nere in small compass7eh*4ched with under
standing, is the story of the great hero of
mass production. In the first, fateful decades
of this century Ford evolved a cheap standard
ized car that transformed American life in city
and country and called into existence new
industries, new roads, a new mechanically
minded generation. The relentless technical
rationalization that made this possible excited
the wonder and emulation of the world.
Ford s greatest innovation the mo.ving as
sembly line raised human productivity to
heights undreamed of.
The life of this lonely, unlettered, contra
dictory genius was as lengendary as his ac
complishment. Burlingame describes Ford s
early days on a Michigan farm, his dogged
attempts in a Detroit woodshed, the desperate
need of funds that drove him into automobile
racing. He describes the formation of the Ford
company, its struggles and reversals, the law
suits, the crises, the adjustments and advances.
He discusses the powerful personalities that
Ford attracted to himself, the internal dissen
sions in the company, the controversial labor
policy, Ford s benefactions and blind spots,
his family life, his square-dances, his fling at
politics. Burlingame has shown all sides of
this light-lipped, intuitive man and all phases
of hrs career, which changed the world. J
C. Paul Thompson
HENRY FORD
FOREWORD
BY ROSE WILDER LANE
FIFTY-TWO years ago * 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 the 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. Some
times 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 ma
terial. 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 fac
tory that ten million dollars would be divided
*July 30, 1863.
iii
iv FOREWORD
among the eighteen thousand employees as their
share of the company s profits. Henry Ford was
a multimillionaire, and America regarded him
with awe.
Mankind must have its hero. The demand for
him is more insistent than hunger, more inex
orable than cold or fear. Before a race builds
houses or prepares food with its hands, it creates
in its mind that demigod, that superman, stand
ing 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 ex
perience 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 ad
vance of democracy destroys our old hero, and
hastily we build up another. When science has
exorcised Jove, and real estate promoters have
subdivided the Olympian heights, we desert the
old altars to kneel before thrones. W T hen our
kings have been cast down from their high places
by our inconsistent struggles for liberty, we can
not 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.
FOREWORD v
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 spec
tacle of his rise from our ranks. Yesterday he
was a farmer s son, an office boy, a peddler of
Armenian laces. To-day he is a demigod. Is
our country threatened with financial ruin? At
a midnight conference of his dependents, 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 life
time he has made himself a world power; in
twenty years he has made a hundred million dol
lars, 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. Fie
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 have been at the
head of our great business development are
greater than ordinary men, that most of them
believe it themselves and act on that assump
tion. 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 mechanic s outlook on life
and human relations. He sees men all as parts
vi FOREWORD
of a great machine, in which every waste mo
tion, every broken or inefficient part means a
loss to the whole.
"Money doesn t do me any good" he says. ff l
can t spend it on myself. Money has no value,
anyway. It is merely a transmitter, like elec
tricity. I try to keep it moving as fast as I can,
for the best interests of everybody concerned. A
man can t afford to look out for himself at the
expense of any one else, because anything that
hurts the other man is bound to hurt you in the
end, tlie same way. 3
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.
CONTENTS
PAGB
FOREWORD iii
CHAPTER
I. ONE SUMMER S DAY , . i
II. MENDING A WATCH . . . . 7
III. THE FIRST JOB .14
W. AN EXACTING ROUTINE , . 20
V. GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA . . . 26
VI. BACK TO THE FARM 33
VII. THE ROAD TO HYMEN .... 40
yill. MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT ... 46
IX. THE LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS . 52
X. "WHY NOT USE GASOLINE?" ... 57
XL BACK TO DETROIT 63
XII. LEARNING ABOUT ELECTRICITY . . 69
XIII. EIGHT HOURS, BUT NOT FOR HIMSELF . 74
XIV. STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR . 80
XV. A RIDE IN THE RAIN .... 86
XVI. ENTER COFFEE JIM 92
XVII. ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS .... 98
XVIII. WINNING A RACE 104
XIX. RAISING CAPITAL . . . .no
XX. CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE . . .116
rii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGH
XXI. EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS . . 122
XXII. AUTOMOBILES FOR THE MASSES . . 129
XXIII. FIGHTING THE SELDON PATENT . . 135
XXIV. "THE GREATEST GOOD TO THE GREATEST
NUMBER" 141
XXV. FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM . . 147
XXVI. MAKING IT PAY 154
XXVII. THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB . . . 161
XXVIII. A GREAT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION . 167
XXIX. THE EUROPEAN WAR .... 173
XXX. THE BEST PREPAREDNESS . . .179
HENRY FORD S OWN
STORY
CHAPTER I
ONE SUMMER S DAY
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 3OO-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-
HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 work
ing there, lifting great forksful 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.
Grasshoppers whirred up from the winrows 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 swal
lows 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 meas
ure 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 shoul
der 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.
Suddenly they heard a clang from the great
bell, hung high on a post in the home dooryard,
ONE SUMMER S DAY 3
and used only for calling in the men at dinner
time or for some emergency alarm. Every man
stopped. It was only 10 o clock. Then they saw
a fluttering apron at the barnyard gate, and Wil
liam Ford dropped his fork.
"I ll go. Get in the hay !" he called back, al
ready running over the stubble in 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 Doc Hall," 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 2 o clock in the afternoon the rain
4 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 sup
posed he cared about the hay.
"What re you going to call him, 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 s 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 boy-
baby need never want for anything in reason.
Henry was the second son of William Ford
and Mary Litogot Ford, his energetic, whole
some Holland Dutch wife. While he was still
in pinafores, tumbling about the house or making
daring excursions into the barnyard, the strong
hold 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, taught,
ONE SUMMER S DAY 5
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, patch
work quilts to sew, and later to fasten into the
quilting frames and stitch by hand in herring
bone or fan patterns. The hired hands must be
fed twenty or thirty of them in 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 or
der" so dear to the pride of the Michigan farm
ers women- folk.
All these tasks Mary Ford did, or superin
tended, efficiently, looking to the ways of her
household with all the care and pride her hus
band 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 any one in
the little community who needed it. And always
she watched over the health and manners of the
children.
6 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
In this environment Henry grew. He was en
ergetic, interested in everything, from the first.
His misadventures in conquering the turkey gob
bler 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 vinegar and water to the men
working in the harvest field. He learned . every
corner of the hay-mow, and had a serious inter
view with his father over the matter 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 afternoons sliding on the ice with
his brothers.
Best of all he liked the "shop," where the black
smith work for the farm was done and the sharp
ening of tools. When the weather was bad out
side his father or one of the men lighted the char
coal in the forge and Henry might pull the bel
lows till the fire glowed and the iron buried in it
shone white-hot. Then the sparks flew from the
anvil while the great hammer clanged on the
metal, shaping it, and Henry begged to be al
lowed to try it himself, just once. In time he
was given a small hammer of his own.
So the years passed until Henry was 1 1 years
old, and then a momentous event occurred small
enough in itself, but to this day one of the keen
est memories of his childhood.
CHAPTER II
MENDING A WATCH
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 Epis
copalians, 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 Sun
day-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
7
8 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
heaven and hell. In my opinion, a man makes
his own heaven and hell and carries it around
with him. 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. 7
To cramp his joyously liberated toes again into
stuffy, leather shoes seemed to him an outrage.
He resented his white collar, too, and the im
maculate 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 an
other.
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
in to the church, they met their neighbors, the
Bennetts. Will Bennett, a youngster about
Henry s age, hailed him from the other carriage.
"Hi, Hen! C m ere! I got something you
ain t got !"
Henry scrambled out over the wheel and hur
ried 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 awed 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
MENDING A WATCH 9
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 runnin !" At the same moment a daz
zling idea occurred to him. He had always
wanted to see the insides of a watch.
"I bet I c n 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 Bennetts farm "shop," busy
with the watch. Having no screw-driver 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 ac
companiment of an agonized protest from Will;
the cogs fell apart, the springs unwound. Alto
gether it was a beautiful disorder, enough to de
light any small boy.
"Now look what you ve went and done !" cried
Will, torn between natural emotion over the dis
aster to his watch and admiration of Henry s
daring.
"Well, you SAID you was goin ta put it to
gether," he reminded that experimenter many
times in the next few hours.
Dinner time came, and Will, recalling the fried
io HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
chicken, dumplings, puddings, cakes, of the Sun
day dinner, grew more than restless, but Henry-
held him there by the sheer force of his en
thusiasm. The afternoon wore along, and he was
still investigating those fascinating gears and
springs.
When at last outraged parental authority de
scended 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 run
ning in no time.
Family discipline was strict in those days. Un
doubtedly 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 timepiece on the
place, excepting only his father s watch.
"Every clock in the house shuddered 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 12 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
MENDING A WATCH n
horses, learned to milk and chop kindling. He
recalls that his principal objection to such work
was that it was always interrupting some inter
esting occupation he had discovered for himself
in the shop. He liked to handle tools, to make
something. The chores were an endless repeti
tion 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 me
chanical 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 every
one, 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 some
thing to show for time spent. Swimming, skat-
12 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
ing 1 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 occu
pation.
Accordingly, he constructed a working forge
in the schoolyard, and he and his crowd spent
every recess and noon during one autumn work
ing at it. There, with the aid of a blow-pipe,
they melted every bottle arid bit of broken glass
they could find and recast them into strange
shapes. It was Henry, too, who devised the plan
of damming the creek that ran near the school-
house, and by organizing the other boys into reg
ular gangs, with a subforeman for each, accom
plished 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 farm lands, under their
plumes of smoke, and when he caught a glimpse
of the sooty man in overalls at the throttle, he
felt an ambitious longing. Some day !
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
MENDING A WATCH 13
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 manu
factured a device for opening and closing the
farm gates without getting down from the wagon.
Then, when he was 14, an event occurred
which undoubtedly changed the course of his life.
Mary Ford died.
CHAPTER III
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 pa
thetic attempt, that effort of the big, hardworking
farmer to take a mother s place to the four chil
dren.
For a time a married aunt came in and man
aged the household, but she was needed in her
own home and soon went back to it. Then Mar
garet, 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 had for him was
gone; thereafter every task was merely a repeti
tion. His father did not need his help; there
were always the hired men. I suppose any need
William Ford may have felt for the companion
ship of his second son was unexpressed. In mat-
14
THE FIRST JOB 15
ters 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
whole 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 ma
chines he longed to handle.
16 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 morn
ing, and while his family supposed him at school
and the teacher was marking a matter-of-fact
"absent" after his name, he had already set 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 be
fore, 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
THE FIRST JOB 17
they were, tingled with excitement when he en
tered the place. He had read of it, and had even
seen a picture of it, but now he beheld for him
self 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 fic
tion. Instead, he looked Henry over, asked him
a question or two, remembered that a big order
had just corne 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
i8 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
walked down the street, whistling. The world
looked like a good place to him. No more farm
ing 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 re
main 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 in 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 con
sent 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 the precision of a machine,
directly to the answer.
THE FIRST JOB 19
"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.
CHAPTER IV
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 inde
pendence Henry had taken no one into his confi
dence, 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 dryly 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 De
troit to look for him.
Those two days had been full of interest for
20
AN EXACTING ROUTINE 21
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 sup
per 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 are 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 fam
ily 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 jewelers 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 a jeweler. The third day, late
in the afternoon, his father found him. Know
ing Henry s interests, William Ford had begun
22 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
his search by inquiring for the boy in Detroit s
machine shops.
He spoke to the foreman and took Henry out
side. There was an argument. William Ford,
backed by the force of parental authority, de
clared sternly that the place for Henry was in
school. Henry, with two days experience in a
real iron works, 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 ar
gument. He must have been an unusually rea
sonable 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 re
sources. 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
AN EXACTING ROUTINE 23
week for spending money. This was embar
rassing 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 sched
ule, following the same route the shortest one
from the boarding-house to the shops, to the jew
eler s, 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 jeweler s.
24 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
Few boys of sixteen could endure a routine
so exacting in its demands on strength and en
durance without destroying their health, but
Henry Ford had the one trait common to all men
of achievement an apparently inexhaustible en
ergy. 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 in
tricate details of building steam engines. The
mammoth shop of James Flower & Co., with its
great force of a hundred mechanics, became fa
miliar to him; it shrank from the huge propor
tions it had at first assumed in his eyes. He be
gan 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
rod ll have to be made over ; it won t fit the cylin
der."
"Oh, well, I guess we do the best we can," the
other man said. "It won t take long to fit it."
AN EXACTING ROUTINE 25
It was the happy-go-lucky method of factories in
the seventies.
Men were shifted from job to job to suit 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 cor
ners of the shop. A piece of work was aban
doned half finished in order to make up time on
another order, delayed by some accident. By
to-day s standards it was a veritable helter-skel
ter, 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 iron-works
was managed.
He was growing dissatisfied with his job.
CHAPTER V
GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA
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 con
cerned, the advantages of the iron- works 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 be
gan to think the foreman rather a stupid fellow,
with slipshod, inefficient 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 cus
tomary. Efficiency experts, waste-motion experi
ments, 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
26
GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA 27
Flower Company. He had got a job with the
Drydock Engine works, manufacturers of ma
rine 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 ma
chines merely, but the machine idea. He went
to work for the drydock company because he
liked its organization.
By this time he was a little more than 17 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 prob
lems, his natural liking for human companion
ship began to assert itself. At the drydock works
he found a group of young men like himself,
hard-working, fun-loving young mechanics. In
a few weeks he was popular with them.
They were a clean, energetic lot, clear-think
ing 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
28 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 water front; 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 en
ergy 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 tentative attempt with hay-cigarettes
in his boyhood had discouraged that perma
nently he did not drink, and girls seemed to
him unutterably stupid.
"I have never tasted liquor in my life," he
says. "I d as soon think of taking any other
poison."
Undoubtedly his opinion is right, but one is in
clined to doubt the accuracy of his memory. In
those early days in Detroit he must have experi
mented at least once with the effects of liquor
on the human system ; probably once would have
been sufficient. Besides, about that time he de
veloped an interest so strong that it not only ab~
GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA 29
sorbed 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 in the drydock
works so thoroughly that his wages were raised.
Later they were raised again. Then he was get
ting 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 its
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 produc
tion 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
30 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 gi
gantic 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 die.
He talked it over with the boys at the drydock
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 thou
sands of dollars as though they were pennies.
The size of the sums did not stagger him, be
cause money was never concrete to him it was
merely rows of figures but to the young fel
lows 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 fac
tory 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 hun-
GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA 31
dred tons, estimated the exact proportions each
metal required ; they planned an output of 2,000
watches daily as the point at which cost of pro
duction would be cheapest. They would sell the
watch for fifty cents, and guarantee it for one
year. Two thousand watches at a profit of thir
teen cents each $260 daily profit! They were
dazzled.
"We needn t stop there we can increase that
output when we get started," Henry Ford de
clared. "Organization will do it. Lack of or
ganization 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 out
put, lower prices. It works in 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 fdr 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
32 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 de
cided 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.
CHAPTER VI
BACK TO THE FARM
THE letter from home must have come like a
dash of cold wather on Henry s enthusiastic
plans. He had been thinking in the future, plan
ning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead.
It has always been his instinct to do just that.
"You can t run anything on precedents if you
want to make a success," he says to-day. "We
should be guiding our future by the present, in
stead of being guided in the present by the past."
Suddenly the past had come into his calcula
tions. 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 con
trolling factor in his life, but it has never been
stronger than his human sympathies. It is in
adjusting them to each other, in 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
33
34 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 be
tween the rows ; in the house his father was fret
ting because the 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 through the fence because
there was no one to see that their noses were
ringed and the gates opened. Some of the plows
and harrows 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, harvest
ing, setting the pace for the others to follow,
as an owner must do on a farm. He was learn
ing, so thoroughly that he never forgot it, the art
BACK TO THE FARM 35
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 barn-yard. 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, driv
ing 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 cor
ners; sleeves were rolled up, shirts opened wide
at the neck.
"Whew! 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, stop
ping gladly enough when the great bell clanged
out the welcome news that Margaret and the
girls had prepared the huge dinner their appe
tites demanded.
In the afternoons Henry, on the little gray
36 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
mare, rode to the far fields for a diplomatic, au
thoritative word with the men plowing there, or
perhaps he went a little farther, and bargained
with the next neighbor for a likely looking year
ling 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
pored over his mechanic journals by the sit
ting-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, at
tractive 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 coun
try 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
BACK TO THE FARM 37
will do, and walked the three miles to church
for the evening services.
It may be imagined that the girls of the neigh
borhood 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 Greenfield girls, an alert,
muscular fellow, with a droll humor and a whim
sical 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 fac
tory.
