghold of the dreadful turkey gobbler, his sister Margaret was born, and Henry had barely been promoted to real trousers at the age of four when another brother arrived. Four babies, to be bathed, clothed, taut, loved and guarded from all the childish disasters to be encountered about the farm, might well be thought enough to fill any woman's mind and hands, but there were a thousand additional tasks for the mistress of that large household. There was milk to skim, butter and cheese to make, poultry and garden to be tended, patchwork quilts to sew, and later to fasten into the quilting frames and stitch by hand and herringbone or fan patterns. The hired hands must be fed, twenty or thirty of them at harvesting time. Pickles, jams, jellies, sweet cider, vinegar must be made and stored away on the cellar shelves. When the hogs were killed in the fall there were sausages, head cheese, pickled pigs feet to prepare, hams and shoulders to be soaked in brine and smoked, onions, peppers, popcorn to be braided in long strips and hung in the attic, while every day bread, cake and pies must be baked, and the house kept in that apple pie order so dear to the pride of the Michigan farmer's women folk. All these tasks Mary Ford did, or superintendent efficiently, looking to the ways of her household with all the care and pride her husband had in managing the farm. She found time too to be neighborly, to visit her friends, care for one of them who fell ill, help anyone in the little community who needed it, and always she watched over the health and manners of the children. In this environment Henry grew. He was energetic, interested in everything from the first. His misadventures in conquering the turkey globbler would fill a chapter. When he was a little older one of the hired men would put him on the back of a big farm horse and let him ride around the barnyard or perhaps he was allowed to carry a spiced drink of venegrine water to the men working in the harvest field. He learned every corner of the haymow and had a serious interview with his father over the matters of sliding down the straw stacks. In the winters, wrapped in a knit muffler with mittens of his mother's making on his hands, he played in the snow or spent whole afternoon sliding on the ice with his brothers. Best of all he liked the shop, where the blacksmith worked for the farm was done and the sharpening of tools. When the weather was bad outside, his father or one of the men lighted the charcoal and the forge, and Henry might pull the bellows till the fire glowed and the iron burried in it shone white hot. Then the sparks flew from the anvil while the great hammer claimed on the metal, shaping it, and Henry begged to be allowed to try it himself just once. In time he was given a small hammer of his own. So the years passed until Henry was eleven years old, and then a momentous event occurred, small enough in itself, but to this day one of the keenest memories of his childhood. CHAPTER II This first memorable event of Henry Ford's childhood occurred on a Sunday in the spring of his eleventh year. In that well regulated household, Sunday, as a matter of course, was a day of stiffly starched, dressed up propriety for the children and of custom enforced idleness for the elders. In the morning the fat driving horses, brushed till their glossy coats shone in the sun, were hitched to the two-seated carriage and the family drove to church. William and Mary Ford were Episcopalians, and Henry was reared in that faith, although both then and later he showed little enthusiasm for church going. Sitting through the long service in the stuffy little church, uncomfortably conscious of his Sunday best garments, sternly forbidden to fidget, while outside were all the sights and sounds of a country spring, must have seemed a wanton waste of time to small Henry. To this day he has not greatly changed that opinion. Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working, he says. I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell, and my opinion a man makes his own heaven and hell and carries it around with them. Both of them are states of mind. On this particular Sunday morning Henry was more than usually rebellious. It was the first week he had been allowed to leave off his shoes and stockings for the summer, and Henry had all a country boy's ardor for going barefoot. To cramp his joyously liberated toes again into stuffy leather shoes seemed to him an outrage. He resented his white collar, too, and the immaculate little suit his mother cautioned him to keep clean. He was not sullen about it. He merely remarked, frankly, that he hated their old Sunday anyhow and wished never to see another. Mother and father and the four children set out for church as usual. At the hitching-posts where William Ford tied the horses before going into the church they met their neighbors the Bennets. Will Bennet, a youngster about Henry's age, hailed him from the other carriage. Hi, Hen, come here. I got something you ain't got. Henry scrambled out over the wheel and hurried to see what it might be. It was a watch, a real watch, as large and shiny as his father's. Henry looked at it with odd admiration and then with envy. It was Will's own watch. His grandfather had given it to him. On a strict cross-your-heart promise to give it back Henry was allowed to take it in his hands. Then he cheered up somewhat. That ain't much, he scornfully remarked. It ain't running. At the same moment a dazzling idea occurred to him. He had always wanted to see the insides of a watch. I bet I can fix it for you, he declared. A few minutes later when Mary Ford looked for Henry he was nowhere to be found. Will was also missing. When after services they had not appeared the parents became worried. They searched. Inquiries and explorations failed to reveal the boys. They were in the Bennett's farm's shop, busy with the watch. Having no screwdriver small enough, Henry made one by filing a shingle nail. Then he set to work and took out every screw in the mechanism. The works came out of the case to the accompaniment of an agonized protest from Will. The cogs fell apart, the springs unwound. Altogether it was a beautiful disorder, enough to delight any small boy. Now look what you've went and done, cried Will, torn between natural emotion over the disaster to his watch and admiration of Henry's daring. Well, you said you was going to put it together. He reminded that experimenter many times in the next few hours. Dinner time came, and Will, recalling the fried chicken, dumplings, puddings, cakes of the Sunday dinner, grew more than restless. But Henry held them there by the sheer force of his enthusiasm. The afternoon wore along, and he was still investigating those fascinating gears and springs. When at last outraged parental authority descended upon the boys, Henry's Sunday clothes were a wreck. His hands and face were grimy, but he had correctly replaced most of the screws, and he passionately declared that if they would only leave him alone, he would have the watch running in no time. Family discipline was strict in those days. Undoubtedly Henry was punished, but he does not recall that now. What he does remember vividly is the passion for investigating clocks and watches that followed. In a few months he had taken apart and put together every time peace on the place, excepting only his father's watch. Every clock in the house shuttered when it saw me coming, he says. But the knowledge he acquired was more than useful to him later, when at sixteen he faced the problem of making his own living in Detroit. In those days farm life had no great appeal for him. There were plenty of chores to be done by an active boy of twelve on that farm, where every bit of energy was put to some useful purpose. He drove up the cows at night, kept the kitchen wood box filled, helped to hitch and unhitch the horses, learned to milk, and chopped kindling. He recalls that his principal objection to such work was that it was always interrupting some interesting occupation he had discovered for himself in the shop. He liked to handle tools to make something. The chores were an endless repetition of the same task, with no concrete object created. In the winter he went to the district school, walking two miles and back every day through the snow and enjoying it. He did not care for school especially, although he got fair marks in his studies and was given to helping other boys get their problems. Arithmetic was easy for him. His mind was already developing its mechanical trend. I always stood well with the teacher, he says with a twinkle. I found things ran more smoothly that way. He was not the boy to create unnecessary friction in his human relations, finding it as wasteful of energy there as it would have been in any of the mechanical contrivances he made. He got along pretty well with everyone until the time came to fight and then he fought hard and quick. Under his leadership, for he was popular with the other boys, the Greenfield School saw strange things done. Henry liked to play as well as any boy, but somehow in his thrifty ancestry there had been developed a strong desire to have something to show for time spent. Swimming, skating, and the like were all very well until he had thoroughly learned them, but why keep on after that? Henry wanted to do something else then, and as for spending a whole afternoon batting a ball around, that seemed to him a foolish occupation. Accordingly, he constructed a working forge in the schoolyard, and he and his crowd spent every recess and noon during one autumn working at it. There, with the aid of a blowpipe, they melted every bottle and bit of broken glass they could find and recast them into strange shapes. It was Henry II who devised the plan of damning the creek that ran near the schoolhouse, and by organizing the other boys into regular gangs with a sub-formin for each, accomplished the task so thoroughly and quickly that he had flooded two acres of potatoes before an outraged farmer knew what was happening. But these occupations, absorbing enough for the time being, did not fill his imagination. Henry already dreamed of bigger things. He meant some day to be a locomotive engineer. When he saw the big black engines roaring across the Michigan farmlands under their plumes of smoke, and when he caught a glimpse of the sooty man and overalls at the throttle, he felt an ambitious longing. Someday. It was on the whole a busy happy childhood spent for the most part out of doors. Henry grew freckled, sunburned the skin from his nose and neck in the swimming-pool, scratched his bare legs on blackberry briars. He learned how to drive horses, how to handle a hay fork or a hoe, how to sharpen and repair the farm tools. The shop was the most interesting part of the farm to him. It was there he invented and manufactured a device for opening and closing the farm gates without getting down from the wagon. Then when he was fourteen, an event occurred which undoubtedly changed the course of his life. Mary Ford died. End of chapter two. Chapter three of Henry Ford's own story. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's own story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter three. The first job. When Mary Ford died, the heart of the home went with her. The house was like a watch without a mainspring, her son says. William Ford did his best, but it must have been a pathetic attempt, that effort of the big hard-working farmer to take a mother's place to the four children. For a time a married aunt came in and managed the household, but she was needed in her own home and soon went back to it. Then Margaret, Henry's youngest sister, took charge and tried to keep the house in order and superintend the work of hired girls older than herself. She was capable, that good New England word so much more expressive than efficient, but no one could take Mary Ford's place in that home. There was now nothing to hold Henry on the farm. He had learned how to do the farm work and the little attraction it had for him was gone. Thereafter every task was merely a repetition. His father did not need his help, there were always the hired men. I suppose any need William Ford may have felt for the companionship of his second son was unexpressed. In matters of emotion the family is not demonstrative. The boy had exhausted the possibilities of the farm shop. His last work in it was the building of a small steam engine. For this helped partly by pictures, partly by his boyish ingenuity. He made his own patterns, his own castings, did his own machine work. His material was bits of old iron, pieces of wagon tires, stray teeth from harrows, anything and everything from the scrap pile in the shop which he could utilize in any imaginable way. When the engine was finished Henry mounted it on an improvised chassis which he had cut down from an old farm wagon, attached it by a direct drive to a wheel on one side, something like a locomotive connecting rod, and capped the hole with a whistle which could be heard for miles. When he had completed the job he looked at the result with some natural pride. Sitting at the throttle, tooting the ear splitting whistle, he charged up and down the meadow lot at nearly ten miles an hour, frightening every cow on the place. But after all his work for some reason the engine did not please him long. Possibly the lack of enthusiasm with which it was received disappointed him. In the technical journals which he read eagerly during his sixteenth winter he learned about the big iron works of Detroit, saw pictures of machines he longed to handle. Early the next spring, when the snow had melted and every breeze that blew across the fields was an invitation to begin something new, Henry started to school as usual one morning and did not return. Detroit is only a few miles from Greenfield. Henry made the journey on the train that morning and while his family supposed him at school and the teacher was marking a matter of fact absent after his name he had already said about his independent career. He had made several trips to Detroit in the past but this time the city looked very different to him. It had worn a holiday appearance before but now it seemed stern and busy, a little too busy perhaps to waste much attention on a country boy of sixteen looking for a job. Nevertheless he whistled cheerfully enough to himself and started briskly through the crowds. He knew what he wanted and he was going straight for it. I always knew I would get what I went after he says. I don't recall having any very great doubts or fears. At that time the shop of James Flower and Company, manufacturers of steam engines and steam engine appliances was one of Detroit's largest factories. Over one hundred men were employed there and their output was one to be pointed to with pride by boastful citizens. Henry Ford's nerves, healthy and steady as they were, tingled with excitement when he entered the place. He had read of it and had even seen a picture of it but now he beheld for himself its size and the great number of machines and men. This was something big he said to himself. After a moment he asked a man working near where he could find the foreman. Over there the big fellow in the red shirt. The man replied. Henry hurried over and asked for a job. The foreman looked at him and saw a slight, wiry country boy who wanted work. There was nothing remarkable about him, one supposes. The foreman did not perceive immediately, after one look into his steady eye, that this was no ordinary lad, as foremen so frequently do in fiction. Instead he looked Henry over, asked him a question or two, remembered that a big order had just come in and he was short of hands. Well, come to work to-morrow. I'll see what you can do," he said. Pay you two and a half a week. All right, sir. Henry responded promptly, but the foreman had already turned his back and forgotten him. Henry, almost doubtful of his good fortune, hurried away before the foreman should change his mind. Outside in the sunshine he pushed his cap on the back of his head, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, jingling the silver in one of them, and walked down the street whistling. The world looked like a good place to him, no more farming for Henry Ford. He was a machinist now, with a job in the James Flower Shops. Before him there unrolled a bright future. He was ambitious. He did not intend always to remain a mechanic. One day when he had learned all there was to know about the making of steam engines he intended to drive one himself, he would be a locomotive engineer, nothing less. Meantime there were practical questions of food and shelter to consider immediately, and he was not the boy to waste time and speculations for the future when there was anything to be done. He counted his money, almost four dollars, and a prospect of two and a half every week. Then he set out to find a boarding house. Two dollars and a half a week, not a large living income, even in 1878. Henry walked a long time looking for a landlady who would consent to board a healthy sixteen-year-old mechanic for that sum. It was late that afternoon before he found one who, after some hesitation, agreed to do it. Then he looked at the small dirty room she showed him, at her untidy slatternly person, and decided that he would not live there. He came out into the street again. Henry was facing the big problem. How was he to live on an income too small? Apparently his mind went, with a precision of a machine, directly to the answer. When your reasonable expenses exceed your income, increase your income. Simple. He knew that after he had finished his day's work at the shops there would be a margin of several hours a day left to him. He would have to turn them into money. That was all. He returned to a clean boarding-house he had visited earlier in the day, paid three dollars and a half in advance for one week's board, and ate a hearty supper. Then he went to bed. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Henry Ford's Own Story This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's Own Story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 4 An Exacting Routine Meantime, back in Greenfield, there was a flurry of excitement, and not a little worry. Henry did not return from school in time to help with the chores. When supper time came and went without his appearing, Margaret was sure some terrible accident had occurred. A hired man was sent to make inquiries. He returned with the news that Henry had not been in school. Then William Ford himself hitched up and drove about the neighborhood looking for the boy. With characteristic reserve and independence, Henry had taken no one into his confidence, but late that night his father returned with information that he had been seen taking the train for Detroit. William Ford knew his son. When he found that Henry had left of his own accord, he told Margaret Dryley that the boy could take care of himself and there was nothing to worry about. However, after two days had gone by without any word from Henry, his father went up to Detroit to look for him. Those two days had been full of interest for Henry. He found that his hours in the machine shop were from seven in the morning to six at night, with no idle moments in any of them. He helped at the forges, made castings, assembled parts. He was happy. There were no chores or school to interrupt his absorption in machinery. Every hour he learned something new about steam engines. When the closing whistle blew and the men dropped their tools, he was sorry to quit. Still, there was that extra dollar a week to be made somehow. As soon as he had finished supper the first night, he hurried out to look for an evening job. It never occurred to him to work at anything other than machinery. He was a machine fan, just as some boys or baseball fans. He liked mechanical problems. A batting average never interested him, but making things go, there was real fun in that. Machine shops were not open at night, but he recalled his experiments with the luckless family clock. He hunted up a jeweler and asked him for night work. Then he hunted up another and another. None of them needed an assistant. When the jeweler's shops closed that night, he went back to his boarding-house. He spent another day at work in the James Flower shops. He spent another night looking for work with the jeweler. The third day, late in the afternoon, his father found him. Knowing Henry's interests, William Ford had begun his search by inquiring for the boy in Detroit's machine shops. He spoke to the foreman and took Henry outside. There was an argument. William Ford, backed by the force of parental authority, declared sternly that the place for Henry was in school. Henry, with two days' experience and a real ironworks, hotly declared that he'd never go back to school, not if he was licked for it. What's the good of the old school, anyhow? I want to learn to make steam engines, he said. In the end William Ford saw the futility of argument. He must have been an unusually reasonable father for the time and place. It would have been a simple matter to lead Henry home by the ear and keep him there until he ran away again. And in 1878 most Michigan fathers in his situation would have done it. Well, you know where your home is any time you want to come back to it, he said finally, and went back to the farm. Henry was now definitely on his own resources, with urgent need for that extra dollar a week weighing more heavily on his mind every day. He spent his evenings searching for night work. Before the time arrived to pay his second week's board, he had found a jeweler who was willing to pay him two dollars a week for four hours work every night. The arrangement left Henry with a dollar a week for spending money. This was embarrassing riches. I never did figure out how to spend the whole of that dollar, he says. I really had no use for it. My board and lodging were paid, and the clothes I had were good enough for the shop. I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid, can't squander it on myself without hurting myself, and nobody wants to do that. Money is the most useless thing in the world, anyhow. His life now settled into a routine eminently satisfactory to him, a routine that lasted for nine months. From seven in the morning to six at night in the machine shop, from seven to eleven in the evening at work with a microscope, repairing and assembling watches, then home to bed for a good six hours sleep, and back to work again. Day followed day exactly alike, except that every one of them taught him something about machines, either