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
38 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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
none the less running, in a cloud of smoke and
sparks. He had a hearty laugh at it and aban
doned 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 get
ting 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 sewed
and talked. In the evening the men arrived and
then the long supper table was spread with Mar
garet s cooking hams, sausages, fried chickens,
a whole roast pig, pans of beans and succotash,
huge loaves of home-made bread, pats of butter,
cheese, cakes, pies, puddings, doughnuts, pitch-
BACK TO THE FARM 39
ers of milk and cidei; good things which dis
appeared fast enough before the plying knives
and forks, in bursts of laughter, while jokes were
called from end to end of the table and young
couples blushed under the chaffing of their neigh
bors.
Clara Bryant was one of the guests. Her fa
ther 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 HYMEN
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 ma
chine shops. The plans for the watch factory,
never wholly abandoned, might be carried out.
But Henry stayed at home on the farm. Grad
ually 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 in
terest in mechanics was as great as ever, but
there was Clara Bryant.
He made a few trips to Detroit, with an inten
tion which seemed to him earnest enough to re
vive 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 ef-
40
THE ROAD TO HYMEN 41
forts came to nothing, and he soon lost interest
in them.
He was in his early twenties then. His ambi
tion had not yet centered about a definite pur
pose, 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 mil
lion 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 crys
tals, he built up the kitchen fire for Margaret.
Then, with a lantern in his hand and milk pails
clanking on his arm, plowed his way through
the snow to the barns.
A red streak was showing in the eastern hori
zon; buildings and fences, covered with snow,
showed odd shapes in the gray dawn; his breath
hung like smoke on the frosty air.
42 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 ful of straw; he measured out rations of
bran and corn and oats ; he milked the cows, stop
ping before he carried the brimming pails to the
house to pour out some of the warm, sweet smell
ing milk for Rover and the cats.
Back in the kitchen Margaret had set the table
for breakfast. She was standing at the stove fry
ing sausages and turning corn cakes. The other
boys came tramping in from poultry yards and
hog pens. They took turns at the tin washbasin
set on a bench on the back porch, and then in to
breakfast with hearty appetites.
Afterward they husked corn in the big gran
aries, 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, sharpen
ing 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, seen that everything was
snug and comfortable about the big barns, he sad
dled the little bay and rode six miles to the Bryant
farm.
THE ROAD TO HYMEN 43
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 favor 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 heartily enough by her big,
jovial father, he would spend the evening talk
ing 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, slip
ping 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 sleighbells.
The fields sparkled white on either hand, here
and there lights gleamed from farm houses.
Then the sleigh slipped into the woods, still and
dark, except where the topmost branches shone
silver in the moonlight, and the road 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, mittened hand in hand, swept over
the ice in long, smooth flight, their skates ringing.
44 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
Or it happened that Henry stood warming his
hands at the bank and watched Clara skating
away with some one else, and thought bitter
things.
Somewhere, between farm work and court
ship, he found time to keep up with his mechan
ics 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 passed 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
and 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 passed with nothing definitely decided.
THE ROAD TO HYMEN 45
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 feel
ing that he had spent enough time in courtship;
he was impatient to get back to his other inter
ests, 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 re
turned 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 any one else,"
he says to-day. And adds, with his whimsical
twinkle, "she criticizes him more."
CHAPTER VIII
MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT
THE young couple went first to the Fords
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 in
the kitchen and dairy.
Henry was out in the fields early, working
hard to get the crops planted. Driving the p 1 ?w-
share deep into the rich, black loam, hclamg 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 in
come 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 sit-
46
MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT 47
ting-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 bed
rooms 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 and bent 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 se
lected 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
48 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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, 32 x 32 feet and containing seven rooms
and a roomy attic. In the evenings, after sup
per, 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 skel
eton partitions of studding, 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 stile
into the apple orchard, where the leaves were sil
ver and black in the moonlight, and so came
slowly home. Margaret had cut a watermelon,
MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT 49
cooled in a basket in the well, and all the family
sat on the back porch eating it.
Long after midnight, when every one else was
sound asleep, the lamp was burning in the sit
ting-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 fur
niture, 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 awhile. All the furniture is there, ex
actly 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; every one had plenty, and wanted no
more.
50 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
Henry s hired men ate at the table with him,
slept under the same roof, called him "Hen" as
a matter of course, just as he called them "Hi"
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 be
tween them. He had lived no better, spent no
more, than the others.
It was in those years that he laid the founda
tion 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 every one con
cerned," he decided. "Hurting the other fellow
is bound to hurt me sooner or later."
He was a good farmer. His mechanical, or
derly mind arranged the work so that it was done
smoothly, and on time, without overworking
any one or leaving any one idle. His thrifty in
stincts saved labor and time just as they saved
the barn manure to spread on the fields, or
MAKING A FARM EFFICIENT 51
planned for the turning in 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 pored 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, rock
ing 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.
CHAPTER IX
THE LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS
IT was an unconscious subterfuge, that state
ment 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, harvest
ing. He thought he was accomplishing nothing.
A little more money in the bank, a few more
52
LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS 53
acres added to the farm that was all, and it did
not interest him. Money never did. His pas
sion was machinery.
So he gave his orders to the hired man, pock
eted 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 drays,
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 be
fore 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 re you doing these days? Not looking
for a job, are you?"
"No, I m farming now," Ford replied. "Just
thought I d 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
54 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 expansive 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 ,1 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 corn
field and set it to plowing ! The wild impossibil
ity of the plan would have staggered any rea
sonable person. The foreman decided that this
was one of Ford s quiet jokes. He laughed ap
preciatively.
"Great idea!" he applauded. "All you ll need
then ll be a machine to give milk, and you ll have
the farm complete. Well, come around 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
LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS 55
handle the work of the farm when it was heavi
est ; 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 horses work in the fields
and cost nothing while not in use.
That the undertaking was revolutionary, vision
ary, 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 to-day. "Every genera
tion 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 domes-
56 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
tic catastrophe, Henry Ford turned and hurried
back to make those purchases. Aided by a sym
pathetic clerk at the ribbon counter, he completed
them satisfactorily, and came out of the store,
laden with bundles, just at the moment that De
troit s pride, a new steam-propelled fire engine,
came puffing around 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."
CHAPTER X
"WHY NOT USE GASOLINE?"
ONE sympathizes with young Mrs. Ford dur
ing the weeks that followed. In two years of
marriage she had learned to understand her hus
band 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, accus
tomed routine of managing her house and poultry
yard, preparing the meals, washing the dishes,
spending the evenings sewing, 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 fore-
57
58 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
noon, twisting a straw in his fingers and frown
ing 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 en
gine he couldn t figure out the ratio of power to
weight 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 consid
ering them one by one, thinking out adaptations,
new devices, in an effort to overcome the diffi
culty.
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 de
velop 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
"WHY NOT USE GASOLINE?" 59
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 brewed snakeroot 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 practiced hands sending streams
of warm milk foaming into the pail, his mind re
turned 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 re
quired to haul the water. It looked like an in
exorable circle. He went over it again, looking
for the weak spot in the reasoning and sud
denly he saw it.
Steam was not necessary. Why not use gaso
line?
The thought opened a door into unknown pos~
sibilities. Up to that time, as far as he knew, no
one had ever dreamed of a self-propelling gaso
line engine. A thousand obstacles rose imme
diately before his mind the gearing, the drive,
the construction of the engine itself a dazzling
array of problems to be faced and solved.
Difficulties innumerable stood in the way of
his carrying out the idea difficulties apparently
60 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
so insurmountable that ninety-nine men in a hun
dred would have abandoned the idea as impossi
ble after one glance at them. Henry Ford was
the hundredth man. They were mechanical dif
ficulties, 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 some place 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 lamplight 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 de
mands 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
"WHY NOT USE GASOLINE?" 61
gone yawning to bed, he sat alone and worked
over the problem of his gasoline engine. He ran
sacked the piles of mechanics journals for sug
gestions ; where they failed him he tried to think
his way ahead without help.
While he worked through the night, in a still
ness broken only by the crowing of a rooster in
some distant farmyard 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 at
tention 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 set his teeth and de
clared that it was not an impossible one.
Sometimes he worked all night. Usually weari
ness 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 al
lowed for his work on the gasoline engine
plans was far too little. By the end of that sum
mer he had made up his mind that he could not
spare his time for the farm. He told his wife
62 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
that he had decided to lease it to his brother and
move to Detroit.
"My goodness, Henry, what for? We re do
ing well here ; I m sure you re going ahead faster
than any one 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 en
gine 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 XI
BACK TO DETROIT
MRS. FORD S opinion was now shared by the
whole Greenfield neighborhood as soon as it
learned Ford s intention of leaving his fine, pay
ing 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 pos
sibilities 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 go
ing off to a city job. You may build that con
trivance of yours and then again you may not,
and look how you ll be living in the meantime."
But Henry was firm, with a determination
which is called obstinacy when it goes with fail
ure and great will power when it is coupled with
63
64 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 gaso
line engine machinery in general was to her
merely something greasy and whirring, to hold
her skirts away from but if Henry was going to
Detroit, of course she was going, too, 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, la
beled, ready to move to Detroit.
Meantime Ford had arranged for the lease of
the farm and for the storage of the furniture un
til he should have found a house in the city. Mrs.
Ford was going there with him, and they would
BACK TO DETROIT 65
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 sta
tion to say good-by. 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 com
ing back before long," they said, and he knew the
neighborhood had learned of his intention to in
vent 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
66 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 dis
charged; the others were working on the engine
in the main plant, and one of the sub-stations
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 to-day. "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 sub-station A quit this
morning. I got a couple of mechanics working
BACK TO DETROIT 67
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 sub-station A until 6 o clock that evening.
Then a small boy arrived with a message : "En
gine running O. K. Ford."
Gilbert went out to the sub-station. The en
gine, in perfect order, was roaring in the base
ment. On the first floor the dynamos were going
at full speed. His worries with sub-station A
were over. He went down to the engine and
found Ford busy with an oil can.
"Want the job of night engineer here?" Gil
bert 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 re
lieve you at six in the morning. Come down to
the office some time to-morrow 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 drearily unpacking trunks and putting the
telescope bags under the bed in a hopeless attempt
to make a boarding-house bedroom homelike, re
ceived an enthusiastic note.
68 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
"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 XII
LEARNING ABOUT ELECTRICITY
FORTY-FIVE dollars a month and a twelve-hour-
a-day job for these Henry Ford had traded his
big, pleasant home, with its assured comfort and
plenty, and his place as one of the most prosper
ous and respected men in Greenfield. The change
would have been a calamity to most men.
Henry Ford was happy. The new job gave
him a chance to work with machinery, an oppor
tunity to learn all about electricity. His content
ment, 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 seemed 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 sub-station A had
69
70 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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."
Ford himself was not in evidence. The man
ager, quitting work at about the time Ford ar
rived at the sub-station 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 to-morrow," 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, remem
bering 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 sub-station 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 sub
station A. He knew Ford would take care of it.
A manager spends his time and thought on the
poor workmen ; a good man he leaves alone.
When Ford had been with the Edison Com
pany six months, drawing his forty-five dollars
LEARNING ABOUT ELECTRICITY 71
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 sub-station, 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 depart
ment. 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 $150.
"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 De
troit 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
72 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 homesites. He was ex
periencing 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 despera
tion to his wife one evening. "I ve been inquir
ing 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 fix
ing. 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
LEARNING ABOUT ELECTRICITY 73
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 seven hundred dollars, fifty dollars down
and the rest in monthly payments. Ford drew
from the savings bank two hundred dollars, 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
sewing 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 in applying his machine-idea
to the managing of men.
CHAPTER XIII
EIGHT HOURS, BUT NOT FOR HIMSELF
WHEN Henry Ford became manager of the
mechanical department the workmen in the Edi
son 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
74
EIGHT HOURS 75
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, the
oretically 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
practical. 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 pay roll. 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 every
thing 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.
76 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
It s only monotonous, grinding work that needs
an eight-hour day. When a man is creating some
thing, working to get results, twelve or fourteen
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 fourteen hours a day.
From 6 to 6 he worked in the Edison plant,
for his eight-hour regime did not apply to him
self. 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 there in the
glare lay materials for his self-propelling gasoline
engine his real work, which at last he could be
gin!
Until late at night the neighbors heard the
sound of his tools and saw the glare of light
through the cracks.
"The Smiths are giving a party to-night I
suppose we can t go?" Mrs. Ford said one even
ing, wistfully. "Oh, well when the gasoline en
gine 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 prob
lems. He finished supper abstractedly and pushed
back his chair.
"Oh, about the party. Too bad. I hope you
EIGHT HOURS 77
don t mind much. When I get the gasoline en
gine finished," he said apologetically, and hurried
out to work on it. In a few minutes he was ab
sorbed 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 Smiths 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 her
self ; 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.
78 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
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 horrid engine finished so they could
live like other people ?
It all hurt. No man was ever friendlier, or
enjoyed more the feeling of comradeship with
other men than Ford. But it was a choice be
tween 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, be
came more reserved with every month that
passed.
If any man ever followed Emerson s doctrine
of self-reliance, giving up friends and family in
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 ad
vance, drawing every casting before he made it,
struggling for months over the problem of the
EIGHT HOURS 79
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 overeating. 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 pos
sible 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 a lot of things," he replied.
CHAPTER XIV
STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR
FORD was now a man of nearly 30, an insig
nificant, unimportant unit in the business world
of Detroit, merely one of the subordinate man
agers in the Edison plant. Seeing him on his
way home from work, a slender, stooping, poorly
dressed man, the firm set of his lips hidden by
the sandy mustache he wore then, and his blue
eyes already surrounded by a network of tired
wrinkles, men probably looked at him half -pity
ingly, and said : "There s a man who will never
get anywhere."
He had his farm, unprofitable since he had left
it, a small home partly paid for, and the little gas
engine, to show for fourteen years of hard work.
Probably he received more than one letter from
his father and brothers in Greenfield, urging him
to come back to the farm, where he and his wife
might live comfortably among their old friends,
and he need not work so hard. It would have
seemed a wise move.
But w r ith the completion of the little one-cylin
der, high-speed engine, Ford was more than ever
possessed by his idea. He brought one or two of
the men from the Edison shop to see it. They
80
STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR 81
watched it whirring away on its pedestal of
blocks, they examined its large cylinder, its short-
stroke piston, noted its power, and looked at Ford
with some increased respect. But most of them
were nevertheless doubtful of the success of the
automobile. The idea of a horseless carriage in
general use still seemed to them fantastic.
"Well, looks like you could make it go," they
conceded. "But it s going to be pretty expensive
to run. Not many people ll want to buy it. And
where will you get the capital to manufacture it?**
"I m making it cheap. I m going to make it
cheap enough so every man in this country can
have one before I m through/ Ford said.
Already his belief that "a thing isn t any
good unless it s good for everybody" was taking
form. He did not intend to make a few high-
priced toys for wealthy men ; he planned to make
something useful for thousands of men like him
self, who were wasting money in keeping idle
horses, as he had done on the farm. He still
meant to make a farm tractor, as soon as he had
worked out the principle of a self-propelling ma
chine.
As to the capital, he believed that question would
take care of itself when the time came. His job
was to make the machine, and he did not waste
time telling himself that there was no chance for
a poor man.
The problem of transmitting the power of the
engine to the wheels now engrossed his attention.
82 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
He brought home materials for a light buggy
frame and built it. Four old bicycle wheels were
repaired, fitted with heavy rims and large pneu
matic tires, and placed on the axles. The ques
tion then was how to attach the engine.
To us, familiar with automobiles, it seems sim
ple enough, but when Ford stood in the old shed,
looking at the buggy frame and then at the little
engine, he was attempting a feat that had never
been accomplished.
Always before, carriages had been pulled.
Naturally enough his first thought was to apply
the power of the engine to the front wheels.
Then how sho\ild he steer? What mechanism
should he use, powerful enough to turn the hind
wheels, against the pull of the engine, and flexible
enough to respond quickly and make a sharp
turn?
Then there was the problem of the throttle,
and the gears. The machine must be able to go
more slowly, or to pick up speed again, without
shutting off the power. The driver must be able,
when necessary, to throw off the power entirely,
and to apply it quickly again, without stopping
the engine.
All these vexing questions, and many minor
ones, were to be solved, and always there was the
big question of simplicity. The machine must be
cheap.
"I m building this thing so it will be useful/
Ford said once while he was in the thick of his
STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR 83
perplexities. "There isn t any object in working
at it unless it will be useful, and it won t be use
ful unless it s cheap enough so common people
can have it, and do their work with it."
The essential democracy of the man spoke
then. It is the distinctly American viewpoint of
the man who for years had fought sun and wind
and weather, tearing his food and shelter from
the stubborn grasp of the soil, and who now
struggles with mechanical obstacles, determined
in spite of them to make something for practical
use. His standards of value were not beauty or
ease of luxury. He wanted to make a machine
that would do the greatest possible quantity of
good, hard work.
His third winter in the house on Edison ave
nue arrived, and still the automobile was not
completed. When he went out to work in the old
shed after supper he lighted a fire in the rusty
heating stove, set up in a corner, and often Mrs.
Ford came out and sat on a box, watching while
he fitted parts together or tried different trans
mission devices.
He had settled finally on a leather belt, pass
ing over the flywheel and connecting with the
rear axle. A pulley arrangement, controlled by
a lever, tightened or loosened this belt, thus in
creasing or decreasing the speed of the automo
bile. That broad strip of leather, inclosed, run
ning from the engine on the rear axle to the
84 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
pulley under the front seat, was the parent of
the planetary system of transmission.
Ford worked on it all winter. It was a lonely
time for Mrs. Ford, for the general attitude of
the neighborhood toward her husband had roused
her good country temper, and she "refused to
have anything to do with people who talked like
that." She knew Henry was perfectly sane, a
better husband than most of them had, too, and
anyhow it was none of their business how Henry
spent his time, and if they didn t like, they could
lump it.
Nevertheless, as the winter days followed each
other in an apparently endless procession, she
grew moody. The baby was coming, and she was
homesick for Greenfield and the big, comfortable
country home, with friends running in and out,
and the sound of sleighbells jingling past on the
road outside.
She put the little house to rights in the morn
ing, and faced a long, lonely day. She sewed a
while, wandered about the rooms, looking out on
the dreary little street, with its scattered houses
and dirty trampled snow, yawned, and counted
the hours till her husband would come home for
supper.
When he came, she had the house warm and
bright, the table set, hot biscuits browning in
the oven. She dished up the food, poured the
tea, brought the hot plates. They sat down to
eat and talk, and the minutes seemed to fly. Be-
STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR 85
fore she had said half she had stored up through
the day, before Henry had more than begun to
talk, he pushed back his plate, drank his tea, and
said : "Well, I must be getting to work." Then
he went out to the shed and forgot her in the ab
sorbing interest of the automobile.
"Oh, when is it going to be finished!" she said
one night, after she had been sitting for a long
time in silence, watching him at work on it. She
began the sentence cheerfully, but she caught her
breath at the end and began to cry. "I c-can t
help it, I m sorry. I w-want to go home to Green
field!" she said.
Ford was testing the steering gear. He
dropped his tools in surprise, and went over to
comfort her.
"There, there!" he said, I suppose patting her
back clumsily, in the awkward way of a man un
accustomed to quieting a sobbing woman. "It s
done now. It s practically done now. It just
needs a little more "
She interrupted him. She said his horrid old
engine was always "just needing a little more."
She said she wanted him to take her back to
Greenfield. Wouldn t he please, just for a little
while, take her home to Greenfield?
CHAPTER XV
A RIDE IN THE RAIN
TEARS, almost hysterics, from the woman who
for seven years had been the quiet, cheerful little
wife, humming to herself while she did the house
work it was more than startling, it was terrify
ing.
Ford realized then, probably for the first time,
how much the making of the automobile had cost
her.
He quieted her as well as he could, and prom
ised that he would take her back to Greenfield.
He would give up his job at the Edison plant and
move to the farm to live, since she cared so much
about it, he said. His work on the machine could
wait.
He took her into the house and made her a cup
of hot tea. When she was sitting comfortably
warming her feet at the heating stove and sip
ping the tea, he said he would just run out and
fasten the shed door for the night.
The machine was almost finished. A few more
screws, a tightening of the leather belt, the
placing of the steering lever, and it would be com
plete. He had spent four years of hard work,
and harder thought, on its building delayed first
86
A RIDE IN THE RAIN 87
by his poverty, then by the building of the house,
and always held back for twelve hours out of
every day by his work at the Edison plant. Now
he would have to pi t it aside again, to spend
precious days and weeks disposing of his equity
in the house, moving, settling in Greenfield, strug
gling with new hired men, beginning again the
grind of managing a farm.
It was only another delay, he said doggedly to
himself; he would make the machine run yet. In
the meantime he could not resist taking up his
tools and working on it, just a minute or so.
The engine was in place, the gears adjusted.
He tightened the leather belt and tested the pul
ley again. Then he set the rear axle on blocks
of wood, lifting the wheels from the ground and
started the engine. The cough of the cylinder
quickened into a staccato bark, the flywheel
blurred with speed. Then Ford tightened the
pulley, the broad leather belt took hold. The rear
wheels spun.
She was running!
It remained only to test the machine in actual
going on the ground. Ford went to work on the
steering gear. He had thought it all out before,
he had made all the parts. Now he must put
them together, fit them into place and test them.
He forgot about his wife, waiting in the house;
he did not notice that the fire in the stove was
getting low and the hour was growing late. He
88 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
bent every thought and energy to placing the
steering gear.
At midnight he was still working. At i o clock
he had the front wheels blocked up and was test
ing the steering lever. It needed some changes.
At 2 o clock they were finished. He started the
engine again and it missed fire. Something was
wrong with the spark.
At 3 o clock, grimy, hollow-cheeked, absorbed,
he was hard at work when he felt a hand on his
arm and heard his wife say, "Henry!"
"My dear, what s the matter? I m coming in
right away. Why, you re all wet!" he exclaimed,
seeing her dripping shawl.
"It s raining hard. Didn t you know it?" she
said.
"You shouldn t have come out; I thought you
were going right to bed," he answered.
"Well, I couldn t sleep very well. I got to
thinking Henry, we mustn t go back to the
farm. It was just a notion of mine. I guess I
was tired, or something. I ve changed my mind.
We d better stay right here till you get the ma
chine finished."
He laughed.
"Well, little woman, I guess that won t be so
very long. It s finished right now," he said.
"You wait a minute and you ll see me running it."
She stood and watched, more excited than he,
while he started the engine again, nailed a couple
of old boards together for a seat and opened wide
A RIDE IN THE RAIN 89
the shed doers. The rain was falling in torrents
and underfoot the light snow had turned to thin
slush on the frozen ground. It was very dark.
He pushed the machine into the yard and hung
a lantern over the dashboard for a headlight. In
side the shed Mrs. Ford, in a voice shaking with
excitement, begged him to wait until morning,
but he did not listen. The engine and steering
gear were protected from the rain and no discom
fort could have equaled for him the disappoint
ment of another delay.
The time had come when he could prove his
theories. He would not waste one minute of it.
The engine was already running. He stepped
into the car, sat down, and slowly, carefully,
tightened the pulley.
Then, in the first Ford automobile, he rode
away from the old shed.
When he felt the machine moving under him
he tightened his grasp on the steering lever. Sud
denly the light of the lantern showed him a dozen
things he had never noticed in the yard before.
The clothes-pole loomed menacingly before him,
a pile of flower pots seemed to grow out of all
proportion to its ordinary size.
The machine wobbled unsteadily, while he des
perately struggled to drive it in a straight line.
He turned it from the flower pots, jerked it back
in time to avoid running into the fence, and
headed straight for the clothes-pole. It seemed
to jump at him.
90 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
At the last minute he thought of the pulley.
He loosened the leather belt, the engine spun
wildly, the car stopped. Henry Ford got out,
breathing hard, and pushed the machine around
the clothes-pole.
"You see, I not only had to make the machine,
but I had to get into it and learn how to steer
it while it was running," he says. It occurred
to him that he would like a good wide space for
the job.
After he had rescued the machine from the
clothes-pole he turned it toward the street.
Chug-chugging away, he passed the house, drove
over the gravel sidewalk, and turned down Edi
son avenue. The scattered houses w T ere dark and
silent; every one was asleep.
The little machine, rattling and coughing, pro
ceeded through the thin slush in jerks and jumps,
doing valiantly with its one cylinder. Perched
on the rough board seat, Henry Ford battled with
the steering lever, while on the sidewalk Mrs.
Ford, wrapped in her shawl, anxiously kept pace
with them. It was not difficult to do, for the car
was not breaking any future speed limits.
At the end of the first block Ford turned the
car successfully, and rode down the side street,
zig-zagging widely from side to side in his effort
to drive straight ahead. Fortunately, Detroit s
streets are wide.
When he had passed the second block he be
gan to wonder how to turn and drive back. At
A RIDE IN THE RAIN 91
the end of the third block he solved the difficulty.
He stopped the car, jumped out, lifted it around,
and headed it for home.
By this time the engine was missing again, but
it continued gallantly to jerk and push the light
car forward until Ford had reached his own
yard. Then he stopped it, pushed the machine
into the shed, and turned to Mrs. Ford.
"Well, it runs all right. Guess I ll have some
breakfast and go to bed," he said, and Mrs. Ford
hurried in to make coffee.
"How did I feel? Why, I felt tired," he ex
plains now. "I went to bed and slept all next
day. I knew my real work with the car had just
begun. I had to get capital somehow, start a fac
tory, get people interested everything. Besides,
I saw a chance for a lot of improvements in that
car."
CHAPTER XVI
ENTER COFFEE JIM
PROBABLY the disposition to rest on our lau
rels is more than anything else responsible for the
mediocrity of the individual and the slow
progress of the race. Having accomplished
something, most of us spend some time in ad
miring it and ourselves. It is characteristic of
big men that past achievements do not hold their
interest; they are concerned only with their ef
forts to accomplish still more in the future.
Henry Ford had built an automobile. His four
years* work had been successful, and that little
machine, scarcely larger than a bicycle, with its
pulley-clutch, puffing little one-cylinder engine,
and crude steering apparatus, stood for an epoch
in human progress.
He might be pardoned if he had spent a month
or two in self -congratulation, in driving the car
up and down Detroit s streets and enjoying the
comments of the men who had laughed at him
so long.
But apparently it did not occur to him. He
saw already a number of possible improvements
in the little machine. He was as indifferent to
92
ENTER COFFEE JIM 93
the praise of other men as he had been to their
ridicule.
After that one day of rest he resumed almost
the old routine. When a few men at the Edison
plant laughingly inquired how he was getting
along with the great invention he remarked
quietly that the machine was running; he had
been riding in it already. Then at 6 o clock he
hurried home and out to the shed for the usual
evening s work. He was trying to plan an en
gine which would give more power; incidentally
in his odd moments he was working to improve
the steering apparatus.
One imagines the incredulity, the amazement,
that followed his quiet statement that the thing
was actually running. The men at the plant be
gan to drop around at the Ford place to look at
it. They came doubtfully, prepared either to
laugh or to be convinced. After they had exam
ined the engine and looked over the transmission
and steering gear they went away still hesitating
between two conclusions.
"It works, all right," they said. "There s no
question the blamed thing runs. How do you
suppose he ever happened to stumble onto the
idea ? But where s he going to get the capital to
manufacture it? After all, there won t be much
of a market a few rich fellows ll buy it, proba
bly, for the novelty. After all, you can t make a
machine that will do the work of horses to any
great extent."
94 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
Some of them took a different view. They
became enthusiastic.
"My Lord, Ford, there s millions in this thing.
Millions !" they said. "You ought to get out and
organize a company a big company. Incor
porate and sell stock and make a clean-up right
away. And then build a machine like a phaeton,
with big leather cushions and carriage lamps and
a lot of enamel finish why, there are hundreds
of men that could afford to pay two or three
thousand dollars for one of em. You could
make a hundred per cent profit two hundred
per cent."
Ford listened to all of them and said little. He
was busy improving the machine; it did not suit
him yet ; he felt he could make it much more pow
erful and efficient with a little more work. Mean
time he revolved in his mind plans for putting it
on the market. Those plans included always one
fundamental point. He was resolved to make the
automobile cheap.
"I ve got a machine here that saves time and
work and money," he said. "The more people
who have it the more it will save. There s no
object in building it so only a few rich men can
own one. It isn t the rich men who need it; it s
the common folks like me."
News of the amazing machine to be seen in
the old shed behind the little house on Edison
street spread rapidly. About this time news dis
patches carried word of two other automobiles
ENTER COFFEE JIM 9$
built in this country. A man named Duryea of
Springfield, 111., and another named Haynes, in
Kokomo, Ind., had been working on the same
idea. A reporter found Ford at work on his en
gine, interviewed him and wrote a- story for a
Detroit paper.
One or two wealthy men hunted Ford up and
talked about furnishing the capital to manufac
ture the machine. They saw, as some of Ford s
friends had done, an opportunity to float a big,
company, sell stock, and build a high-priced car.
Ford considered these offers for a time. Build
ing an automobile had been only half of his idea;
building it cheap had been the other half, and he
would not abandon it.
He figured it out in dollars and cents; two
hundred per cent on a small quantity of cars, or
a smaller profit on a larger quantity. He showed
that the most sound basis for the company was
the manufacture of a large number of machines,
at a profit sufficient merely to keep enlarging the
plant and building more machines. The idea did
not appeal to the men who were eager for large
immediate profits for themselves.
In the end the men with money dropped the
matter. Ford was obstinate, but he was a small
man with no capital, merely a crank who had hit
by accident on a good idea; he would come
around all right in time, they concluded.
Ford continued to work at the Edison plant
and spend his evenings trying to improve his ma-
96 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
chine. He had taken Mrs. Ford to Greenfield,
where she would stay with her mother until the
baby was born. After that one hysterical out
burst on the night the automobile was finished,
she had returned to her cheerful acceptance of his
interest in the car. Indeed, she herself had be
come enthusiastic about its possibilities.
"You stay right here and keep your job with
the Edison people/ she said. "I ll be perfectly
all right with mother, and maybe by the time I
come back you ll have a company organized and
a whole factory going, who knows ? Only, mind
you don t work too late at night, and promise
you ll eat your meals regular."
Ford promised, but when he returned to the
dark little house at night and faced the task of
building a fire and cooking supper for himself
it seemed to him a bigger job than building the
automobile had been. He heated some coffee on
the gasoline stove, burned some bread into a
semblance of toast, and scrambled a few eggs.
Then he spread a newspaper on the kitchen table,
set the frying-pan on it, and managed to make a
meal.
Naturally about midnight he grew hungry. He
came into the kitchen, looked at the cold, greasy
frying-pan, still setting on the kitchen table, re
membered that he was out of bread, and thought
of an all-night lunch wagon that stood near sub
station A, where sometimes he bought a cup of
coffee when he was working there.
ENTER COFFEE JIM 97
The automobile stood waiting in the shed; he
told himself that he wanted to test the steering
gear again, anyway. He went out, started the
engine, climbed in and chug-chugged away
through the silent, deserted streets to the lunch
wagon.
Coffee Jim, loafing among his pans and mounds
of Hamburg steak, was astonished to see the
queer little machine, jerking and coughing its
way toward him. He remembered Ford, and
while he sliced the onions and cut the bread for
Ford s midnight luncheon they talked about the
automobile. Afterward Coffee Jim examined it
in detail and marveled. When Ford took him for
a little ride in it he became enthusiastic.
Soon it was part of Ford s routine to drive the
little car to the lunch wagon at midnight, have a
cup of coffee and a hot sandwich and a chat with
Coffee Jim. They became friends.
It was one of those accidental relationships
which have great consequences. A hundred thou
sand Ford automobiles to-day owe their existence
largely to that chance friendship between Ford
and Coffee Jim.
CHAPTER XVII
ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS
IF Ford had been unduly elated over his suc
cess in making an automobile the years that fol
lowed that night ride in the rain would have been
one succession of heart-breaking disappoint
ments.
Men with money enough to build a factory
were not seeking business ventures in the nine
ties. Money was scarce, and growing more so.
The few financiers who might have taken up
Ford s invention, floated a big issue of common
stock, and sold the cars at a profit of two or three
hundred per cent, saw no advantage in furnish
ing the capital to start a small plant on Ford s
plan.
He himself was close pressed for money. Pay
ments on the little house, with their interest, the
cost of his wife s illness and of providing for
the new baby, his own living expenses, took the
greater part of his salary. The situation would
have been disheartening to most men. Ford set
his teeth and kept on working.
The one-cylinder engine bothered him. It did
not give him the power he wanted. - After he had
worked with it for a time he took it down, cut
98
ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS 99
another section from the piece of pipe and made
another cylinder. The two-cylinder result was
somewhat better, but still the little car jerked
along over the ground and did not satisfy him.
He fell back into the old routine twelve hours
at the Edison plant, home to supper and out to
the shed to work the evening through on the ma
chine. Mrs. Ford was in charge of the house
again, busy keeping it neat and bright, nursing
the baby, making his little dresses, washing and
ironing, keeping down the grocer s bills.
Meantime other men, with machines no better
than Ford s, w r ere starting factories and manu
facturing automobiles. Once in a while on his
way home from work Ford saw one on the street
a horseless carriage, shining with black enamel,
upholstered with deep leather cushions, orna
mented with elaborate brass carriage lamps.