steam engines or watches. He went to bed, rose, ate, worked on a regular schedule, following the same route, the shortest one, from the boarding house to the shops, to the jewelers, back to the boarding house again. Before long he found that he could spend a part of his dollar profitably in buying technical journals, French, English, German magazines dealing with mechanics. He read these in his room after returning from the jewelers. Few boys of sixteen could endure a routine so exacting in its demands on strength and endurance without destroying their help. But Henry Ford had the one trait common to all men of achievement—unapparently inexhaustible energy. His active, out-of-door boyhood had stored up physical reserves of it. His one direct interest gave him his mental supply. He wanted to learn about machines. That was all he wanted. He was never distracted by other impulses or tastes. Recreation? No, I had no recreation. I didn't want it, he says. What's the value of recreation anyhow? It's just waste time. I got my fun out of my work. He was obsessed by his one idea. In a few months he had mastered all the intricate details of building steam engines. The mammoth shop of James Flower and Company, with its great force of a hundred mechanics, became familiar to him. It shrank from the huge proportions it had at first assumed in his eyes. He began to see imperfections in its system and to be annoyed by them. See here, he said one day to the man who worked beside him, nothing's ever made twice alike in this place. We waste a lot of time and material assembling these engines. That piston rattle have to be made over. It won't fit the cylinder. Oh, well, I guess we do the best we can, the other man said. It won't take long to fit it. It was the happy-go-lucky method of factories in the seventies. Men were shifted from job to job to soothe the whim of the foreman or the exigencies of a rush order. Parts were cast, recast, filed down to fit other parts. Scrap iron accumulated in the corners of the shop. A piece of work was abandoned half finished in order to make up time on another order, delayed by some accident. By today's standards it was a veritable helter-skelter, from which the finished machines somehow emerged at a fearful cost in wasted time and labor. When Henry was switched from one piece of work to another, taken from his job to help some other workman, or sent to get a needed tool that was missing, he knew that his time was being wasted. His thrifty instincts resented it. With his mind full of pictures of smoothly running, exactly adjusted machines, he knew there was something wrong with the way the ironworks was managed. He was growing dissatisfied with his job. When Henry had been with the James Flower Company nine months, his wages were increased. He received three dollars a week. He was not greatly impressed. He had not been working for the money. He wanted to learn more about machines. As far as he was concerned, the advantages of the ironworks were nearly exhausted. He had had in turn nearly every job in the place, which had been a good education for him, but the methods which had allowed it annoyed him more every day. He began to think the foreman rather a stupid fellow with slip shod and efficient ideas. As a matter of fact, the shop was a very good one for those days. It turned out good machines and did it with no more waste than was customary. Efficiency experts, waste motion experiments, mass production, in a word, the machine idea applied to human beings was unheard of then. Henry knew there was something wrong. He did not like to work there any longer. Two weeks after the additional fifty cents had been added to his pay envelope, he left the James Flower Company. He had got a job with the dry dock engine works, manufacturers of marine machinery. His pay was two dollars and a half a week. To the few men who knew him, he probably seemed a discontented boy who did not know when he was well off. If any of them took the trouble to advise him, they probably said he would do better to stay with a good thing while he had it than to change around aimlessly. He was far from being a boy who needed that advice. Without knowing it, he had found the one thing he was to follow all his life. Not machines merely, but the machine idea. He went to work for the dry dock company because he liked its organization. By this time he was a little more than seventeen years old, an active, wiry young man, his muscles hard and his hands calloused from work. After nearly a year of complete absorption in mechanical problems, his natural liking for human companionship began to assert itself. At the dry dock works he found a group of young men like himself, hard working, fun-loving young mechanics, and a few weeks he was popular with them. They were a clean, energetic lot, clear thinking and ambitious as most mechanics are. After the day's work was finished, they rushed through the wide doors into the street with a whoop of delight in the outdoor air, jostling each other, playing practical jokes, enjoying a little rough horseplay among themselves. In the evenings, they wandered about the streets in couples, arms carelessly thrown over each other's shoulders, commenting on things they saw. They learned every inch of the waterfront, tried each other out in wrestling and boxing. Eager young fellows, grasping at life with both hands, wanting all of it and wanting it right then, naturally enough they smoked, drank, experimented with love-making, turned night into day in a joyous carouse now and then. But before long Henry Ford was a leader among them, as he had been among the boys in the Greenfield School, and again he diverted the energy of his followers into his own channels. Pursuits that had interested them seemed to him a waste of time and strength. He did not smoke, his sedative attempt with hay cigarettes and his boyhood had discouraged that permanently, he did not drink, and girls seemed to him unutterably stupid. I have never tasted liquor in my life, he says, I'd assume think of taking any other poison. Undoubtedly his opinion is right, but one is inclined to doubt the accuracy of his memory. In those early days in Detroit he must have experimented at least once with the effects of liquor on the human system. Probably once would have been sufficient. Besides, about that time he developed an interest so strong that it not only absorbed his own attention, but carried that of his friends along with it. He bought a watch. It had taken him only a few months to master his task and the dry dock works so thoroughly that his wages were raised. Later they were raised again. Then he was getting five dollars a week, more than enough to pay his expenses without night work. He left the jeweler's shop, but he brought with him a watch, the first he had ever owned. Immediately he took it to pieces. When it scattered parts lay on a table before him he looked at them and marveled. He had paid three dollars for the watch and he could not figure out any reason why it should have cost so much. It ran, he says. It had some kind of a dark composition case and it weighed a good deal and it went along all right, never lost or gained more than a certain amount in any given day, but there wasn't anything about that watch that should have cost three dollars. Nothing but a lot of plain parts made out of cheap metal. I could have made one like it for one dollar or even less, but it cost me three. The only way I could figure it out was that there was a lot of waste somewhere. Then he remembered the methods of production at the James Flower Company. He reasoned that probably that watch factory had turned out only a few hundred of that design and then tried something else, alarm clocks perhaps. The parts had been made by the dozen, some of them had probably been filed down by hand to make them fit. Then he got the great idea. A factory, a gigantic factory running with the precision of a machine turning out watches by the thousands and tens of thousands, watches all exactly alike, every part cut by an exact dye. He talked it over with the boys at the dry dock works. He was enthusiastic. He showed them that a watch could be made for less than half a dollar by his plan. He juggled figures of thousands of dollars as though they were pennies. The size of the sums did not stagger him because money was never concrete to him. It was merely rows of figures, but to the young fellows who listened, his talk was dazzling. They joined enthusiastically in the scheme. Then their evenings became merely so much time to spend up in Ford's room, figuring estimates and discussing plans. The watch could be made for thirty-seven cents, provided machinery turned it out by tens of thousands. Henry Ford visualized the factory, a factory devoted to one thing, the making of one watch, specialized, concentrated with no waste energy. Those eager young men planned the whole thing from furnaces to assembling rooms. They figured the cost of material by the hundred tons estimated the exact proportions each metal required. They planned an output of two thousand watches daily as the point at which cost of production would be cheapest. They would sell the watch for fifty cents and guarantee it for one year. Two thousand watches at a profit of thirteen cents each. Two hundred and sixty dollars daily profit. They were dazzled. We needn't stop there. We can increase that output when we get started, Henry Ford declared. Organization will do it. Lack of organization keeps prices up, for its cost must be charged in on the selling price, and high prices keep sales down. We will work it the other way. Low prices, increased sales, increased output, lower prices. It works on a circle. Listen to this. He held them, listening, while he talked and figured, eliminating waste here and cutting expenses there, until the landlady came up and knocked at the door, asking if they meant to stay up all night. It took time to get his ideas translated into concrete exact figures. He worked over them for nearly a year, holding the enthusiasm of his friends at fever heat all that time. Finally he made drawings for the machines he planned and cut dies for making the different parts of the watch. His plan was complete. A gigantic machine taking in bars of steel at one end and turning out completed watches at the other. Hundreds of thousands of cheap watches, all alike. The Ford watch. I tell you there's a fortune in it. A fortune. The young fellows in the scheme exclaimed to each other. All we need now is the capital. Ford decided at last. He was turning his mind to the problem of getting it when he received a letter from his sister Margaret. His father had been injured in an accident. His older brother was ill. Couldn't he come home for a while? They needed him. It. Henry Ford's own story. By Rose Wilder Lane. CHAPTER VI. BACK TO THE FARM. The letter from home must have come like a dash of cold water on Henry's enthusiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future. Planning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead. It has always been his instinct to do just that. You can't run anything on precedence if you want to make a success, he says today. We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past. Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter, the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one. There was never any real question as to the outcome. The machine idea has been the controlling factor in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to each other and making human sympathies a working business policy that he has made his real success. Of course at that time he did not see such a possibility. It was a clear-cut struggle between two opposing forces. On one side the splendid future just ahead. On the other his father's need of him. He went home. He intended at the time to stay only until his father was well again, perhaps for a month or so, surely not longer than one summer. The plans for the watch factory were not abandoned. They were only laid aside temporarily. It would be possible to run up to Detroit for a day or two now and then and keep on working on plans for getting together the necessary capital. But no business on earth is harder to leave than the business of running a farm. When Henry reached home he found a dozen fields needing immediate action. The corn had been neglected. Already weeds were springing up between the rows. In the house his father was fretting because they hired hands were not feeding the cows properly, and they were giving less milk. The clover was going to seed, while the hogs looked hungrily at it to the fence because there was no one to see that their noses were ringed and the gates opened. Some of the plows and heros had been left in the fields, where they were rusting in the summer sun and rain. There was plenty of work for Henry. At first from day to day, then from week to week, he put off the trip to Detroit. He worked in the fields with the men, plowing, planting, harvesting, setting the pace for the others to follow, as an owner must do on a farm. He was learning, so thoroughly that he never forgot it, the art of managing men without losing the democratic feeling of being one of them. In the mornings he was up before daylight and out to the barnyard. He fed the horses, watched that the milking was thoroughly done, and gave orders for the day's work. Then the great bell clanged once, and he and all the men hurried into the house, where, sitting at one long table in the kitchen, they ate the breakfast Margaret and the hired girls brought to them, piping hot from the stove. After that they scattered, driving down the farm lanes to the fields, while the sun rose, and the meadows sparkling with dew, scented the air with clover. The sun rose higher, pouring its heat down upon them as they worked, and a shrill, whirring noise rose from all the tiny insects in the grass, a note like the voice of the heat. Coats and vests came off and were tossed in the fence corners. Sleeves were rolled up, shirts opened wide at the neck. "'Hoo! It's hot!' said Henry, stopping to wipe the sweat from his face. Where's the water jug? Jim, what say you run and bring it up? Let's have a drink before we go on.' So they worked through the mornings, stopping gladly enough when the great bell clanged out the welcome news that Margaret and the girls had prepared the huge dinner their appetites demanded. In the afternoons Henry, on the little gray mare, rode to the far fields for a diplomatic authoritative word with the men plowing there, or perhaps he went a little farther and bargained with the next neighbor for a likely-looking yearling heifer. Then back at night to the big farm-yard, where the cows must be milked, the horses watered, fed, and everything made comfortable and safe for the night. It was a very different life from that in the machine shop, and Henry Ford thought, when he poured over his mechanic journals by the sitting-room lamp in the evenings, that he was wasting precious time, but he was learning a great many things he would find useful later. Margaret Ford was by this time a healthy attractive young woman, with all the affairs of the household and dairy well in hand. The social affairs of the community began to center around her. In the evenings the young men of the neighborhood rode over to propose picnics and hay-rides. After church on Sundays a dozen young people would come trooping out to the farm with her, and Margaret would put a white apron over her best dress and serve a big country dinner. They had a rollicking time in the grassy front yards afterwards, or out in the orchard when the plums were ripe. Late in the afternoon they separated somehow into pairs, as young people will do, and walked the three miles to church for the evening services. It may be imagined that the girls of the neighborhood were interested when Henry appeared in church again, now a good-looking young man of twenty-one, back from the city. The social popularity of the Ford place must have increased considerably. On this point Ford is discreetly silent, but it does not require any great effort of fancy to see him as he must have looked then, through the eyes of the green-filled girls, an alert, muscular fellow with a droll humor and a whimsical smile. Moreover the driver of the finest horses in the neighborhood and one of the heirs to the big farm. However he is outspoken enough about his own attitude. He did not care for girls. Like most men with a real interest he kept for a long time the small boy opinion of them. Girls? Huh. What are they good for? He was interested in machines. He wanted to get back to Detroit, where he could take up again his plans for that Mammoth Watch Factory. In a few weeks he had brought the farm up to its former running order, the crops were doing well, and the hired men had learned that there was a boss at the head of affairs. Henry had a little more time to spend in the shop. He found in one corner of it the absurd steam engine he had built five years before, and one day he started it up and ran it around the yard. It was a weird-looking affair. The high wagon wheels warped and wobbly, the hybrid engine on top sputtering and wheezing and rattling, but nonetheless running and a cloud of smoke and sparks. He had a hardy laugh at it and abandoned it. His father grew better slowly, but week by week Henry was approaching the time when he could return to the work he liked. Late summer came with all the work of getting in the crops. The harvest crew arrived from the next farm, twenty men of them, and Henry was busy in the fields from morning to night. When, late in October, the last work of the summer was done and the fields lay bare and brown waiting for the snow, Margaret Ford gave a great harvest supper with a quilting bee in the afternoon and corn husking in the evening. All the neighbors came from miles around. The big barns were crowded with their horses and rows of them were tied under the sheds. In the house the quilting frames were spread in the big attic, and all afternoon the women sowed and talked. In the evening the men arrived and then the long supper table was spread with Margaret's cooking. Hams, sausages, fried chickens, a whole roast pig, pans of beans and succotash, huge loaves of homemade bread, pats of butter, cheese, cakes, pies, puddings, donuts, pictures of milk and cider, good things which disappeared fast enough before the plying knives and forks in bursts of laughter while jokes were called from end to end to the table and young couples blushed under the chaffing of their neighbors. Clara Bryant was one of the guests. Her father was a prosperous farmer who lived eight miles from the Ford place and Henry had scarcely seen her that summer. That night they sat side by side and he noticed the red in her cheeks and the way she laughed. After supper there was corn husking in the big barn, where each young man tried to find the red ears that gave him permission to kiss one of the girls, and still later they danced on the floor of the hay barn while the fiddler called the figures of the old square dances and the lanterns cast a flickering light on the dusty mounds of hay. The next week Henry might have returned to Detroit and to the waiting project of the watch factory, but he did not. He thought of Clara Bryant and realized that his prejudice against girls was unreasonable. CHAPTER VII. THE ROAD TO HIGHMAN. With William Ford's complete recovery and the coming of the long half-idle winter of the country, there was no apparent reason why Henry Ford should not return to his work in the machine shops. The plans for the watch factory, never wholly abandoned, might be carried out. But Henry stayed at home on the farm. Gradually it became apparent to the neighborhood that Ford's boy had got over his liking for city life. Farmers remarked to each other, while they sat in their granaries husking corn, that Henry had come to his senses and knew when he was well off. He'd have his share in as good a farm as any man could want some day. There was no need for him to get out and hustle in Detroit. Probably there were moments when Henry himself shared the prevailing opinion. His interest in mechanics was as great as ever. But there was Clara Bryant. He made a few trips to Detroit with an intention which seemed to him earnest enough to revive the plans for the watch factory. But the thought of her was always tugging at his mind, urging him to come back to Greenfield. His efforts came to nothing, and he soon lost interest in them. He was in his early twenties then. His ambition had not yet centered about a definite purpose, and already it had met the worst enemy of ambition—love. It was a choice between his work and the girl. The girl won, and ten million fifty-cent Ford watches were lost to the world. I've decided not to go back to Detroit. Henry announced to the family at breakfast one day. I thought you'd come around to seeing it that way, his father said. You can do better here in the long run than you can in the city. If you want to take care of the stock, I'll let one of the men go and pay you his wages this winter. All right, Henry said. His work as a machinist seemed to all of them only an episode, now definitely ended. He settled into the work of the farm as though he had never left it. Rising in the cold, lamp-lit mornings while the window-panes showed only a square of darkness, sparkling with frost crystals, he built up the kitchen fire for Margaret. Then with a lantern in his hand and milk-pales clanking on his arm plowed his way through the snow to the barns. A red streak was showing in the eastern horizon. Buildings and fences covered with snow showed odd shapes in the grey dawn. His breath hung like smoke on the frosty air. Inside the barns the animals stirred. A horse stamped. A cow rose lumberingly. Old Rover barked when he heard Henry's hand on the door fastening. Henry hung his lantern on a nail and set to work. He pitched down hay and huge forks full of straw. He measured out rations of bran and corn and oats. He milked the cows, stopping before he carried the brimming pails to the house to pour out some of the warm, sweet-smelling milk for Rover and the cats. Back in the kitchen Margaret had set the table for breakfast. She was standing at the stove frying sausages and turning corn cakes. The other boys came tramping in from poultry yards and hogpins. They took turns at the tin washbasin set on a bench on the back porch and then into breakfast with hearty appetites. Afterward they hussed corn in the big granaries or shelled it, ready to take to mill. They cleaned the barn stalls, whitewashed the hen-houses, sorted the apples in the cellar. In the shop Henry worked at the farm-tools, sharpening the plows, refitting the harrows with teeth, oiling and cleaning the mowing machines. After supper when he had finished the day's work, milked the cows again, filled the racks in the calves' yard with hay, spread deep beds of straw for the horses, seeing that everything was snug and comfortable about the big barns, he saddled the little bay and rode six miles to the Bryant farm. It was a courtship which did not run any too smoothly. Henry was not the only Greenfield farmer's son who admired Clara Bryant, and she was minded to divide her favour evenly among them until some indefinite time in the future, when, as she said, she would see. Often enough Henry found another horse tied to the hitching-post and another young man inside the house making himself agreeable to Clara. Then, welcomed hardly enough by her big jovial father, he would spend the evening talking politics with him while Clara and his rival popped corn or roasted apples on the hearth. But Henry built that winter a light sleigh, painted red, balanced on cushiony springs, slipping over the snow on smooth steel runners. No girl in Greenfield could have resisted the offer of a ride in it. In the evenings when the moon was full, Clara and Henry, warmly wrapped in fur robes, flashed down the snowy roads in a chime of sleigh bells. The fields sparkled white on either hand, here and there lights gleamed from farmhouses. Then the sleigh slipped into the woods, still and dark, except where the topmost branches shone silver in the moonlight, and the roads stretched ahead like a path of white velvet. Their passing made no sound on the soft snow. There were skating-parties too, where Henry and Clara, mitten hand in hand, swept over the ice in long, smooth flight, their skates ringing. Or it happened that Henry stood warming his hands at the bank and watched Clara skating away with someone else and thought bitter things. Somewhere between farm work and courtship he found time to keep up with his mechanics trade journals, for his interest in machinery was still strong, but he planned nothing new at this time. All his constructive imagination was diverted into another channel. More than the loss of the Ford watches is chargeable to that laughing, rosy country girl who could not make up her mind to choose between her suitors. The winter past and Henry, torn between two interests, had accomplished little with either. Spring and the spring work came, plowing, harrowing, sowing, planting. From long before dawn until the deepening twilight hid the fields, Henry was hard at work. Until the pressure of farm work was over he could see Clara only on Sundays. Then summer arrived, with picnics on the old custom of bringing a crowd of young people out from church for Sunday dinner at the Fords. Now and then there were excursions up to Detroit for an outing on the lake. By the end of that summer it was generally accepted among the Greenfield young folks that Henry Ford was going with Clara Bryant. But she must still have been elusive for another winter past with nothing definitely decided. The third spring of Henry's stay on the farm arrived. Henry went over his bank account, a respectable sum made up of his earnings on the farm and a few ventures in cattle-buying and selling. Well, Father, he said one day, I guess I'll be getting married. All right, his father said. She's a good capable girl, I guess. I'll give you that south forty and you can have lumber enough from the timber lot to build a house when you get ready. Apparently Henry had made up his mind to settle the matter. No doubt behind the ardor he showed Clara there was an unconscious feeling that he had spent enough time in courtship. He was impatient to get back to his other interests, to have again an orderly smooth routine of life with margins of time for machinery. In April he and Clara went up to Detroit and were married. A couple of weeks later they returned to Greenfield. Clara with plans for the new house on the south forty already sketched in a tablet in her suitcase. Henry with a bundle of mechanics trade journals and the responsibility of caring for a wife. A wife helps a man more than anyone else, he says today. And adds with his whimsical twinkle, she criticizes him more. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of Henry Ford's Own Story This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's Own Story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 8. Making a Farm Efficient The young couple went first to the Ford's place, where the big roomy house easily spared rooms for them, and Margaret and her father gave them a hearty welcome. Clara, having brought her belongings from her old home, put on her big work apron and helped Margaret and the kitchen and dairy. Henry was out in the fields early, working hard to get the crops planted. Driving the plow share deep into the rich black loam, holding it steady while the furrow rolled back under his feet, he whistled to himself. He was contented. The farm work was well in hand. His forty would bring in an ample income from the first year. In the house his rosy little wife was busy making the best butter in the whole neighborhood. He revolved in his mind vague plans for making a better plow than the one he was handling. He remembered noticing in his latest English magazine an article covering the very principle he would use. In the evening, after the last of the chores was done, he settled himself at the table in the sitting room, moved the big lamp nearer, and opened the magazine. But Clara was busy correcting the plans for the new house. She must have the lamp light, too. Henry moved the lamp back. Would you have the kitchen here or here? This way I could have windows on three sides, but the other way I'd have a larger pantry, said Clara, stopping to chew her pencil. Fix it exactly to suit yourself. It's your house, and I'll build it just as you say. Henry replied, turning a page. But I want your advice, and I can't see how to get this back porch in without making the bedrooms too small. Clara complained. I want this house just so, and if I put the chimney where I want it to come in the kitchen, it will be in the wrong end of the sitting room, best I can do. Oh, let those horrid papers alone and help me out. Henry let the horrid papers alone invent his head over the problems of porch and pantry and fireplace. When the pressure of spring work was over, he set to work a gang of men cutting down selected trees in the timber lot and hauling them down to the little sawmill which belonged to his father. There he sawed them into boards of the lengths and sizes he needed and stocked them in neat piles to season and dry. From the shorter pieces of timber he split shakes or homemade shingles and stacked them log cabin fashion. He was preparing to build his first house. It rose little by little through that summer. Henry built it himself, helped by one of the hired men. It was a good substantial middle-western home, thirty-two by thirty-two feet, and containing seven rooms and a roomy attic. In the evenings after supper, dishwashing, and the chores at the barn were finished, he and Clara strolled over in the twilight to inspect the day's progress. They climbed together over the loose boards which made temporary floors, looked at the skeleton partitions of studying, planned where the stoves should be set and what kind of paper should be chosen for the walls. Then they walked around the outside, imagined with pride how well the house would look when the siding was on and painted white, and planned where the flower beds should be in the front yard. Let's be getting on back, said Henry. I saw an article in that French magazine that came to-day about a Frenchman who invented some kind of a carriage that runs by itself without horses, sort of a steam engine to pull it. Did you, said Clara, how interesting. Oh, look, the moon's coming up. They loitered back through the clover fields, sweet smelling in the dew, climbed over the style into the apple orchard, where the leaves were silver and black in the moonlight, and so came slowly home. Margaret had cut a watermelon, cooled in a basket in the well, and all the family sat on the back porch, eating it. Long after midnight, when everyone else was sound asleep, the lamp was burning in the sitting-room, and Henry was reading that article about the horseless carriage. The idea fascinated him. The new house was finished late in the fall. Clara had made a trip to Detroit to purchase furniture, and all summer she had been working on patchwork quilts and crocheted tidies. When everything was ready, the sitting-room bright with new carpet and shining, varnished furniture, the new range installed in the kitchen, the cellar stocked with apples, vegetables, canned fruits. Henry and Clara moved into their own home. They were proud of it. It's a fine place yet, as good as anybody could want, Henry Ford says now. We still have it, and we like to go down there in the summers and stay a while. All the furniture is there exactly as it was then. I wouldn't ask any better place to live. It must have been a happy time for both of them. They had a comfortable home, plenty to eat and wear, they were surrounded by friends. There was a simple neighborly spirit, a true democracy in that little country community. There were no very poor families there, no very rich ones. Everyone had plenty and wanted no more. Henry's hired men at the table with him, slept under the same roof, called him hen, as a matter of course, just as he called them Hy and Dave. They worked together to plant, care for, and harvest the crops. Their interests were the same, and if at the end of the year Henry had a more improved farm to show for the year's work, it was the only difference between them. He had lived no better, spent no more than the others. It was in those years that he laid the foundation for his philosophy of life. He found that the work of the farm progressed faster and produced more when every one worked together with a good will, each doing his own share and doing it well. He found that men, like horses, did their best when they were well fed, contented, and not overworked. He saw that one unruly horse, or one surly lazy man, delayed the work of the whole farm, hindered all the others. The only plan that will work out well in the long run is a plan that is best for everyone concerned, he decided. Hurting the other fellow was bound to hurt me sooner or later. He was a good farmer. His mechanical orderly mind arranged the work so that it was done smoothly and on time without overworking anyone or leaving anyone idle. His thrifty instincts saved labor and time, just as they saved the barn manure to spread on the fields or planned for the turning end of the last crop of clover to enrich the soil. His granaries were well filled in the fall, his stock was sleek and fat, fetching top prices. Clara kept the house running smoothly, the pantry filled with good, simple food, the cellar shelves stocked with preserves and jams for winter. In the evenings Henry got out his mechanics journals and poured over them while Clara sewed or mended. He found now and then a mention of the horseless carriage. That looks to me like a good idea. If I was in Detroit now, where I could get a good machine shop, I believe I could do something along that line myself, he said. Probably you could, his wife replied, rocking comfortably. But what's the use? We've got everything here we need. Yes, but I'd just like to try what I could do, Henry said restlessly. A few days later he inspected his farm shop and announced that he was going up to Detroit for a day to get some materials. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Henry Ford's Own Story. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's Own Story. By Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 9. The Lure of the Machine Shops. It was an unconscious subterfuge, that statement of Henry Ford's that he was going up to Detroit to get material. He knew what he wanted. Sitting by the red covered table in his own dining and sitting room some evening after Clara had cleared away the supper dishes he could have written out his order, article by article, exactly what he needed, and two days later it would have arrived by express. But Henry wanted to get back to Detroit. He was tired of the farm. Those years of quiet, comfortable country living among his greenfield neighbors were almost finished. They had given him his viewpoint on human relations. They had saved his character in the formative period from the distorting pressure of the struggle of man against man in the city. They had been from the standpoint of Henry Ford, the man, perhaps the most valuable years in his life. At that time he saw in them only an endless repetition of tasks which had no great appeal for him. A recurring cycle of sowing, tilling, harvesting. He thought he was accomplishing nothing. A little more money in the bank, a few more acres added to the farm, that was all, and it did not interest him. Money never did. His passion was machinery. So he gave his orders to the hired man, pocketed a list of things to buy for Clara, and caught the early train to Detroit that morning with a feeling of keen anticipation. He meant to spend one whole day in machine shops. From the station in Detroit he hurried direct to the James Flower iron works. The broad, busy streets, jammed with carriages and trays, the crowds of hurrying people, did not hold his attention for a moment. But when he came into the noisy, dirty turmoil of the machine shop he was in his element again. He took in a dozen details at a glance. Scarcely a change had been made since he had first seen the place years when he was a boy of sixteen looking for a job. The old foreman was gone, and one of the men who had worked beside Henry in those days was in charge. Well, hello there, Ford! he said heartily. What are you doing these days? Not looking for a job, are you? No, I'm farming now, Ford replied. Just thought I drop in and have a look around. Together they wandered over the works, and the foreman, shouting to make himself heard in the clanging, pounding uproar, pointed out here and there a new device, an improved valve, a different gearing. Ford saw it all with interest. He was wider awake, more alive, than he had been for months. When he was leaving the shop some time later he had a sudden expanse of impulse which broke through his customary reticence. I'm thinking of building an engine myself, he said, a little one to use on the farm. I figure I can work something out that will take the place of some of my horses. The foreman looked at Ford in amazement. It is hard to realize now how astounding such an idea must have seemed to him. Here was a man who proposed to take a locomotive into his cornfield and set it to plowing. The wild impossibility of the plan would have staggered any reasonable person. The foreman decided that this was one of Ford's quiet jokes. He laughed appreciatively. Great idea, he applauded. All you'll need then will be a machine to give milk and you'll have the farm complete. Well, come round any time. Glad to see you. Ford made the rounds of Detroit's machine shops that day, but he did not mention his idea again. It was gradually shaping itself in his mind. In part a revival of his boyish plan for that first steam engine he had built of scraps from his father's shop. In part adapted from the article he had read about the horseless carriage. He was obliged to keep enough horses to handle the work of the farm when it was heaviest. In the slack season and during the winter the extra animals were necessarily idle, wasting food and barn space, and waste of any kind was an irritation to his methodical mind. It seemed to him that a machine could be built, which would do a great part of the horse's work in the fields, and cost nothing while not in use. That the undertaking was revolutionary, visionary, probably ridiculous to other people, did not deter him. He thought he could do it, and that was enough. Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world, he says today. Every generation has its own problem, it ought to find its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can't do things better than our fathers did. That belief had been steadily growing in him while his inherited thrift and his machine ideas improved on the farming methods of Greenfield. It crystallized into a creed when his old friend laughed at his idea of replacing horses with a machine. He had visited the shops which interested him, ordered the material he wanted, and was on his way to the station to take the train home when he remembered the shopping list Mrs. Ford had given him, and her repeated injunctions to attend to it—the very first thing he did. With the usual exclamation of a husband saved by a sudden thought on the very brink of domestic catastrophe, Henry Ford turned and hurried back to make those purchases. Aided by a sympathetic clerk at the ribbon counter, he completed them satisfactorily and came out of the store, laden with bundles, just at the moment that Detroit's pride, a new steam-propelled fire engine, came puffing round the corner. It was going at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, with impressive clatter and clang pouring clouds of black smoke from the stack. Detroit's citizens crowded the sidewalks to view it as it went by. Henry Ford, gripping his bundles, stood on the curb and looked at it. Here was his first chance to see a steam engine built to run without a prepared roadbed and rails. It was the original of one of those pictures we sometimes see now with a smile murmuring, How quaint! A huge round boiler, standing high in the back, supplied fully half its bulk. Ford made a hasty calculation of the probable weight of water it carried in proportion to its power. The result appalled him. He thoughtfully watched the engine until it was out of sight. Then he resumed his way home. On the train he sat in deep thought, now and then figuring a little on the back of an old envelope. I couldn't get that steam engine out of my mind, he says. What an awful waste of power! The weight of the water in that boiler bothered me for weeks. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Henry Ford's Own Story This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Leanne Howlett. Henry Ford's Own Story by Rose Wilder Lane. Chapter 10 Why not use gasoline? One sympathizes with young Mrs. Ford during the weeks that followed. In two years of marriage she had learned to understand her husband's interests and moods fairly well. She had adjusted herself with fewer domestic discords than usual to the simple demands of his good humored methodical temperament. She had begun to settle into a pleasant, accustomed routine of managing her house and poultry yard, preparing the meals, washing the dishes, spending the evening sowing while Henry read his mechanics journals on the other side of the lamp. Now everything changed. Henry had returned from that trip to Detroit with something on his mind. In reply to her anxious inquiries he told her not to bother. He was all right, a statement that had the usual effect of confirming her fears. She was sure something terrible had occurred, some overwhelming business catastrophe, and Henry was keeping it from her. From the kitchen window she saw him sitting idly on the horse block in the middle of the forenoon, twisting a straw on his fingers and frowning intently at the side of the barn. Sometimes after supper, instead of settling quietly down with his papers, he walked up and down, up and down, the sitting room, with his hands behind his back, and that same frown on his forehead. At last she could endure it no longer. She begged him to tell her the worst. He replied, surprised, that it was a steam engine. He couldn't figure out the ratio of power to wait satisfactorily. The blame thing bothered him. Oh, is that all? Mrs. Ford said indignantly. Well, I wouldn't bother about it if I were you. What does an old steam engine matter anyhow? Come and sit down and forget about it. It was the one thing Ford could not do. His mind, once started on the project of building an engine to use on the farm, remained obstinately at work on the details. He spent weeks considering them one by one, thinking out adaptations, new devices, in an effort to overcome the difficulty. Still he could not see how to construct a cheap engine, which would pull across his soft fields, carry the necessary weight of water, and still develop enough free power to be useful. He was still struggling with the problem three months after his trip to Detroit. I declare to goodness, I don't know what's got into you, Henry. You act like a man in a dream half the time, the wife said worried. You aren't coming down with a fever, are you? I should say not. Henry replied hastily, with visions of brood, snake root, and wormwood. I feel fine. Where's the milk pail? He took it and his lantern and hurried out to the barn, but even while he sat on the three-legged stool, his practice hand sending streams of warm milk foaming into the pail, his mind returned to that problem of the steam engine. He was sure a machine could be made to do the work of horses. He was confident that he could make it if he persisted long enough. The trouble was the weight of the water. He must have it to make steam. He must have steam to develop power, and the whole power was required to haul the water. It looked like an inexorable circle. He went over it again, looking for the weak spot in the reasoning, and suddenly he saw it. Steam was not necessary. Why not use gasoline? The thought opened a door into unknown possibilities. Up to that time, as far as he knew, no one had ever dreamed of a self-propelling gasoline engine. A thousand obstacles rose immediately before his mind. The gearing, the drive, the construction of the engine itself, a dazzling array of problems to be faced and solved. Difficulties enumerable stood in the way of his carrying out the idea. Difficulties apparently so insurmountable that ninety-nine men in a hundred would have abandoned the idea as impossible after one glance at them. Henry Ford was the hundredth man. They were mechanical difficulties, and he loved mechanics. He was eager for the struggle with them. It seemed to take me a year to finish the chores so I could sit down someplace and figure it out, he says. He finished the milking, fed the waiting circle of gleaming-eyed cats, flashed his lantern down the rows of stalls to be sure the horses were well fed and