Usually they were driven by steam engines.
They were a curiosity in Detroit s streets, a
luxury which only the very rich might afford.
Crowds gathered to look at them. Ford must
have seen them with some bitterness, but ap
parently he was not greatly discouraged.
"I didn t worry much. I knew I could put my
idea through somehow," he says. "I tell you, no
matter how things may look, any project that s
founded on the idea of the greatest good for the
greatest number will win in the end. It s bound
to."
He went home, ate the supper Mrs. Ford had
ioo HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
waiting and doggedly resumed work in the old
shed.
The chronicle of those years from the stand
point of an onlooker would be merely a weari
some record of the machine shop a detailed rec
ord of pistons, number of revolutions per min
ute, experiments in spark-timing. Only the
knowledge of their result, or Ford s own story
of his hopes, disappointments, mental struggles,
would make them interesting. That part of his
story Ford will not dwell upon.
"I kept on working another eight years," he
says quietly. Eight years!
Some time during them he saw what was
needed. Heretofore the crank shaft had made
Q) complete revolution on a single power impulse.
Ford perceived that two impulses, properly
placed, would increase both the power and the
smoothness of the running.
The result of that quiet eight years work was
the first practical two-cylinder opposed engine
mounted on a motor car. In the little shed, work
ing alone through the long evenings, while his
neighbors rested and visited on their front
porches, and his wife sang the baby to sleep in
the house, he built the four-cycle engine that made
the gasoline automobile a possibility.
In the spring of 1901 he finished it, mounted
it on the old car which he had made nine years
before of discarded bicycle wheels and rough
boards, and drove it out of the shed. It was
ANOTHER EIGHT : Y2 A#S%: \ioi
nearly midnight of a quiet star-lit spring night.
The lights in near-by houses had gone out long
before; in his own home Mrs. Ford and the boy
were sleeping soundly. Ford turned the car down
Edison avenue and put on full power.
The engine responded beautifully. The car
raced down the avenue, under the branches of
the trees whose buds were swelling with spring
sap, while the wind lifted Ford s hair and blew
hard against his face. It was pleasant, after the
long hours in the shed. The steady throb of the
motor, the car s even progress, were delightful.
"By George! I ll just ride down and show
this to Coffee Jim," said Ford.
His circle of acquaintances in Detroit was
small; his long hours of work prevented his cul
tivating them. At the Edison plant his pleasant
but rather retiring manner had won only a casual
friendliness from the men. This friendliness that
had grown since his success with the motor had
replaced their derision with respect, but still it
was far from intimate companionship.
He knew no one with money. He was still a
poor man, working for wages, with only his
brain and hands for equipment. Nearly thirteen
years of hard work had produced his motor car,
but he had very little money and no financial back
ing for its manufacture. His closest friend was
Coffee Jim.
Coffee Jim examined the car with interest that
night. He left his lunch wagon and took a short
i 9 2 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
ride in it. He listened while Ford explained its
mechanical principle.
"You ve got a winner there, all right," he said
heartily. "All you need is capital." Ford agreed
with him. He had been revolving in his mind
plans for getting it; when he left Coffee Jim at
his lunch wagon and rode slowly home he con
tinued to think about it. That morning he drove
to the Edison plant in the car, and on his way
home at night he made a detour through Detroit s
principal streets.
He wanted people to talk about the car, and
they did. Every one in Detroit heard more or
less about it in the months that followed. Mean
time Ford took a few days leave from the Edi
son plant now and then and personally made ef
forts to interest financiers in its manufacture.
He interviewed his banker and most of the big
business men of the city, outlined his plan for a
factory, demonstrated the car. Every one showed
some interest, but Ford did not get the money.
Late that fall he discussed the situation with
Coffee Jim one night.
"I ve got the car and I ve got the right idea,"
he said. "It s bound to win in time. The trouble
is these men can t get an idea until they see it
worked out with their own eyes. What I need
is some spectacular exhibition of the car. If I
could enter her in the races next year she d stand
a chance to win over anything there ll be in the
ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS 103
field then these men would fall over themselves
to back me."
"Well, can t you do it?" Coffee Jim inquired.
Ford shook his head.
"Cost too much," he said. "I ve laid off work
a lot this summer, trying to get capital, and the
boy s been sick. I d have to buy a new car for
the racing. I might rake up money enough for
material, but I couldn t make the car in time,
working evenings, and I can t afford to give up
my job and spend my whole time on it."
CHAPTER XVIII
WINNING A RACE
COFFEE JIM pondered the situation. He knew
Ford thoroughly ; he believed in the car. To win
the Grosse Point races would give Ford his
chance a chance he was missing for lack of
money. Coffee Jim thought of his own bank ac
count, which had been growing for years, nickel
by nickel, dime by dime, from the profits on fried-
ham sandwiches and hamburger and onions.
"See here, Ford," he said suddenly : "I ll take
a chance. I ll back you. You go on, quit your
job, build that car and race her. I ll put up the
money."
Ford accepted the offer without hesitation. He
believed in the car. Coffee Jim waved aside Ford s
suggestion of securing the loan by his personal
note, or by a mortgage on the little house.
"Take the money ; that s all right. Pay it back
when you can. Your word s good enough for
me/ he said. He believed in Ford.
It was a demonstration of the practical value
of friendship a pure sentiment which had come
unexpectedly to the rescue when all material
means had failed.
Hard work, real ability, business sagacity, had
104
WINNING A RACE 105
been unable to give Ford the start which his
friendship with the owner of the little lunch
wagon had brought him. It was one of those ex
periences which helped to form Ford s business
philosophy, that philosophy which sounds so im
practical and has proved so successful.
"Any man who considers everything from the
standpoint of the most good to the most people
will never want for anything," he says. "No, I
don t mean mental influence, or psychic attrac
tion, or anything like that. I mean plain common
sense. That s the attitude that makes friends
all kinds of friends, everywhere, some that you
never even hear about and friends bring all the
rest."
He took Coffee Jim s money, gave up his job
at the Edison plant, and went to work on the little
racer.
"It seemed pretty good to be able to work all
day on the car, as well as the evenings," he says.
He took down the engine and entirely rebuilt
it, substituting the best of material for the make
shifts he had been obliged to use. He spent long
hours designing a racing body, figuring out prob
lems of air-resistance and weight.
Eight months of careful thought and work
went into that car. At last, in the early summer
of 1902, it was finished. At 4 o clock one morn
ing, business being over at the lunch wagon, he
and Coffee Jim took it out for a trial.
It ran like the wind. Down the quiet, vacant
io6 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
streets of Detroit, in the gray chill of early morn
ing, they raced at a speed that made the houses
on either side blur into a gray haze. Coffee Jim
clung breathlessly to the mechanic s seat, while
Ford bent over the steering lever and gave her
more power, and still more power.
"Holy Moses, she sure does run!" Coffee Jim
gasped, when the car slowed down smoothly and
stopped. "You ll win that race sure as shoot
ing."
"Yes, she s a good little car," Ford said, look
ing it over critically. "She s a pretty good little
car." He stood looking at it, his hands in his
pockets.
"I ve got an idea for a four-cylinder motor
that will beat her, though," he said. "It s too
late to build it now ; we ll have to put this one in
the race. But I ll make a car yet that ll beat this
as much as this beats a bicycle."
It was not a boast; it was a simple statement
of fact. The little racer was finished, thor
oughly well done; he spent no more thought on
it. Already his mind was reaching ahead, plan
ning a better one.
It may be imagined with what anxiety the
Fords awaited the day of the races. Ford was
to be his own driver, and Mrs. Ford s dread of
losing the race was mixed with fear for his safety
if there should be an accident. She had seen the
car in the tryout, and its speed terrified her,
though Ford assured her, with masculine clumsi-
WINNING A RACE 107
ness, that even greater speed had been made in
previous races. Alexander Winton of Cleveland,
then the track champion of the country, had
beaten it more than once. On the racetrack, Ford
said, he was confident he could do better. Later
there was a quiet tryout on the racetrack that
showed Ford he was right, though he kept secret
the exact time he had made.
On the day of the races enormous crowds
gathered at the Grosse Point tracks. It was the
first automobile track meeting ever held in Mich
igan, and excitement ran high. Alexander Win-
ton was there, confident and smiling in his car,
which had broken so many records. The crowds
cheered him wildly.
Ford, quiet and perhaps a little white with the
tension, drove his car out on the tracks, was
greeted with a few uncertain cheers.
"Who s that?" people said.
"Oh, that s a Detroit man let s see, what is
his name? Ford never heard of him before.
Funny little car, isn t it?"
"Maybe he s been put in to fill out. He s the
only man against Winton in the free-for-all.
They couldn t get a real car to race Winton."
"Hi, there s Cooper! Cooper! Rah!" The
crowd got to its feet and cheered Tom Cooper,
the bicycle champion, who strolled on to the field
and chatted with Winton.
Ford was outside it all. He had been too busy
working on his car, had had too little money, to
io8 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
be on intimate terms with the big men of the
automobile business, or to become friendly with
champions.
One supposes he wasted no regrets on the situ
ation. He had his car, the concrete form of his
mechanical ideas. The time had come to test
their value. If they were right he would win the
race; if they were wrong he would go back to
his shed and work out better ones. He examined
the car again, looked to the gasoline and oil, and
was ready.
Coffee Jim, slapping him on the shoulder, said,
"All right, Ford, go to it !" and hurried up to his
seat in the grandstand, where Mrs. Ford and the
boy were already sitting, tense with excitement
and apprehension.
Winton waved his cap in a last response to the
roar from the crowd, pulled it down tight and
settled back into his seat. The signal came. Ford,
bending over his steering lever, threw on the
power and felt the car jump forward. The race
was on.
It happened thirteen years ago, but there are
still people in Detroit who talk of that race. They
describe the start, the enthusiasm for Winton, the
surprise of the crowd when the little car, driven
by nobody knew whom, hung on grimly just be
hind the champion, to the end of the first stretch,
through the second stretch, well on to the third.
Winton s car shot ahead then. The crowd cheered
him madly. Then the roar died down in amaze-
WINNING A RACE 109
ment. The little car, with a burst of speed, over
took the champion, and the two cars shot past the
grandstand side by side and sped into the second
lap.
Into the silence came a yell from Coffee Jim:
"Ford ! Yah, Ford ! Go it, go it, go it ! Ford !"
The crowd went crazy.
No one knew clearly what was happening.
"Ford! Ford! Winton! He s ahead! Go it,
go it! Winton! Come on, come on! Look at
em! Look at em! Ford!" they yelled.
Then the two cars swept into the final stretch
abreast ; the crowd, wild with excitement, hoarse,
disheveled, was standing on the seats, roaring,
"Come on, come on, come on ! Ford ! Ford !"
Every detail of that race must still be distinct
in Ford s mind, but he sums them all in one con
cise sentence :
"It was SOME race. I won it."
CHAPTER XIX
RAISING CAPITAL
FORD sat in his little car, white, shaken, dusty
the track champion of this country.
He was surrounded by a small crowd of auto
mobile enthusiasts, promoters, bicycle champions,
all eager to meet and talk with the unknown man
who had taken the honors away from Winton.
Among them was Tom Cooper. Grasping Ford s
hand, he looked with interest at the slightly built,
thin-cheeked man who had won the race, and
said : "Bully work, the way you handled her on
that last turn. Whose car is it?"
"Mine," said Ford.
"I mean" Cooper looked at the lines of the
car "I mean, whose engine did you use?"
"It s my engine I made it," Ford replied.
"The deuce you did!" Cooper exclaimed.
"Well, I must say you did a good job. I d like
to look it over some time."
"Sure ; come out to my house any time. Glad
to show it to you," said Ford cordially.
It was the beginning of an association which
was to be highly profitable to both of them.
Other men of national prominence in the world
of sports greeted Ford enthusiastically as one of
no
RAISING CAPITAL in
themselves, while the crowd in the grandstand
still cheered spasmodically. Reporters hurried up
with camera men, and Ford stepped back into the
little car and posed somewhat sheepishly for his
first newspaper pictures. Men who had formerly
passed him on the street with a careless nod, now
stopped him, clapped him on the shoulder and
talked like old friends.
He was beyond question the hero of the day.
He took it all in a matter-of-fact manner; his car
had done no more than he had expected all along,
and it was the car, not himself, which filled his
mind. He hoped that the publicity would bring
him the necessary capital to start his factory.
Within a week he received offers from wealthy
men of Detroit. The local papers had printed
pictures of Ford, his car and the old shed where
it had been built, with long accounts of his years
of work and his efforts to organize a company.
Detroit had been awakened to the fact that there
was a real opportunity for men with vision and
sufficient capital to carry it out. But without ex
ception these men insisted on one thing absolute
control of the company to be organized.
From their standpoint that proviso was rea
sonable enough. If they furnished the money
and Ford merely the idea, of course they should
keep not only the larger share of the profits, but
entire control of the venture as well. Without
their money, they argued, his idea was valueless.
On the other hand, in spite of his eight years
ii2 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
of struggle for lack of capital, Ford still main
tained that the idea was the really valuable part
of the combination. He insisted on controlling
the organization which was to manufacture his
cars.
While he had been working alone in the little
shed at night, he had thought out his plan for a
factory, mentally picturing its methods, its or
ganization, the handling of material from the raw
iron to the finished cars, fully assembled, rolling
away in an endless line. He had figured costs to
the fraction of a cent; planned methods of ar
ranging the work, standardizing the product,
eliminating waste and friction at every possible
point.
Now that the car was finished, the factory plan
took its place in his mind. He did not intend to
abandon it until he had made it a reality. He
was going to build that factory, as he had built
his engine, in spite of any obstacles or opposition.
To do it, he must control the company s policies.
It was a deadlock. To the man with money it
seemed sheer insanity to put control of a busi
ness venture into the hands of an obstinate me
chanic who had happened to hit on an idea for
an automobile engine. Ford would not dispose
of his patents on any other condition. In a short
time the discussions were dropped, and he was
where he had been before the track meeting.
That spectacular race, however, had brought
him many acquaintances, and many of them de-
RAISING CAPITAL 113
veloped into close friends. James Couzens, a
small hardware merchant of Detroit, was one of
them, and C. H. Wills, a mechanical draughts
man, was another. With Tom Cooper, the bi
cycle champion, they spent many evenings in the
old shed, or on the front steps of the Ford house,
discussing projects for the Ford factory.
Couzens, who had a talent for business affairs,
formed a plan for interesting a small group of
other merchants like himself and financing Ford.
He brought negotiations to a certain point and
found himself confronted again by their demand
for control of the company.
"We must do something that ll show them that
they ve got to have you on your own terms
something big startling to stir them up," he
reported.
"How about winning another race?" Cooper
suggested. "They re pulling one off in Ohio this
fall."
"No, it must be right here, so I can take my
men out and let them see it," Couzens objected.
"It takes a lot to jar any money loose from those
fellows."
"I could enter at the Grosse Point tracks next
spring," Ford said. "But it wouldn t show them
any more than they ve already seen, if I race the
same car. I can t afford to build another one."
He was still in debt to Coffee Jim for the cost
of his firs-: racer. Coffee Jim, professing him
self satisfied with the results of the race doubt-
ii 4 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
less he had judiciously placed some bets on it
had left Detroit in the meantime, but Ford nev
ertheless counted the loan among his liabilities.
"Think you can beat that car?" Cooper in
quired.
"I know I can," Ford replied quietly.
"Then you go to it and build her. I ll back
the scheme," Cooper said.
It was another debt on Ford s shoulders, but
he accepted it and immediately began to work on
another racer. With the intention of startling
Couzens s group of sedate business men, he
obeyed Cooper s injunction to "build her big the
roof s the limit." The result was certainly
startling.
Four enormous cylinders gave that engine
eighty horsepower. When it was finished and
Cooper and Ford took it out one night for a trial,
people started from their sleep for blocks about
the Ford house. The noise of the engine could
be heard miles. Flames flashed from the motor.
In the massive framework was one seat. Cooper
stood thunderstruck while Ford got in and
grasped the tiller.
"Good Lord, how fast do you figure she ll do?"
he asked.
"Don t know," Ford replied. He put on the
power, there was a mighty roar, a burst of flame,
and Cooper stood alone on the curb. Far down
the street he saw the car thundering away.
RAISING CAPITAL 115
A few minutes later it came roaring back and
stopped. Ford sat in it, white.
"How far did you go?" Cooper asked. Ford
told him.
"Do you mean to say she makes a speed like
that?" Cooper ejaculated, aghast.
"She ll make better than that. I didn t dare
to give her full power," Ford replied. He climbed
out and stood beside Cooper, and the two looked
at the car in awe.