comfortable, fastened the barn doors, and hastened into the house with the milk. Every moment seemed wasted until he could reach the quiet sitting-room, spread paper and pencils in the lamp-light, and begin to work out some of those problems. He had never disliked the chores so much. From that time his distaste for farm-work grew. Nature would not delay her orderly cycle because Henry Ford wanted to spend his days in the little farm-shop. Weeds sprang up and must be cut, crops ripened and must be harvested. Morning came with a hundred imperative demands on his time and strength, and night brought the chores. All the farm tasks were to Ford only vexing obstacles in his way to his real work, and they kept him from it till late at night. Then when all Greenfield was asleep and Mrs. Ford, after a long struggle to keep awake, had gone yawning to bed, he sat alone and worked over the problems of his gasoline engine. He ransacked the piles of mechanics journals for suggestions. Where they failed him, he tried to think his way ahead without help. While he worked through the night in a stillness broken only by the crowing of a rooster in some distant farm-yard and the sputtering of the lamp, the possibilities of his idea gradually grew in his mind. He was not an imaginative man. The details of the engine absorbed most of his attention. But now and then, as the night wore on toward morning, he had a dim understanding of the possibilities of horseless transportation. He thought what it might mean to the world if every man had a machine to carry him and his goods over the country at a speed of twenty or even twenty-five miles an hour. It was a fantastic vision, he admitted, but he said his teeth and declared that it was not an impossible one. Sometimes he worked all night. Usually weariness overcame him in the small hours, and he was forced to stop and go through another day's work on the farm before he could get back to his real interests again. If the farm was to prosper, he must give it his attention every day. The margin of time it allowed for his work on the gasoline engine plans was far too little. By the end of that summer he had made up his mind that he could not spare his time for the farm. He told his wife that he had decided to lease it to his brother and move to Detroit. My goodness, Henry, what for? We're doing well here. I'm sure you're going ahead faster than anyone in the neighborhood, she said in astonishment. I want to get back to work in the machine shops. I can't do any work on my gasoline engine here. Even if I had the time I haven't the equipment, he explained. Well, I must say here we've worked hard and got a comfortable home and a fine farm that pays more every year and sixteen head of good stock, and you're going to leave it all for a gasoline engine that isn't even built. I don't see what you're thinking of, said poor Mrs. Ford, confronted thus suddenly with the prospect of giving up all her accustomed ways. Her old friends, her big house with its stock of linens and its cellar filled with good things. You can't begin to make as much in the city as you do here," she argued reasonably, and suppose the engine doesn't work after all. It'll work all right. I'm going to keep at it till it does, Ford said. CHAPTER X Mrs. Ford's opinion was now shared by the whole Greenfield neighborhood as soon as it learned Ford's intention of leaving his fine paying farm and moving to Detroit to work in a machine shop. You had this notion once before you know when you were a youngster, his father reminded him. I thought you'd made up your mind to stay here, where you can make a good living and have some peace and comfort. He listened to his son's explanation of the possibilities in a self-propelling gasoline engine and he shook his head. I guess you can build it if anybody can, but you can't ever tell about these inventions. Looks to me you'd better stick to a good farm where you're your own boss and there's always plenty in the cupboard whatever happens instead of going off to a city job. You may build that contrivance of yours and then again you may not, and look how you'll be living in the meantime. But Henry was firm, with the determination which is called obscenity when it goes with failure and great willpower when it is coupled with success. He was going to the city. That settled it. After her first protest Mrs. Ford accepted the situation and set herself with what philosophy she might to packing her linen and wrapping the furniture. She had no great interest in the gasoline engine. Machinery in general was to her merely something greasy and worrying to hold her skirts away from. But if Henry was going to Detroit, of course she was going to and she might as well be cheerful about it. The rosy teasing country girl who had kept Henry Ford from his beloved machines nearly five years before by her laughing refusal to choose between her suitors had developed into a cheerful, capable little housewife. The kind of woman whose place is in the home because there she does her best work. She could never invent a gasoline engine, but she was an ideal person to take care of Henry Ford while he did it. To keep the house clean and comfortable, cook good meals, cheer him a bit when he was depressed and never have nerves. She went briskly to work and in no time she had packed away the thousand articles that meant home to her and they stood wrapped, crated, labeled, ready to move to Detroit. Meantime Ford had arranged for the lease of the farm and for the storage of the furniture until he should have found a house in the city. Mrs. Ford was going there with him, and they would live in a boarding house until he got a job. On the last morning when he picked up the telescope bags, ready to start to the station, his wife went over to the house for the last time to see that everything was snug and safe to leave. Then she came into the parlor where he was waiting and looked around the bare room stripped of its bright Brussels carpets, lace curtains and shiny furniture. Well, we'll come back some day, won't we? she said. When the gasoline engine is built? She had spoken for the first time a phrase they were to repeat frequently with every accent of expectation, hope, discouragement and irony during the next ten years. When the gasoline engine is built. A crowd of their friends gathered at the station to say goodbye, with an intention of being tactful, they avoided any mention of Henry's purpose in leaving Greenfield. Sorry to lose you, Ford. Hope you'll be coming back before long, they said, and he knew the neighborhood had learned of his intention to invent something and thought him suddenly become a fool. As soon as they reached Detroit and found a boarding house where he could leave his wife he started out to get a job. He wanted one where he could learn something about electricity. So far his knowledge of it was purely theoretical, gained from reading and thinking. Electric lights had come to Detroit since he left it. The Edison Electric Lighting and Power Company had established three power stations there. He asked nothing better than a chance to work in one of them. Charles Gilbert, manager of the plants, was having a hard time that morning. By one of those freaks of fate which must be left out of any fiction plot because they are too improbable, two of his engines had chosen that day to break down simultaneously. One of the engineers who had been responsible had been summarily discharged. The others were working on the engine in the main plant and one of the substations was entirely out of commission with no prospect of getting to work on it until the next day. Into this situation Henry Ford walked and asked for a job. He looked to me like any tramp engineer, Charles Gilbert says today. A young fellow, not very husky looking, more of a slight wiry build. You wouldn't have noticed him at all in a crowd. He talked like a steady capable fellow, but if he had come in on any other day I'd have said we couldn't use him. As it was I thought I might as well give him a chance. He listened to Ford, looked him over. Know anything about steam engines? He asked him. Ford said he did. Well, the engine at substation A quit this morning. I got a couple of mechanics working on it but they don't seem to be doing much. Get out there and see what you can do and let me know. All right, sir. Ford replied and went. It was then about ten in the morning. Gilbert, busy with the troubles in the main plant, heard no more from substation A until six o'clock that evening. Then a small boy arrived with a message. Engine running OK. Ford. Gilbert went out to the substation. The engine in perfect order was roaring in the basement. On the first floor the dynamos were going at full speed. His worries with substation A were over. He went down to the engine and found Ford busy with an oil can. What's the job of night engineer here? Gilbert asked him. Pays forty-five a month. Go to work right now if you say so. Ford assured him. All right. I'll have another man here to relieve you at six in the morning. Come down to the office sometime tomorrow and I'll put your name on the payroll. In one day Ford had got the very opportunity he wanted. A job where he could study electricity at first hand. An hour later Mrs. Ford, who had spent the day drearly unpacking trunks and putting the telescope bags under the bed and a hopeless attempt to make a boarding-house bedroom home-like, received an enthusiastic note. Got fine job already, working all night. Go to bed and don't worry. Everything is settled splendidly, Henry. He had forgotten to mention that his wages were forty-five dollars a month. CHAPTER XI. The new job gave him a chance to work with machinery, an opportunity to learn all about electricity. His contentment, as he went whistling about his work after Gilbert left, would have seemed pure insanity to the average person. Forty-five dollars a month. You see, I never did bother much about money, he says. My wages were enough for food and shelter and that was all I wanted. Money matters always seem to sort of take care of themselves some way. It's always that way. If a man is working at something he likes he's bound to work hard at it and then the money comes. Worrying about money is about the worst thing a man can do. It takes his mind off his work. His philosophy apparently justified itself. In the months that followed, Substation A had no more breakdowns. Now and then Manager Gilbert inquired how the new man was getting along. A wizard at machinery had some trouble with the dynamo last night and he had it fixed in no time, he heard. Or, say, where'd you get him? He knows more about this plant than the man that built it. Fort himself was not in evidence. The manager, quitting work at about the time Fort arrived at the Substation for the night shift, did not see him again until one day at the end of three months the engine at the main plant stopped. The engineer in charge looked at it and shook his head. Can't do anything with it till tomorrow, he said. We'll have to take it down. It was late in the afternoon and the engine was needed to keep Detroit lighted that night. Gilbert, remembering the reports of the new man, sent for Ford. He came and fixed the engine. It was all in the day's work as far as he was concerned. He went back to Substation A and forgot the incident. He