"See here, I hope you don t think I ll drive that
thing in the races," Cooper said after a time. "I
wouldn t do it for a gold mine. You ll have to
do it."
"I should say not!" Ford retorted. "I won t
take the responsibility of driving her at full speed
to win every race that was ever run. Cooper, if
that car ever gets really started it will kill some
body, sure."
CHAPTER XX
CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE
FORD and Cooper regarded the juggernaut car
for some time in meditative silence.
"Well, I guess you ve built a real racer there,
all right/ Cooper said admiringly.
"Yes, it looks as if I had," Ford answered.
"The question is, what good is it? Is there a
man on earth who d try to drive it?"
"Well, I ve got some nerve myself, and I don t
want to," Cooper admitted. He walked around
the car and then looked again at the engine.
"How fast would the darn thing go, I wonder?"
he said.
"Get in and try her," Ford suggested. Cooper
climbed in, Ford cranked the engine, and again
sleeping Detroit jumped from its bed. The car
leaped and shot dpwn the avenue.
When it roared back again Cooper stopped it
in the middle of the street.
"That settles it for me," he said. "She must
have made forty miles an hour, and she wasn t
half running, at that. I won t take her out on
the track."
They confronted the situation gloomily.
Couzens was depending on the success of the car
116
CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE 117
at the races to bring his men in line for the or
ganization of a company ; here was the car, built
at the cost of months of work and some hundreds
of Cooper s money, and it developed such speed
that it was not safe to enter it for the race.
Suddenly Cooper had an idea.
"See here! I know a man if there s a man
on earth who would take that car out he s the
one !" he said. "He isn t afraid of anything un
der the shining sun a bicycle rider I raced
against in Denver. Oldfield s his name Barney
Oldfield."
"Never heard of him," said Ford. "But if
you think he would drive this car let s get hold
of him. Where is he?"
"He ought to be in Salt Lake now," Cooper
answered. "I ll wire him."
The message went to Oldfield that night.
Couzens was told of the situation, and the three
men waited anxiously for a telegram from Salt
Lake. It came late the next day, asking some
further questions about the car and stating that
Oldfield had never driven an automobile. Cooper
wired again.
The track meeting was to be held the next
month. Time was short. Oldfield, if he came,
would have to learn every detail of handling the
machine. Even with an experienced man, the
danger of driving that car in the races was great.
Cooper and Ford haunted the telegraph offices.
At last the final reply came. Oldfield would
n8 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
drive the car. He would arrive on the 1st of
June, exactly one week before the date of the
race.
It was a busy week. Ford and Cooper bent
every energy to teaching Oldfield how to drive
the car. They crammed his mind with a mass of
facts about the motor, the factor of safety in
making quick turns, the way to handle the steer
ing lever. On the day before the races he took
the car out on the tracks and made one circuit
safely, holding it down to slow speed.
"I can handle her all right. I ll let her out to
morrow," he reported.
The day of the track meeting dawned. Ford
and Cooper, tense with anxiety, went over the car
thoroughly and coached Oldfield for the last time.
Couzens, hiding his nervousness under a bland,
confident manner, gathered his group of business
men and took them into the grandstand. The
free-for-all was called.
Half a dozen cars were entered. When they
had found their places in the field Barney Old-
field settled himself in his seat, firmly grasped the
two-handed tiller which steered the mighty car,
and remarked, "Well, this chariot may kill me,
but they ll say afterward that I was going some
when the car went over the bank."
Ford cranked the engine, and the race was on.
Oldfield, his long hair snapping in the wind,
shot from the midst of the astounded field like
a bullet. He did not dare look around ; he merely
CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE 119
clung to the tiller and gave that car all the power
it had. At the end of the first half mile he was
far in the lead and gaining fast.
The crowd, astounded, hysterical with excite
ment, saw him streak past the grandstand a quar
ter of a mile ahead of the nearest car following.
On the second lap he still gained. Grasping the
tiller, never for a second relaxing that terrific
speed, he spun around the course again, driving
as if the field was at his heels.
He roared in at the finish, a full half mile
ahead of the nearest car, in a three-mile race.
News of the feat went around the world, and
in one day Ford was hailed as a mechanical
genius.
Couzens brought the group of business men
down to the track, and before Oldfield was out of
the car they had made an appointment to meet
Ford next day and form a company. The race
had convinced them.
"Some people can t see a thing unless it is writ
ten in letters a mile high and then illustrated with
a diagram," Ford says meditatively.
During the following week a company was
formed, and Ford was made vice-president, gen
eral manager, superintendent, master mechanic
and designer. He held a small block of stock and
was paid a salary of $150 a month, the same
amount he had drawn while working for the Edi
son company.
He was satisfied. The salary was plenty for
120 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
his needs; apparently he waved that subject aside
as of little importance. At last, he thought, he
had an opportunity to put into practice his plans
for manufacturing, to build up an organization
which was to be as much a Ford factor as his
car was a Ford car.
The machine idea was to be its basis. The old
idea for the fifty-cent watch factory, altered and
improved by years of consideration, was at last
to be carried out. He planned a system of
smooth, economical efficiency, producing enor
mous numbers of cheap, standardized cars, and he
began work on it with all the enthusiasm he had
felt when he first began building his car.
But almost immediately there was friction be
tween him and the men who furnished the cap
ital. They insisted on his designing not cheaper
cars, but more luxurious ones. They demanded
that his saving in reduced costs of production
should be added to their profits, not deducted
from the price of the car. They were shrewd,
successful business men, and they intended to run
their factory on business lines.
"I prefer not to talk about that year," Ford
says to-day. "Those men were right, according
to their lights. I suppose, anyway, some of them
are still building a fairly successful car in the
$3,000 to $4,000 class, and I don t want to criti
cize other men in the automobile field.
"The trouble was that they couldn t see things
my way. They could not understand that the
CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE 121
thing that is best for the greatest number of peo
ple is bound to win in the end. They said I was
impractical, that notions like that would hurt
business. They said ideals were all very well,
but they wouldn t work. I did not know anything
about business, they said. There was an imme
diate profit of 200 per cent in selling a high-priced
car; why take the risk of building forty cheap
cars at 5 per cent profit? They said common
people would not buy automobiles anyway.
"I thought the more people who had a good
thing the better. My car was going to be cheap,
so the man that needed it most could afford to
buy it. I kept on designing cheaper cars. They
objected. Finally it came to a point where I had
to give up my idea or get out of the company.
Of course I got out"
Over thirty years old, with a wife and child to
support, and no capital, Henry Ford, still main
taining that policy of "the greatest good to the
greatest number" must win in the end, left the
company wnich had given him an opportunity to
be a rich man and announced that somehow he
would manufacture his own car in his own way.
CHAPTER XXI
EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS
AGAIN Henry Ford s talent for friendliness
helped him. Wills, who had been working with
Ford as a draughtsman, came with him into the
new company. He had a few hundred dollars,
which he was willing to stake on Ford s ability.
Couzens, who had helped organize the first com
pany, came also, and turned his business talents
to the task of raising capital to start the new con
cern.
While he was struggling with the problems of
organization, Henry Ford rented an old shack
on Mack avenue, moved his tools from the old
shed, and, with a couple of machinists to help
him, began building his cheap cars.
News of his venture spread in Detroit. The
cars sold before they were built. Men found their
way to the crude shop, talked to Ford in his
greasy overalls, and paid down deposits on cars
for future delivery. Often these deposits helped
to buy material for the same cars they pur
chased.
Ford was working on a narrow margin. Every
dollar which could be squeezed from the week s
122
EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS 123
earnings after expenses were paid went directly
into more material for more cars. At first his
machinists went home at the end of their regular
hours ; then Ford worked alone far into the night,
building engines. Before long the men became
vitally interested in Ford s success and returned
after supper to help him.
Meantime a few men had been found who were
willing to buy stock in the new company. It was
capitalized at $100,000, of which $15,000 was
paid in. Then Ford set to work in earnest.
The force was increased to nearly forty men,
and Wills became manager of the mechanical de
partment. Carloads of material were ordered, on
sixty days time, every pound of iron or inch of
wire calculated with the utmost nicety so that
each shipment would be sufficient to build a cer
tain number of completed cars without the waste
of ten cents worth of material.
Then Ford and Couzens set out to sell the cars
before payment for the material came due. Ford
set a price of $900 a car, an amount which he
figured would cover the cost of material, wages
and overhead and leave a margin for buying more
material.
*A thousand anxieties now filled his days and
nights. Fifteen thousand dollars was very little
money for his plant ; wages alone would eat it up
in ten weeks. The raw material must be made
into cars, sold, and the money collected, before
it could be paid for. Many times a check from
124 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
a buyer won the race with the bill from the foun
dry by a margin of hours. Often on pay day Ford
faced the prospect of being unable to pay the men
until he should have sold a shipment of cars not
yet built.
But the cars sold. Their simplicity of con
struction, their power, above all their cheapness,
in a day when automobiles almost without excep
tion sold for $2,500 to $4,000, brought buyers.
In a few weeks orders came from Cleveland for
them; shortly afterward a dealer in Chicago
wrote for an agency there.
Still the success of the venture depended from
week to week on a thousand chances. Ford, with
his genius for factory management, reduced the
waste of material or labor to the smallest mini
mum. He worked on new designs for simpler,
cheaper motors. He figured orders for material.
His own living expenses were cut to the bone
every cent of profit on sales went into the factory.
Nearly a thousand cars were sold that year, but
with the beginning of winter sales decreased, al
most stopped. The factory must be kept run
ning, in order to have cars for the spring trade.
Close figuring would enable them to keep it open,
but an early, brisk market would be necessary to
save the company in the spring.
In this emergency Ford recalled the great ad
vertising value of racing. He had designed a
four-cylinder car to be put on the market the fol
lowing year. If he could make a spectacular
EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS 125
demonstration of four-cylinder construction as
compared with the old motors, the success of his
spring sales would be assured.
Ford announced that in November he would
try for the world s speed record in a four-cylinder
car of his own construction.
The old machine in which Barney Oldfield had
made his debut as an automobile driver was
brought out and overhauled. The body was re
built, so that in form it was much like the racing
cars of to-day. Ford himself remodeled the mo
tor.
The test was to be made on the frozen surface
of Lake St. Clair. The course was surveyed. On
the appointed day, with Ford himself as driver,
the motor car appeared for its second trial.
A stiff wind was blowing over the ice. The
surface of the lake, apparently smooth, was in
reality seamed with slight crevices and rough
ened with frozen snow. Ford, muffled in a fur
coat, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
went over it anxiously, noting mentally the worst
spots. Then he cranked the car, settled himself
in the seat and nodded to the starter. The sig
nal came, Ford threw on the power and was off.
The car, striking the ice fissure, leaped into the
air, two wheels at a time. Ford, clinging to the
tiller, was almost thrown from his seat. Zig
zagging wildly, bouncing like a ball, the machine
shot over the ice. Twice it almost upset, but
Ford, struggling to keep the course, never shut
126 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
down the power. He finished the mile in 39 1-5
seconds, beating the world s record by seven sec
onds.
The success of next year s sales was certain.
The following day when Ford reached the fac
tory, Wills met him with an anxious face. It
was pay day and there was no money.
"We didn t bother you about it last week be
cause you were so busy with the race," Wills said.
"We thought up to the last minute that the check
from Chicago would come. It was due two days
ago. We wired yesterday and got no answer.
Mr. Couzens left this morning on the early train
to find out what is wrong. You know how it is;
the men want their money for over Christmas.
The Company wants men and they re offer
ing more money than we can pay. I m afraid our
men will quit, and if they do and we can t get out
the Cincinnati order next week "
Ford knew that to raise more money from the
stockholders would be impossible. They had gone
in as deeply as they could. To sacrifice a block
of his own stock would be to lose control of the
company, and besides it would be difficult to sell
it. The company was still struggling for exist
ence ; it had paid no dividends, and other automo
bile manufacturers were already paying the enor
mous profits that led in the next few years to
wild, disastrous expansion in the automobile busi
ness. The Ford company had no marketable as-
EARLY MANUFACTURING TRIALS 127
sets nothing but the rented building, the equip
ment and a few unfilled orders.
"Well, if we pull through the men will have to
do it," said Ford. "I ll tell them about it."
That evening when the day s work was over
and the men came to the office to get their pay
they found Ford standing in the doorway. He
said he had something to tell them. When they
had all gathered in a group nearly a hundred
by this time he stood on a chair so that all of
them could hear what he had to say, and told them
the exact situation.
"Now, men, we can pull through all right if
you ll help out now," he concluded. "You krtow
the kind of car we re selling, and the price, and
you know what the new one did yesterday. We
can get through the winter on our unfinished or
ders if we never get that Chicago check. Next
year we ll have a big business. But it all depends
on you. If you quit now we re done for. What
about it, will you stay?"
"Sure, Mr. Ford." "You bet we will, old
man!" "We re with you; don t you forget it!"
they said. Before they left the plant most of
them came up to assure him personally that they
would stand by the Ford company. Next day
they all arrived promptly for work, and during
the week they broke all previous records in the
number of cars turned out.
"War between capital and labor is just like any
other kind of war," Henry Ford says to-day. "It
128 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
happens because people do not understand each
other. The boss ought to show his books to his
employees, let them see what he s working for.
They re just as intelligent as he is, and if he needs
help they ll turn in and work twenty-four hours
a day, if they have to, to keep the business going.
More than that, they ll use their heads for him.
They ll help him in hundreds of ways he never
would think of.
"The only trouble is that people make a dis
tinction between practical things and spiritual
qualities. I tell you, loyalty, and friendliness,
and helping the other man along are the only
really valuable things in this world, and they
bring all the practical advantages along with
them every time. If every one of us had the
courage to believe that, and act on it, war and
waste and misery of all kinds would be wiped out
over night."
CHAPTER XXII
AUTOMOBILES FOR THE MASSES
IN a short time Couzens returned from Chi
cago, bringing not only the delayed check, but
several orders as well, which he had obtained
largely because of the astounding record made by
the Ford car in its race over the ice on Lake St.
Clair.
The Ford company was not yet firmly estab
lished, but prospects were bright. America was
awaking to the possibilities of the automobile,
not merely as a machine for spectacular exhibi
tions of daring and skill at track meetings, or as
the plaything of wealthy men, but as a practical
time and labor-saver for the average person.
The automobile industry rose almost over
night. Orders poured into the offices of com
panies already organized; new companies were
formed by dozens, capitalized at millions of dol
lars. Fly-by-night concerns sprang up like mush
rooms, flooded the country with stock-selling
schemes, established factories where parts of mo
tor cars, bought elsewhere, were assembled. For
tunes were made and lost and made again. Al
most every day saw new cars on the market.
Every one wanted an automobile. It was a
129
130 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
luxury, it appealed to our longing to have some
thing just a little better than our neighbors could
afford. At the same time its obvious usefulness
was an argument which overcame economy. The
comic supplements, those faithful reflectors of
American life in terms of the ridiculous, played
with every variation of the theme, "He mort
gaged the home to buy an automobile.
Amid this mounting excitement, in spite of
millions to be made by building a car bigger, finer,
more beautiful and luxurious than those of his
competitors, Henry Ford still clung firmly to his
Idea. He seems to have been, at that time, the
only automobile manufacturer who realized that
the automobile supplied a real need of the aver
age man, and that the average man is a hard
working, frugal individual, used to living with
out those things he must mortgage his home to
get.
The automobile of those days was like a
steam yacht," Ford says. "It was built for only
a few people. Now anything that is good for
only a few people is really no good. It s got to
be good for everybody or in the end it will not
survive."
Radical philosophy, that. You might hear it
from a street corner orator, one of that dissatis
fied multitude which will insist, in spite of all the
good things we have in this country, that merely
because those things are not good for them they
are not good. There is something of Marx in
AUTOMOBILES FOR THE MASSES 131
such a statement, something of George Washing
ton, even something of Christianity. No wonder
men were astounded by the notion that success
could be founded on a theory like that.
"It s plain common sense, I tell you," Ford in
sisted, and in spite of good advice, in spite of
sound business reasoning, that obstinate man went
on in his own way and acted on that belief.
The Ford cars were cheap. Already under-
priced nearly a thousand dollars in comparison
with other cars, they were to be sold still cheaper,
Ford insisted. Every cent he could save in con
struction, in factory managment, in shrewd buy
ing of material was deducted from the selling
price.
The cars sold. Orders accumulated faster
than they could be filled in the shop on Mack ave
nue. The profits went back into the factory.
More men were added to the pay-roll, more ma
chinery was installed, and still the orders came
and the output could not keep up with them.
Mrs. Ford could afford to buy her own hats
instead of making them, to get a new set of furni
ture for the parlor, to purchase as many gloves
and shoes as she wanted. She did these things;
she even talked of getting a hired girl to do the
cooking. But Ford himself made little change
in his way of living. He had always dressed
warmly and comfortably, eaten when he was hun
gry, slept soundly enough on an ordinary bed.
132 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
He saw no way to increase his comforts by spend
ing more money on himself.
"More than enough money to keep him com
fortable is no use to a man," he says. "You can t
squander money on yourself without hurting
yourself. Money s only, a lubricant to keep busi
ness going."
He continued to work hard, designing simpler,
cheaper cars, struggling with business difficulties
as they arose, planning a new factory. Most of
all he was interested in the new factory.
The success of his four-cylinder car provided
money enough to warrant building it at last. A
small tract of land on Piquette avenue was bought
and Ford prepared to move from the rented
Mack avenue place.
The watch-factory dream was finally to be
realized. Henry Ford declared that by a large
equipment of special machinery and a sympa
thetic organization of the work, cars could be
produced at a hitherto unheard-of price. *He
planned to the smallest detail, to the most minute
fraction of space, time, labor, the production of
those cars.
Every part was to be machined to exact size.
No supplementary fitting in the assembling room
was to be necessary. From the time the raw
iron entered one end of the factory till the fin
ished car rolled away from the other end, there
was not to be a moment s delay, a wasted motion.
The various parts, all alike to the fraction of an
AUTOMOBILES FOR THE MASSES 133
inch, were to fit together with automatic pre
cision. And Ford announced that he would pro
duce 10,000 cars in a single year.
The manufacturing world was stunned by the
announcement. Then it laughed. Very few peo
ple believed that Ford would go far with such a
radical departure from all accepted practice. But
the new building was finished, Ford installed his
machinery according to his plans, and when the
wheels began to turn the world learned a new
lesson in efficiency.
Still Ford s success in the automobile field was
not easily won. As a poor, hard-working me
chanic, he had fought weariness and poverty and
ridicule, to build his motor car; as an unknown
inventor, still poor, he had struggled for a foot
hold in the business world and got it ; now he was
in for a long, expensive legal battle before he
should be able to feel secure in his success.
The Association of Licensed Automobile Man
ufacturers, a combination of seventy-three of the
biggest motor car companies, brought suit against
the Ford company to recover tremendous sums
of money because of Ford s alleged violation of
the Seldon patent.
Seldon held a basic patent covering the use of
the gasoline engine as motive power in self-pro
pelled vehicles. When automobiles began to be
put on the market, he claimed his right under that
patent to a royalty on all such vehicles. Other
automobile manufacturers almost without ex-
134 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
ception acceded to his claim and operated under
a lease from him, adding the royalty to the selling
price.
Henry Ford balked. He had been running a
self-propelled gasoline engine long before Seldon
had applied for his patent; furthermore, the
royalties interfered with the long-cherished
dream of cheapening his cars. He flatly refused
to make the payments.
The lessees of the Seldon rights, perceiving in
Ford a dangerous adversary in the automobile
field, who would become still more dangerous if
he succeeded in eliminating the royalty payments
from his manufacturing costs, immediately began
to fight him with all the millions at their com
mand.
CHAPTER XXIII
FIGHTING THE SELDON PATENT
BY sheer force of an idea, backed only by hard
work, Henry Ford had established a new princi
ple in mechanics ; he had created new methods in
the manufacturing world methods substantially
those which prevail in manufacturing to-day;
now he entered the legal field. His fight on the
Seldon patent a fight that lasted nearly ten
years was a sensation not only in the automo
bile world, but among lawyers everywhere.
The intricacies of the case baffled the jurists
before whom it was tried. Time and again de
cisions adverse to Ford were handed down. Each
time Ford came back again, more determined
than before, carried the contest to a higher court
and fought the battle over again.
On one side the Association of Licensed Auto
mobile Manufacturers was struggling to save
patent rights for which they had paid vast sums
of money, to maintain high prices for automo
biles, and to protect their combination of manu
facturing interests. On the other, Ford was
fighting to release the industry from paying
tribute to a patent which he believed unsound, to
smash the combination of manufacturers, and to
135
136 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
keep down his own factory costs so that he could
make a still cheaper car.
With the first adverse decision, the A. L. A.
M. carried the fight into the newspapers. Most
of us can recall the days when from coast to
coast the newspapers of America blossomed with
page advertisements warning people against buy
ing Ford cars, asserting that every owner of a
Ford car was liable to prosecution for damages
under the Seldon patent rights.
Those were chaotic years in the industry. The
hysteria which followed the huge profit-making
of the first companies, checked only temporarily
by the panic of 1907-8, mounted again in a rising
wave of excitement. Dozens of companies sprang
up, sold stock, assembled a few cars, and went
down in ruin. Buyers of their cars were left
stranded with automobiles for which they could
not get new parts.
It was asserted that the Ford Motor Company,
unable to pay the enormous sums accruing if the
Seldon patent was upheld, would be one of the
companies to fail. Buyers were urged to play
safe by purchasing a recognized car a car made
by the licensed manufacturers.
Ford, already involved in a business fight
against the association and its millions, thus
found himself in danger of losing the confidence
of the public.
The story of those years is one which cannot
be adequately told. Ford was working harder
FIGHTING THE SELDON PATENT 137
than lie had ever done while he was building his
first car in the old shed. He was one of the first
men at the factory every morning, and long after
Detroit was asleep he was still hard at work, con
ferring with lawyers, discussing with Couzens
the latest disaster that threatened, struggling with
business problems, meeting emergencies in the
selling field, and always planning to better the
factory management and to lower the price and
increase the efficiency of the car.
The car sold. Ford had built it for common
men, for the vast body of America s middle-class
people, and it was cheap enough to be within their
reach. Ford knew that if he could keep their
confidence he could win in the end.
He met the attack of the A. L. A. M. by print
ing huge advertisements guaranteeing purchasers
of his cars from prosecution under the Seldon
patents, and backed his guarantee by the bond
of a New York security company. Then he ap
pealed the patent case and kept on fighting.
In 1908 the farmer boy who had started out
twenty years before with nothing but his bare
hands and an idea found himself at the head of
one of America s largest business organizations.
That year his factory made and sold 6,398 cars.
Every machine sold increased his liabilities in
case he lost the patent fight, but the business was
now on a firm foundation. Agencies had been
established in all parts of the world, orders came
pouring in. Profits were rolling up. Ford found
138 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
his net earnings increasing faster than he could
possibly put them back into the business.
At the end of that year he and Couzens sat in
their offices going over the balance sheets of the
company. The size of the bank balance was
most satisfactory. The factory was running to
the limit of its capacity, orders were waiting.
Prospects were bright for the following season.
Ford leaned back in his chair.
"Well, I guess we re out of the woods, all
right," he said. He put his hands in his pockets
and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Remem
ber that time in the Mack avenue place," he be
gan, "when that Chicago check didn t come in,
and we couldn t pay the men ?"
"I should say I do! And the day we got the
first order from Cleveland. Remember how you
worked in the shop yourself to get it out?"
"And you hustled out and got material on sixty
days time? And the boys worked all night, and
we had to wait till the money came from Cleve
land before we could give them their overtime?
That was a great bunch of men we had then."
They began to talk them over. Most of them
were managers of departments now; one was
handling the sales force, another had developed
into a driver and won many trophies and broken
many records with the Ford car; Wills was su
perintendent of the factory.
"I tell you, Couzens, you and I have been at
the head of the concern, and we ve done some big
FIGHTING THE SELDON PATENT 139
things together, but if it hadn t been for the men
we d be a long way from where we are to-day,"
Ford said at last.
"Now we have some money we don t need for
the business, we ought to divide with them. Let s
do it"
"I m with you!" Couzens said heartily, and
reached for his pencil. Eagerly as two boys,
they sat there for another hour figuring. They
began with checks for the men they remembered,
men who had been with them in the first days of
the company, men who had done some special
thing which won their notice, men who were
making good records in the shops or on the sales
force. But there seemed no place to draw the
line.
"After all, every man who s working for us is
helping," Ford decided.
"Let s give every one of them a Christmas
present." Couzens agreed. "We ll have the
clerical department figure it out. The men who
have been with us longest the most, and so on
down to the last errand boy that s been with us
a year. What do you say ?"
Ford said yes with enthusiasm, and so it was
settled. That year every employee of the com
pany received an extra check in his December
pay envelope. Ford had reached a point in his
business life where he must stop and consider
what he should do with the money his work had
140 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
brought him, and those extra checks were the first
result.
For twenty years Ford had spent all his energy,
all his time and thought in one thing his work.
If he had divided his interests, if he had allowed
a liking for amusement, ease, finer clothes, ad
miration, to hinder his work in the old shed, he
would never have built his car. If he had cared
more for personal pleasure and applause than he
did for his idea, he would have allowed his fac
tory plan to be altered, twisted out of shape and
forgotten when he first found capital to manu
facture the car. But from the day he left his
farm till now he has subordinated everything
else to his machine idea.
He applied it first to an engine, then to a fac
tory. He fought through innumerable difficulties
to make those ideas into realities. He destroyed
old conceptions of mechanics and of factory man
agement. He built up a great financial success.
Now he found himself with a new problem to
face the problem of a great fortune piling up
in his hands.
CHAPTER XXIV
"THE GREATEST GOOD TO THE GREATEST NUMBER"
THE response to that first Christmas gift from
the Ford company to its employees was another
proof of Ford s theory that friendliness pays. In
the following month the production of cars broke
all January records. Salesmen, with a new feel
ing of loyalty to the firm, increased their efforts,
worked with greater enthusiasm and their orders
jumped.
The fight with the association still raged in the
courts and in the newspapers, but the factory
wheels were turning faster than ever before.
More cars were pouring out, more people were
buying. That year the Ford organization made
and sold 10,607 cars. Ford had made good his
prophecy that the new factory would produce
10,000 cars in one year.
The phenomenal growth of his business had
begun. His own fortune was doubling and
doubling again. America had produced another
self-made millionaire.
Ford himself believes that any one who will
pay the price he has paid can make a financial suc
cess as great.
"Poverty doesn t hold a man down," he says.
141
142 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
"Money doesn t amount to anything it has no
real value whatever. Any young man who has
a good idea and works hard enough will succeed ;
money will come to him. What do I mean by a
good idea? I mean an idea that will work out
for the best interests of every one an idea for
something that will benefit the world. That s the
kind of an idea the world wants."
This country has produced hundreds of men
whose lives prove this statement men who have
built railroads, telephones, telegraph systems,
great merchandising organizations. These men
have subordinated every personal pleasure to
their work. They have exhausted their minds
and bodies, driven themselves mercilessly, used
every ounce of energy and ability, and won.
The tragedy for them and for our country is
that in winning the fight most of them have lost
their perspective on it. They themselves have
become absorbed by the machine they have built
up. The money they have amassed usually means
very little to them, but business is their passion.
With millions upon millions piling up to their
credit, they continue to hold down wages, to pro
tect their profits, to keep the business running as
it has always run.
That business has been built only because fun
damentally it was for "the greatest good to the
greatest number," but in the long fight they have
lost sight of that fact. Let a new project arise
"THE GREATEST GOOD" 143
which is for the general good and "it will hurt
business!" they cry in alarm.
Ford kept his viewpoint. Partly because of his
years on the farm, where he worked shoulder to
shoulder with other men and learned essential
democracy; partly because most of his work had
been in mechanics rather than in business, but
most of all because he is a simple, straight-think
ing man, the tremendous Ford organization did
not absorb him,
He had applied his machine idea first to an en
gine, then to a factory ; in time he was to apply
it to society as a whole.
"That Christmas present of ours is paying bet
ter dividends than any money we ever spent," he
said to Couzens with a grin. "First thing we
know, the men ll be paying us back more than we
gave them. Look here." He spread on Couzens
desk a double handful of letters from the men.
"They like it," he said soberly. "Some of
them say they were worrying about Christmas
bills, and so on. Those checks took a load off
their minds, and they re pitching in and working
hard to show they appreciate it. I guess in the
long run anything that is good for the men is
good for the company."
In the months that followed he continued to
turn over in his mind various ideas which oc
curred to him, based on that principle.
The Ford employees and agents now numbered
tens of thousands. They were scattered all over
144 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
the earth, from Bombay to Nova Scotia, Switzer
land, Peru, Bermuda, Africa, Alaska, India
everywhere were workers, helping Ford. Black
men in turbans, yellow men in embroidered robes,
men of all races and languages, speaking, think
ing, living in ways incomprehensible to that quiet
man who sat in his office in Detroit, were part of
the vast machine out of which his millions poured.
He thought it over that great machine. He
knew machines. He knew that the smallest part
of one was as necessary as the largest, that every
nut and screw was indispensable to the success of
the whole. And while he brooded over the
mighty machine his genius had created, the
thought slowly formed itself in his mind that
those multiplying millions of his were the weak
spot in the organization. Those millions repre
sented energy, and through him they were drain
ing out of the machine, accumulating in a useless,
idle store. Some way they must be put back.
"Everybody helps me," he said. "If I m going
to do my part I must help everybody !" *
A new problem filled his mind. How should
he put his money back into that smooth, efficient
organization in such a way as to help all parts of
it without disorganizing it? It was now a part of
the business system of the world, founded on
financial and social principles which underlie all
society. It was no small matter to alter it.
Meantime, there were immediate practical
necessities to be met. His business had far out-
"THE GREATEST GOOD" 145
grown the Piquette avenue plant. A new factory
must be built. He bought a tract of 276 acres
in the northern part of Detroit and began to plan
the construction of his present factory, a num
ber of huge buildings covering more than forty-
seven acres.
In this mammoth plant Ford had at last the
opportunity, unhampered by any want of capital,
to put into operation his old ideas of factory man
agement. Here 1800 men were to work, quickly,
efficiently, without the loss of a moment or a mo
tion, all of them integral parts of one great ma
chine. Each department makes one part of the
Ford car, complete, from raw material to the fin
ished product, and every part is carried swiftly
and directly, by gravity, to the assembling room.
But Ford s new idea also began to express it
self here. He meant to consider not only the
efficiency but the happiness and comfort of his
men.
The walls were made of plate glass, so that
every part of the workrooms were light and well
ventilated. One whole department, employing
500 men, was established to do nothing but sweep
floors, wash windows, look after sanitary condi
tions generally. The floors are scrubbed every
week with hot water and alkali. Twenty-five
men are employed constantly in painting the walls
and ceilings, keeping everything fresh and clean.
That winter the Christmas checks went again
to all the employees. Ford was still working out
146 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
a real plan by which his millions could help;
meantime, he divided his profits in this makeshift
fashion.
The following year the company moved to its
new quarters. In that atmosphere of light and
comfort the men worked better than ever before.
Production broke another record 38,528 cars
in one year were made and sold.
"And the automobile world is waiting to hear
the next announcement from Henry Ford," said
a trade journal at that time. "Whether or not
he has another sensation in store is the livest
topic of discussion in Detroit manufacturing cir
cles nay, even throughout the world."
Henry Ford was preparing another sensation,
but this time it was to be in a larger field. He
had startled the world, first, with a motor car,
next with a factory. Now he was thinking of
broad economic problems.
CHAPTER XXV
FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM
THE Seldon patent fight had continued through
all the early years of Ford s struggle to establish
himself in business. At last it was settled. Ford
won it. The whole industry was freed from an
oppressive tax and his long fight was over.
Immediately, of course, other cars came into
the low-priced field. Other manufacturers,
tardily following Ford, began the downward pres
sure in prices which now makes it possible for
thousands of persons with only moderate means
to own automobiles. For the first time Ford
faced competition in his own price class. In
numerable business problems confronted the
farmer-mechanic, from the time he opened his
office doors in the early morning until the last
workman had left the plant and only his light was
burning. Business men came, financiers, sales
men, lawyers, designers. Every day for two
hours he conferred with his superintendents and
foremen in the main factory. Every detail of
the business was under his supervision. A
smaller man or a less simple one, would have been
absorbed by the sheer mass of work.
Ford settled every problem by his own simple
147
148 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
rule, "Do what is fundamentally best for every
body. It will work out for our interests in the
end."
And always he was pondering the big problem
of putting back into active use the millions that
were accumulating to his credit. Every year the
price was lowered on his cars, following his origi
nal policy of making the automobile cheap. Still
the sales increased by leaps and bounds, and his
margin of profit on each car mounted into a
greater total.
"The whole system is wrong/* he says. "Peo
ple have the wrong idea of money. They think
it is valuable in itself. They try to get all they
can, and they ve built up a system where one man
has too much and another not enough. As long
as that system is working there does not seem any
way to even things up. But I made up my mind
to do what I could.