does not remember it now. Gilbert remembered it, but he did not go out of his way to pay any attention to Ford. He simply forgot about the mechanical work of Substation A. He knew Ford would take care of it. A manager spends his time and thought on the poor workman, a good man he leaves alone. When Ford had been with the Edison Company six months, drawing his forty-five dollars regularly and handing it to Mrs. Ford to pay the landlady, he knew the Edison plants from the basements up. He had become enthusiastic over electrical problems. In his idle time, after his twelve hours' work at the Substation, he was planning the batteries and spark plugs for his gasoline engine. About that time a shift in the force left vacant the place of manager of the mechanical department. Gilbert sent for Ford. Think you can handle the job, he asked him. Yes, I can handle it, Ford said. Gilbert gave him the job. When he drew his pay at the end of the month, he found he was getting one hundred fifty dollars. Now, he said to himself, I've got to have a place of my own where I can work on my gasoline engine at night. Now we can have a home of our own and get away from this awful boarding house. Mrs. Ford exclaimed, when he told her the news, and he, contrasting the supper he had just eaten with memories of her excellent cooking, heartily agreed. Besides it seemed to him that paying rent was wasting money, he proposed to buy a lot and build on it. They talked it over, walking up and down Detroit's wide tree-shaded streets in the evening. Next morning early Mrs. Ford put on her hat and went down to the real estate offices. Before night two hustling young city lot salesmen had interviewed Ford at the Edison plant, and when he came home that night another one was waiting on the boarding house steps. That week was a busy one. Ford worked from six in the morning to six at night in the Edison plant, hurried home to find Mrs. Ford waiting, bright-eyed with eagerness to tell him of the lots she had seen that day, and before he had finished his supper he was snatched away from it to hear an enthusiastic salesman describe still other bargains in Detroit real estate. Impatient to be at work on his drawings for the gasoline engine he was taken from end to end of the city to inspect home sites. He was experiencing that agony of all workers, being obliged to spend so much time preparing a place to work that there was none left for the work. This thing has to stop, he said in desperation to his wife one evening. I've been inquiring around a little and I think the best place to buy is out on Edison Avenue. Put on your hat and we'll go out and decide on one of those lots we saw last Saturday. They went out and looked them over. On one of the lots was an old shed. Ford examined it. If this place suits you, we'll take it, he said. This shed will make a shop without much fixing. I'll build the gasoline engine here. Mrs. Ford looked about at the scattered little houses and bare lots. It was spring, the grass was beginning to sprout, and the smell of the damp earth and the feeling of space reminded her of the country. She liked it. All right, let's buy this one, she said. A few days later they signed the contract. The lot cost $700, $50 down and the rest in monthly payments. Ford drew from the savings bank $200, his bank balance at the time he left the farm, and bought lumber. After that he spent his evenings building the house. While he hammered and sawed Mrs. Ford was at work in the yard. She set out rose bushes, planted a vegetable garden behind the shed. The neighboring women came over to get acquainted and asked her to come in some time and bring her sowing as soon as she got settled. After those six months in a dreary boarding house it must have been pleasant to her to see the beginnings of a home and a friendly circle again. This seems to be a nice neighborhood. I think we're going to enjoy it here. She said later to her husband, holding the lantern while he nailed down the floors long after dark. That's good. Glad you like it, he answered. I wish the place was finished so I could get to work. Meantime at the Edison plant he was making his first experiments and applying his machine idea to the managing of men. End of CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII When Henry Ford became manager of the mechanical department, the truckmen and the Edison plants were working twelve-hour shifts as a matter of course. In those days the theory of practically all employers was that men, like the rest of their equipment, should be worked to the limit of their strength. We had about forty men on the regular list and four or five substitutes who were kept busy filling in for the regular men who were sick or tired out, he said. I hadn't been in charge long before it struck me there was something wrong. If our machines had broken down as often as our men did, anybody would have known we weren't handling them right. No good engineer will run a machine at the limit of its power and speed for very long. It hurts the machine. It isn't sentimentalism to take care of the machine. It's plain common sense and efficiency. It isn't sentimentalism to look out for the interests of the men. The sooner people get over the idea that there's a difference between ideals of brotherhood and practical common sense, the sooner we'll do away with waste and friction of all kinds and have a world that's run right. The only trouble now is that people haven't the courage to put their ideals to work. They say, oh, of course theoretically we believe in them, but they aren't practical. What's the use of believing in anything that isn't practical? If it's any good at all, it's The whole progress of the world has been made by men who went to work and used their impractical theories. Well, I figured over the situation quite a while, and I found out that by putting the substitutes on the regular list and shifting the men around a little I could give them all an eight-hour day without increasing the payroll. I did it. Yes, there was a howl from the stockholders when they heard about it. Nobody had ever tried it before. They thought I was going to turn everything upside down and ruin the business. But the work was going along better than before. The men felt more like work, and they pitched in to show they appreciated being treated right. We had fewer breakdowns after that. Everything went better. After the thing was done, it was easy enough to prove that it paid, and the stockholders quieted down after one or two complaints. As a matter of fact, I don't believe in any hours for work. A man ought to work as long as he wants to, and he ought to enjoy his work so much that he wants to work as long as he can. It's only monotonous grinding work that needs an eight-hour day. When a man is creating something, working to get results, 12 or 14 hours a day doesn't hurt him. Ford put this theory into practice as apparently he had done with all his theories. He himself worked more than 14 hours a day. From six to six he worked in the Edison plant for his eight-hour regime did not apply to himself. Then he hastened home to the little house on Edison Avenue, ate supper, and hurried out to his improvised workshop in the old shed. He turned on the big electric lights and therein the glare lay materials for his self-propelling gasoline engine, his real work, which at last he could begin. Until late at night the neighbor has heard the sound of his tools and saw the glare of light through the cracks. The Smiths are giving a party tonight. I suppose we can't go. Mrs. Ford said one evening wistfully. Oh, well, when the gasoline engine is finished, how long do you think it's going to take? I don't know. I'm working on the cylinder now. I'll have to have a larger bore to get the speed and then there'll be the transmission. Ford stopped speaking and was lost in the problems. He finished supper abstractedly and pushed back his chair. Oh, about the party. Too bad. I hope you don't mind much when I get the gasoline engine finished. He said apologetically and hurried out to work on it. In a few minutes he was absorbed with the cylinder. He had found that day a piece of pipe thrown into the scrap heap at the Edison plant and it had struck him at once that it would do for his cylinder and that using it would save him the time and work of making one. He brought it home, cut it to the right length, and set it in the first Ford engine. Meantime in the house Mrs. Ford cleared away the supper dishes, took out her sewing and settled down with a sigh. The neighbors were going by to the Smith's party. She could hear them laughing and calling to each other on the sidewalk outside. In the shed her husband was filing something. The rasp of the file on the metal sounded plainly. After all, she thought, she might as well give up the idea of parties. She couldn't give one herself. She knew Henry would refuse to leave his hateful engine even for one evening. She was very homesick for Greenfield. The months went by. Ford worked all day at the Edison plant, half the night in his own shop. The men he met in his work had taken to looking at him half in amusement, half in good-humored contempt. He was a crank, they said. Some of the younger ones would laugh and tap their foreheads when he had gone past them. One night he came home and found Mrs. Ford crying. The neighbors were saying that he was crazy, she sobbed. She'd told Mrs. Lessing just exactly what she thought of her, too, and she'd never speak to her again. But, oh, wouldn't he ever get that hard engine finished so they could live like other people? It all hurt. No man was ever friendlier or enjoyed more of the feeling of comradeship with other men than Ford. But it was a choice between that and his automobile. He went on with his routine of work, fourteen or sixteen hours of it every day, and he drew more into himself, became more reserved with every month that passed. If any man ever followed Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance, giving up friends and family and his devotion to his own work, that man was Henry Ford in those days. There was nothing dramatic about it, just an obscure machinist with an idea, willing to give up social pleasures, restful domestic evenings, the good opinion of his neighbors, and work hard in an old shed behind his common little house. Only an ordinary man turning his back on everything most of us want for an impractical theory. That was all. He continued to work for two years. He built the engine slowly, thinking out every step in advance, drawing every casting before he made it, struggling for months over the problem of the electrical wiring and spark. Sometimes he worked all night. Sick? No, I never was sick, he says. It isn't overworking that breaks men down. It's overplaying and over-eating. I never ate too much, and I felt all right, no matter how long I worked. Of course sometimes I was pretty tired. One day he called his wife out to the shed. The little engine set up on blocks was humming away, its flywheel a blur in the air. The high-speed revolutions that made the automobile possible were an accomplished fact. Oh, Henry, it's done. You've finished it," she said happily. No, that's just the beginning. Now I've got to figure out the transmission, the steering gear, and a lot of things, he replied. End of Chapter 13.