"Money valuable ? I tell you, gold is the least
valuable metal in the world. Edison says it is no
good at all, it is too soft to make a single useful
article. Suppose there was only one loaf of bread
in the world, would all the money on earth buy it
from the man who had it? Money itself is noth
ing, absolutely nothing. It is only valuable as a
transmitter, a method of handling things that are
valuable. The minute one man gets more of it
than he can use to buy the real things he needs,
the surplus is sheer waste. It is stored-up energy
that is no good to anybody.
1 FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM 149
"Every bit of energy that is wasted that way
hurts the whole world, and in the end it hurts the
man who has it as much as it hurts anybody.
Look here, you make a machine to do something
useful, don t you? Well, then, if it is built so
that it keeps wasting energy, doesn t the whole
machine wear itself out without doing half as
much as it should ? Isn t that last energy bad for
every part of the machine? Well, that is the
way the world is running now. The whole sys
tem is wrong."
A very little thought brings almost any of us
to that conclusion, especially if the thinker is one
whose surplus money is all in the other man s
bank account; but Ford held to that thought, as
few of us would, with the surplus millions in his
own hands. Furthermore, he proposed not
merely to think,- but to act on that thought.
He is not a man to act hastily. Before he made
his engine he worked out the drawings. Before
he distributed his money he selected 200 men
from the workers in his shop and sent them out
to learn all they could of the living conditions of
the other thousands. They worked for a year,
and at the end of that time Ford, going carefully
over their reports, saw plainly where his surplus
money should go.
Over 4,000 of the 18,000 men working in the
Ford plant were living in dire poverty, in un
speakable home conditions. Families were huddled
into tenements, where in wet weather water stood
ISO HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
on the floor. Wives were ill, uncared for ; babies
were dressed in rags. Another 5,000 men in his
employ were living in conditions which could
only be called "fair." Only 364 out of 18,000
owned their own homes.
Yet the employees in the Ford shops were
above the average of factory workingmen.
They were paid the regular scale of wages, not
overworked, and their surroundings at the plant
were sanitary and pleasant.
In those terrible figures Ford was seeing merely
the ordinary, accustomed result of the wasted en
ergy represented in those idle millions of dollars.
He went over them thoroughly, noting that
the scale of living grew steadily better as the sal
aries increased, observing that the most wretched
class was mainly composed of foreign workmen,
ignorant, unskilled labor, most of them unable to
speak English. He figured, thought, drew his
own conclusions.
He had been studying relief plans, methods
of factory management in Germany, welfare
work of all kinds. When he had finished his con
sideration of those reports he threw overboard
all the plans other people had made and an
nounced his own.
"Every man who works for me is going to get
enough for a comfortable living," he said. "If
an able-bodied man can t earn that, he s either
lazy or ignorant. If he s lazy, he s sick. We ll
have a hospital. If he s ignorant, he wants to
FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM 151
learn. We ll have a school. Meantime, figure
out in the accounting bureau a scale of profit-
sharing that will make every man s earnings at
least five dollars a day. The man that gets the
smallest wages gets the biggest share of the
profits. He needs it most."
On January 12, 1914, Ford more than satis
fied the expectant manufacturers of the world.
He launched into the industrial world a most
startling bombshell.
"Five dollars a day for every workman in the
Ford factory!"
"He s crazy!" other manufacturers said,
aghast. "Why, those dirty, ignorant foreigners
don t earn half that! You can t run a business
that way!"
"That man Ford will upset the whole industrial
situation. What is he trying to do, anyhow?"
they demanded when every Detroit factory work
man grew restless.
The news spread rapidly. Everywhere work
ers dropped their tools and hurried to the Ford
factory. Five dollars a day!
When Ford reached the factory in the morn
ing of the second day after his announcement, he
found Woodward avenue crowded with men
waiting to get a job in the shops. An hour later
the crowds had jammed into a mob, which
massed outside the buildings and spread far into
adjoining streets, pushing, struggling, fighting to
get closer to the doors.
152 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
It was not safe to open them. That mass of
humanity, pushed from behind, would have
wrecked the offices. The manager of the employ
ment department opened a window and shouted
to the frantic crowd that there were no jobs, but
the sound of his voice was lost in the roar that
greeted him. He shut the window and telephoned
the police department for reserves.
Still the crowds increased every moment by
new groups of men wildly eager to get a job
which would pay them a comfortable living.
Ford looked down at them from his window.
"Can t you make them understand we haven t
any jobs?" he asked the employment manager.
The man, disheveled, breathing hard, and hoarse
with his efforts to make his voice heard, shook
his head.
"The police are coming," he said.
"Then there ll be somebody hurt," Ford pre
dicted. "We can t have that. Get the fire hose
and turn it on the crowd. That will do the busi
ness/
A moment later a solid two-inch stream of
water shot from the doors of the Ford factory.
It swept the struggling men half off their feet;
knocked the breath from their bodies; left them
gasping, startled, dripping. They scattered. In
a few moments the white stream from the hose
was sweeping back and forth over a widening
spa.ce bare of men. When the police arrived the
crowd was so dispersed that the men in uniform
FIVE DOLLARS A DAY MINIMUM 153
marched easily through it without using their
clubs.
For a week a special force of policemen
guarded the Ford factory, turning back heartsick
men, disappointed in their hope of a comfortable
living wage.
It was a graphic illustration of the harm done
the whole machine by the loss of energy stored
in money, held idle in the hands of a few men.
CHAPTER XXVI
MAKING IT PAY
"WHEN I saw thousands of men in Detroit
alone fighting like wild animals for a chance at a
decent living wage it brought home to me the tre
mendous economic waste in our system of doing
business/ Ford said. "Every man in those
crowds must go back to a job if he found one
at all that did not give him a chance to do his
best work because it did not pay him enough to
keep him healthy and happy.
"I made up my mind to put my project
through, to prove to the men who are running
big industries that my plan pays. I wanted em
ployers to see that when every man has all the
money he needs for comfort and happiness it
will be better for everybody. I wanted to prove
that the policy of trying to get everything good
for yourself really hurts you in the end."
He paused and smiled his slow, whimsical
smile.
"Well, I guess I proved it," he said.
Six weeks after the plan went into effect in
his factory a comparison was made between the
production for January, 1914, and January, 1913.
In 1913, with 16,000 men working on the actual
154
MAKING IT PAY 155
production of cars for ten hours a day, 16,000
cars were made and shipped. Under the new
plan 15,800 men working eight hours a day made
and shipped 26,000 cars.
Again Ford had shown the value of that in
tangible, "impractical" thing a spirit of friend
liness and good will.
On the ebb tide of the enthusiasm which had
stirred this country at the announcement of his
profit-sharing plan a thousand skeptical opinions
arose. "Oh, he s doing it just for the advertis
ing." "He knew, right enough, that he would
make more money in the end by this scheme -
he s no philanthropist."
Ford wanted his new plan known; he wanted
employers everywhere to see what he was doing,
how he did it, and what the effects would be. He
did expect the factory to run better, to produce
more cars. If it had not done so his plan would
have been a failure.
"Do the thing that is best for everybody and
it will be best for you in the end." That was his
creed. He hoped to prove its truth so that no
one would doubt it.
Nor is Ford a philanthropist, with the ordi
nary implications that follow that word. He is a
hard-headed, practical man, who has made a suc
cess in invention, in organization, in the building
of a great business. His contribution to the
world is a practical contribution. His message
is a practical message.
156 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
"This whole world is like a machine every
pa*! is as important as every other part. We
should all work together, not against each other.
Anything that is good for all the parts of the
machine is good for each one of them.
"Or look at it as a human body. The welfare
of one part is dependent on all the other parts.
Once in a while a little group of cells get to
gether and takes to growing on its own account,
not paying any attention to the rest. That is a
cancer. In the end what it takes from the rest of
the body causes the death of the whole organism.
What do those independent, selfish cells get out
of it?
"I tell you, selfishness, trying to get ahead of
the other fellow, trying to take away from other
people, is the worst policy a man can follow. It
is NOT a practical viewpoint on life. Any man
who is a success is a success because his work has
helped other men, whether he realizes it or not.
The more he helps other men the more success
ful every one will be, and he will get his share."
Putting his profit-sharing plan into effect was
not a simple matter of writing the checks. He
had to educate not only other employers, but his
own men as well. They must be taught the
proper way to use money, so that it would not be
a detriment to themselves or a menace to society
in general. %
On the other hand, Ford did not believe in the
factory systems in use abroad. He did not mean
MAKING IT PAY 157
to give each of his workmen a model cottage,
with a model flower garden in front and a model
laundry in the rear, and say to them : "Look at
the flowers, but do not pick them; it will spoil
my landscape effect. Look at the lawn, but do
not cut it; I have workmen for that."
He meant to place no restraints on the personal
liberty of the men. He believed that every man,
if given the opportunity, would make himself a
good, substantial citizen, industrious, thrifty and
helpful to others. He meant his plan to prove
that theory also.
It has been rumored that the extra share of
profits was given with "a string to it." That is
not so. There was no single thing a man must
have to do to entitle him to his share. He need
not own a home, start a bank account, support a
family, or even measure up to a standard of work
in the shops. Manhood and thrift were the only
requisites, and the company stood ready to help
any man attain those.
The first obstacle was the fact that 55 per cent
of the men did not speak English. Investigators
visiting their miserable homes were obliged to
speak through interpreters. A school was started
where they might learn English, and the response
was touching. More than a thousand men en
rolled immediately, and when the plan was dis
cussed in the shops 200 American workmen vol
unteered to help in teaching, so thoroughly had
the Ford spirit of helpfulness pervaded the fac-
158 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
tory. The paid teachers were dismissed, and now
those 200 men, on their own time, are helping
their fellow-employees to learn the language of
their new country.
Shortly after the newspapers had carried far
and wide the news of Ford s revolutionary the
ories a man knocked late one night at the door
of the manager s home.
"Will you give me a job?" he asked.
"Why, I don t know who you are," the man
ager replied.
"I m the worst man in Detroit," said the caller
defiantly. "I m fifty-four years old, and I ve
done thirty-two years in Jackson prison. I m a
bad actor, and everybody knows it. I can t get
a job. The only person that ever played me true
is my wife, and I ain t going to have her taking
in washing to support me. If you want to give
me a job, all right. If you don t I m going back
to Jackson prison for good. There s one man
yet I want to get, and I ll get him."
Somewhat nonplussed by the situation the man
ager invited the man in, talked to him a bit, and
called up Ford.
"Sure, give him a chance," Ford s voice came
over the wire. "He s a man, isn t he? He s en
titled to as good a chance as any other man."
The ex-convict was given a job in the shops.
For a couple of months his work was poor. The
foreman reported it to the manager. The man
ager wrote a letter, telling the man to brace up,
MAKING IT PAY 159
there was plenty of good stuff in him if he would
take an interest in the work and do his best.
The next morning he came into the manager s
office with his wife, so broken up he could hardly
hold his voice steady. "That letter s the finest
thing, outside of what my wife has done, that
I ve ever had happen to me," he said. "I want
to stick here, I ll do the best I know how. I ll
work my hands off. Show me how to do my
work better."
A couple of months later he came into the
office and took a small roll of bills out of his
pocket.
"Say," he said, shifting from one foot to the
other, and running his fingers around the brim of
the hat in his hands, "I wonder if you d tell me
how to get into a bank and leave this ? And what
bank? I m wise how to get in and take it out,
but I ain t up to putting it in without some ad
vice."
To-day that man is living in his own home
which he is paying for on the installment plan,
and he is one of the best workers in Detroit, a
good, steady man.
His chance appearance resulted in Ford s policy
of employing convicts wherever his investigators
come across them. Nearly a hundred ex-crim
inals, many of them on parole, are working in his
shops to-day, and he considers them among his
best men.
* "No policy is any good if it cannot go into a
160 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
community and take every one in it, young, old,
good, bad, sick, well, and make them all happier,
more useful and more prosperous," he says.
"Every human being that lives is part of the big 1
machine, and you can t draw any lines between
parts of a machine. They re all important. You
can t make a good machine by making only one
part of it good."
This belief led to his establishing a unique labor
clearing-house in his administration building a
department that makes it next to impossible for
any man employed in the organization to lose his
job.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB
THAT surging mob of men outside this factory
during the week following the announcement of
his profit-sharing plan had impressed indelibly
on Ford s mind the tremendous importance of a
job.
"A workingman s job is his life," he says. "No
one man should have the right ever to send
another man home to his family out of work.
Think what it means to that man, sitting there
at the supper table, looking at his wife and chil
dren, and not knowing whether or not he will be
able to keep them fed and clothed.
"A normal, healthy man wants to work. He
has to work to live right. " Nobody should be able
to take his work away from him. In my factory
every man shall keep his job as long as he
wants it."
Impractical? The idea seems fantastic in its
impracticality. What, keep every man lazy,
stupid, impudent, dishonest, as he may be every
man in a force of 18,000 workmen, on the pay
roll as long as he wants to stay ? Surely, if there
is any point at which ideals of human brother-
161
1 62 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
hood end and coldblooded business methods begin,
this should be that point.
But Ford, obstinate in his determination to
care for the interests of every one, declared that
this policy should stand. As a part of his new
plan, he installed the labor clearing house as
part of his employment department.
Now when a foreman discharges a man, that
man is not sent out of the factory. He goes with
a written slip from the foreman to the labor clear
ing house. There he is questioned. What is
wrong? Is he ill? Does he dislike his work?
What are his real interests ?
In the end he is transferred to another depart
ment which seems more suited to his taste and
abilities. If he proves unsatisfactory there, he
returns again to the clearing house. Again his
case is discussed, again he is given another chance
in still another department. Meantime the em
ployment managers take an active interest in him,
in his health, his home conditions, his friends.
He is made to feel that he has friends in the man
agement who are eager to help him make the
right start to the right kind of life.
Perhaps he is ill. Then he is sent to the com
pany hospital, given medical care and a leave of
absence until he is well enough to resume work.
Over 200 cases of tuberculosis in various stages
were discovered among Ford s employees when
his hospital was established. These men pre
sented a peculiar problem. Most of them were
THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB 163
still able to work, all of them must continue work
ing to support families. Yet, if their cases were
neglected it meant not only their own deaths, but
spreading infection in the factory.
The business world has never attempted to
solve the problem of these men. Waste from the
great machine, they are thrown carelessly out,
unable because of that tell-tale cough to get an
other job, left to shift for themselves in a world
which thinks it does not need them.
Ford established a "heat-treating department"
especially for them. When the surgeons discover
a case of incipient tuberculosis in the Ford fac
tory, they transfer the man to this department,
where the air, filtered, dried and heated, is scien
tifically better for their disease than the mountain
climate of Denver. Here the men are given light
jobs which they can handle, and paid their regular
salaries until they are cured and able to return to
their former places in the shops.
"It s better for everybody when a man stays
at work, instead of laying off," Ford says. "I
don t care what s wrong with him, whether he s
a misfit in his department, or stupid, or sick.
There s always some way to keep him doing use
ful work. And as long as he is doing that it s
better for the man and for the company, and for
the world.
"And yet there are men in business to-day
who install systems to prevent the waste of a
piece of paper or a stamp, and let the human labor
1 64 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
in their plants go to waste wholesale. Yes, and
they sat up and said I was a sentimental idiot
when I put in my system of taking care of the
men in my place. They said it would not pay.
Well, let them look over the books of the Ford
factory and see how it paid how it paid all
of us."
Five months after Ford s new plans had gone
into effect his welfare workers made a second
survey.
Eleven hundred men had moved to better
homes. Bank deposits had increased 205 per
cent. Twice as many men owned their own
homes. More than two million dollars worth
of Detroit real estate had passed into the hands
of Ford employees, who were paying for it on
the installment plan. Among the 18,000 work
men only 140 still lived in conditions which could
be called "bad" in the reports.
And the output of Ford automobiles had in
creased over 20 per cent.
That year, with an eight-hour day in force, and
$10,000,000 divided in extra profits among the
men, the factory produced over 100,000 more cars
than it had produced during the preceding year,
under the old conditions.
Cold figures had proved to the business world
the "practical" value of "sentimental theories."
Ford s policy had not only done away with the
labor problem, it had also shown the way to solve
the employers problems.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB 165
"The heart of the struggle between capital
and labor is the idea of employer and employee,"
he says. "There ought not to be employers and
workmen just workmen. They re two parts of
the same machine. It s absurd to have a machine
in which one part tries to foil another.
"My job at the plant is to design the cars and
keep the departments working in harmony. I m
a workman. I m not trying to slip anything over
on the other factors in the machine. How would
that help the plant?
"There s trouble between labor and capital.
Well, the solution is not through one side getting
the other by the neck and squeezing. No, sir;
that isn t a solution; that is ruin for both. It
means that later the other side is going to recover
and try to get on top again, and there ll be con
stant fighting and jarring where there ought to
be harmony and adjustment.
"The only solution is to GET TOGETHER. It
can t come only by the demands of labor. It can t
come only by the advantages of capital. It s got
to come by both recognizing their interest and
getting together.
"That s the solution of all the problems in the
world, as I see it. Let people realize that they re
all bound together, all parts of one machine, and
that nothing that hurts one group of people will
fail in the end to come back and hurt all the peo-
pie."
So, at the end of thirty-seven years of work,
1 66 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
Henry Ford sat in his office on his fifty-second
birthday and looked out of a community of
nearly 20,000 persons, working efficiently and
happily together, working for him and for them
selves, well paid, contented. He thought of the
world, covered with the network of his agencies,
crossed and recrossed with the tracks of his cars.
He had run counter to every prompting of
"practical business judgment" all his life he had
left the farm, built his engine, left the moneyed
men who would not let him build a cheap car,
started his own plant on insufficient capital, built
up his business, established his profit-sharing
scheme all against every dictate of established
practice.
He had acted from the first on that one funda
mental principle, "Do the thing that means the
most good to the most people." His car, his fac
tory, his workmen, his sixty millions of dollars,
answered conclusively the objection, "I know it s
the right thing, theoretically but it isn t practi
cal."
Thinking of these things on that bright sum
mer day in 1914, Ford decided that there re
mained only one more thing he could do.
CHAPTER XXVIII
A GREAT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
IT happened that on Ford s fifty-second birth
day a commission from the French Chamber of
Commerce arrived in Detroit, having crossed the
Atlantic to inspect the Ford factories.
They viewed 276 acres of manufacturing activ
ity ; the largest power plant in the world, develop-
ing 45,000 horse-power from gas-steam engines
designed by Ford engineers ; the enormous forty-
ton cranes; 6,000 machines in operation in one
great room, using fifty miles of leather belting;
nine mono-rail cars, each with two-ton hoists,
which carry materials in short, the innumerable
details of that mammoth plant.
Then they inspected the hospitals, the rest
rooms, noted the daylight construction of the
whole plant, the ventilating system which changes
the air completely every ten minutes, the labor-
saving devices, the "safety-first" equipment.
At last they returned to Henry Ford s office,
with notebooks full of figures and information to
be taken to the manufacturers of France. They
thanked Ford for his courtesy and assured him
that they comprehended every detail of his poli
cies save one.
167
1 68 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
"We find, sir," said the spokesman, courteously,
"that last year you had more orders than you
could fill. Is it not so?"
"Yes, that is correct," replied Ford. "But with
the increased output this year we hope to catch
up."
"And yet, is it not so that this spring you low
ered the price of your car fifty dollars?"
"Yes, that is true," said Ford.
"But, sir, we cannot understand is it then true
that you reduce your prices when already you
have more orders than you can fill ? This seems
strange to us, indeed. Why should a manufac
turer do that?"
"Well," Ford answered, "I and my family al
ready have all the money we can possibly use.
We don t need any more. And I think an auto
mobile is a good thing. I think every man should
be able to own one. I want to keep lowering the
price until my car is within the reach of every one
in America. You see, that is all I know how to
do for my country."
Unconsciously, he was voicing the new patriot
ism the ideal to which he was to give the rest
of his life. He said it simply, a little awkwardly,
but the French commission, awed by the greatness
of this Detroit manufacturer, returned and re
ported his statement to the French people as the
biggest thing they had found in America.
Yet this viewpoint was the natural outcome of
his life. A simple man, seeing things simply, he
EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION 169
had arrived at a place of tremendous power in
America. He had come to a time when he need
no longer work at his engine or his factory or
ganization. He had leisure to survey his country
and its problems, to apply to them his machine
idea.
And he saw in America a great machine, made
up of countless human parts a machine which
should work evenly, efficiently, harmoniously, for
the production and just distribution of food, shel
ter, clothes, all the necessities of a simple and
comfortable life.
His part, as he saw it, was to make and dis
tribute automobiles. He meant to do his part
in the best way he knew how, hoping by his suc
cess to hasten the time when every one would
follow his example, and all the terrible friction
and waste of our present system would be stopped.
This was his only interest in life. A farmer-
boy mechanic, who had left school at sixteen,
who had lived all his life among machines, in
terested in practical things, he saw no value in
anything which did not promote the material
well-being of the people. Art music, painting,
literature, architecture luxuries, super-refine
ments of living, these things seemed useless to
him.
"Education? Come to Detroit and I ll show
you the biggest school in the world," he says.
/"Every man there is learning and going ahead
all the time. They re realizing that their interests
170 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
are the same as their employer s, that he is the
men s trustee, that he is only one of the workmen
with a job of his own, and that his job, like the
jobs of the others, has to be run for the good
of the whole plant. He would fire a man who
took away from the other men for his own ad
vantage. That spirit would harm the works.
Similarly, the men would have a right to fire him
if he took away from them for his personal
benefit.
"The men in my plant are learning these things.
They re leading the way for the workers of this
country. They are going to show other workers,
just as I hope to show other employers, that
things should be run for the most good for the
most people. That s the education we need.
"This education outside of industry that we
have to-day is just the perpetuation of tradition
and convention. It s a good deal of a joke and
a good deal of waste motion. To my mind, the
usefulness of a school ends when it has taught
a man to read and write and figure, and has
brought out his capacity for being interested in
his line. After that, let the man or boy get after
what he is interested in, and get after it with all
his might, and keep going ahead that is school.
"If those young fellows who are learning chem
istry in colleges were enough interested in chem
istry they would learn it the way I did, in my little
back shed of nights. I would not give a plugged
EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION 171
nickel for all the higher education and all the art
in the world."
This, then, was Henry Ford at 52. A slender,
slightly stooped man, with hollow cheeks, thin,
firm, humorous lips, gray hair ; a man with sixty
odd millions of dollars; used to hard work all his
life, and liking it. A man who on a single idea
had built up a tremendous organization, so sys
tematized that it ran by itself, requiring little su
pervision.
In some way he must use his driving energy,
in some way he must spend his millions, and his
nature demanded that he do it along the line of
that idea which had dominated his whole life
the machine idea of humanity, the idea of the
greatest good to the greatest number.
That summer, for the first time, he found him
self with leisure. He was not imperatively
needed at the plant. He and Mrs. Ford spent
some time in Greenfield, where he enlarged the
old farm by purchasing nearly four thousand
acres of land adjoining it. He himself spent
some time on the problems of organizing the
work on those acres. He and his wife lived in
the house where they had begun their married
life, and where, with their old furniture and their
old friends, they reconstructed the life of thirty
years before.
Ford returned to Detroit with a working model
for a cheap farm-tractor which he intends to put
on the market soon. He worked out the designs
172 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
and dropped them into the roaring cogs of his
organization which presently produced some
dozens of the tractors. These were sent down to
the farm and put to work. In due course, caught
up again by the Ford organization, the tractors
will begin to pour out in an endless stream and
Ford will have done for farm work what he did
for passenger traffic.
But he realized that those occupations did not
absorb his whole energy. Unconsciously he was
seeking something bigger even than his factories,
than his business operations, to which he could
devote his mind something to which he could
apply his ruling idea, something for which he
could fight.
The terrible 4th of August, 1914, which
brought misery, ruin, desolation to Europe and
panic to the whole world, gave him his oppor
tunity.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE EUROPEAN WAR
WAR! The news caught at the heart of the
world, and stopped it.
For a time the whole business structure of
every nation on earth trembled, threatened to
crumble into ruin, under this weight, to which
it had been building from the beginning.
Greed, grasping selfishness, a policy of "each
man for himself, against other men," these are
the foundations on which nations have built up
their commercial, social, industrial success. These
are the things which always have led, and always
will lead, to war, to the destruction of those struc
tures they have built.
Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia,
England, Japan, Turkey, Italy one by one they
crashed down into the general wreck. Every
thing good that the centuries had made was bur
ied in the debris. The world rocked under the
shock.
Here in America we read the reports in dazed
incredulity. It could not be possible, it could not
be possible, we said to each other with white lips
in this age, now, to-day
For, living as most of us do, on the surface of
173
174 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
things, among our friends, in an atmosphere of
kindliness and helpfulness, we had been cheer
fully unconcerned about the foundations of our
economic and industrial life.
In the winter there are thousands of unem
ployed men <we try to give each one a bowl of
soup, a place to sleep. Our street corners are
unpleasantly infested with beggars we pass an
ordinance, arrest them for vagrancy, feed them
a few days and order them to leave town. The
city is full of criminals what are the police do
ing ? we inquire testily. We build another prison,
erect another gallows.
We are like an architect who, seeing threaten
ing cracks in the walls of the building, would hur
riedly fill them with putty and add another story.
Henry Ford read the news from Europe. He
saw there a purposeless, useless and waste of
everything valuable. He saw a machine, wrongly
built for centuries so that each part would work
against all the other parts, suddenly set in mo
tion and wrecking itself.
It was a repetition, on a larger scale, of a ca
tastrophe with which he had been familiar in the
business world. How many companies in his
own field had been organized in the early days of
the industry, had gone into business with the one
purpose of getting all they could from every one,
workers, stockholders, buyers and had gone
down in ruin ! Only those companies which had
been built on some basis of fair service had sue-
THE EUROPEAN WAR 175
ceeded, and these had done so in proportion to
their real value to others. Whether or not this
principle is recognized by those who profit from
it, it is the fundamental principle on which busi
ness success is built.
"The trouble is that people do not see that,"
said Ford. "A man goes into business from
purely selfish motives; he works for himself, and
against every one else, as far as he can. But
only so far as his grasping selfishness really works
out in benefit to other people he succeeds. If
he knew that, if he went to work deliberately to
help other people, he would do more good, and at
the same time he would make a bigger success for
himself.
"But instead of that, he gets more and more
selfish. When he has got a lot of money, and be
comes a real power, he uses his power selfishly.
He thinks it is his grasping policy that has made
him successful. Why, everything I ever did
selfishly in my life has come back like a boom
erang and hurt me more than it hurt any one
else, and the same way with everything I have
done to help others. It helps me in the end every
time. It is bound to. As long as a machine runs,
anything that is really good for one part is good
for the whole machine.
"Look at those fighting nations. Every one
of them is hurting itself as much as it hurts the
enemy. Their success was founded on the fact
that they have helped each other. England got
1 76 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
her dyes and her tools and her toys from Ger
many; Germany got her wheat from Russia, and
her fruits and olives from Italy ; Turkey got her
ships from England. They were all helping each
other. Their real interests the comfort and
happiness of their people were all one interest.
"Left to themselves, the real German people
would never fight the French people, never in the
world. No more than Iowa would fight Michi
gan. Race differences? They do not exist in
sufficient degree to make men fight, and they are
disappearing every day. See how the races mix
in America! I have fifty-three nationalities,
speaking more than one hundred different lan
guages and dialects, in my shops, and they never
have any trouble. They realize that their in
terests are all the same.
"What is the root of the whole question? The
real interests of all men are the same work,
food and shelter, and happiness. When they all
work together for those, every one will have
plenty.
"What do people fight for? Does fighting
make more jobs, better homes, more to eat? No.
People fight because they are taught that the only
way to get these things is to take them from
some one else. The common people, the people
who lose most by fighting, don t know what they
are fighting for. They fight because they are
told to. What do they get out of it? Disgust,
THE EUROPEAN WAR 177
shame, grief, wounds, death, ruin, starvation.
War is the most hideous waste in the world."
In the first terrible months of the war the
American people, in horror, echoed that opinion.
With the spectacle of half the world in bloody
ruins before our eyes, we recoiled. We thanked
God that our country remained sane. We saw a
vision of America, after the madness had passed,
helping to bind up the wounds of Europe, help
ing to make a permanent peace which should
bring the people of the earth together in one fra
ternity.
By degrees that feeling began to change. We
want peace. Are there a hundred men among
our hundred million who will say they want war
for war s sake? We want peace but We
have begun to ask that old question, "Is it prac
tical?" That vision of the people of the world
working together, increasing their own happiness
and comfort by helping to make happiness and
comfort for each other it is a beautiful theory,
but is it not a bit sentimental? a bit visionary?
just a little too good to be true?
"Here is a world where war happens," we
say. "If a war should happen to us what would
we do? Let us begin to prepare for war. Let
us take war into our calculations. Let us be
practical."
And Henry Ford, reading the papers, listen
ing to the talk of the men in the streets, saw the
object lesson of his great organization disre-
178 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
garded. He heard again the objection which had
met every step of his life. "It is a good idea,
but it is theoretical. It is not practical. It will not
work. Things never have done that way." He
saw this country, already wasting incalculable
human energy, destroying innumerable lives
daily, because of a "practical" system of organi
zation, preparing to drain off still more energy,
still greater wealth, in preparation for a still more
terrible waste.
The dearest principle of his life, the principle
whose truth he had proven through a life of hard
work, was in danger of being swept away and
forgotten.
CHAPTER XXX
THE BEST PREPAREDNESS
HENRY FORD saw that the meaning 1 of his
work was about to be lost. He was in for the
greatest fight of his life.
He counted his resources. The mammoth fac
tory was still running to capacity, the farm-
tractors, which would mean so much in increased
production of food, in greater comforts for mil
lions of farmers, were almost ready to be put on
the market. His plan for profit-sharing with the
buyers of his cars had recently been announced.
Three hundred thousand men in this country
would have, during 1915, an actual proof in dol
lars and cents of the practical value of coopera
tion, of Ford s principle" that "helping the other
fellow will help you." Those men would share
with him the profit which would add still more
millions to his credit.
Ford had these things; he had also a tre
mendous fortune at his command. He cast about
for \vays of using that fortune in this fight, and
again the uselessness of money was impressed
upon him.
"Money is of no real value whatever/ he says.
"What can I do with it now? I cannot pay a
179
i8o HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
man enough to make him change his real opin
ions. The only real resource this country has
now is the intelligence of our people. They must
think right, they must know the true principles
on which to build a great, strong nation.
"They must hold firm to the big, true things,
and realize some way they must be MADE to
realize that they are practical, that ideals are
the only practical things in this world.
"It is to everybody s interest to do right. Not
in the next world, nor in a spiritual way only,
but in good, hard dollars-and-cents business
value.
"Let s be practical. Suppose we do prepare for
war? Suppose we do take the energies of our
young men and spend them in training for war.
Our country needs the whole energy of every man
in productive work, work that will make more
food, more clothing, better houses. But suppose
we turn that energy from real uses, train it to
destroy, instead of to create? Suppose we have
half a million young men ready to fight? What
weapons shall we give them ?
"Shall we give them guns? They will be out
of date. Shall we give them poisonous gases,
or disease germs, or shall we invent something
even more horrible? As fast as we make these
things, other nations will make worse ones.
"Shall we turn our factories into munition
plants ? Shall we build dreadnoughts ? The sub
marine destroys them. Shall we build sub-
THE BEST PREPAREDNESS 181
marines ? Other nations will make submarine-
destroyers. Shall we build submarine destroy
ers? Other nations will build war-aeroplanes to
destroy them. We must make something worse
than the aeroplanes, and something worse still,
and then something still more horrible, bidding
senselessly up and up and up, spending millions
on millions, trying to outdo other nations which
are trying to outdo us.
"For if we begin to prepare for war we must
not stop. We can not stop. I read articles in the
magazines saying that we might as well have no
navy at all as the one we have; that we might
as well have no army as the army we have, if
this country should be invaded. Yet we have
already spent millions on that army and that
navy. Let us spend millions more, and more
millions, and more, and still, unless we keep on
spending more than any other nation can spend,
we might as well have no army or navy at all.
"And yet there are people who think that to
begin such a course is practical, is good com
mon sense!
"I tell you, the only real strength of a nation
is the spirit of its people. The only real, prac
tical value in the world is the spirit of the people
of the world. There were animals on the earth
ages ago who could kill a hundred men with one
sweep of a paw, but they are gone, and we sur
vive. Why? Because men have minds, because
1 82 HENRY FORD S OWN STORY
they use their minds in doing useful things, mak
ing food, and clothes, and shelters.
"A few hundred years ago no man was safe
on the street alone at night. No woman was
safe unless she had a man with her who was
strong enough to kill other men. We have
changed all that. How ? By force ? No, because
we have learned in a small degree that there are
things better than force. We have learned that
to look out for the interests of every one in
our community is best for us in the end.
"Let us realize that to think of the welfare of
the whole world is best for each one of us. We
do not carry a gun so that if we meet an Eng
lishman on the street and he attacks us we can
kill him. We know he does not want to kill us.
"We know that the real people of the whole
world do not want war. We do not want war.
There are only a few people who think they want
war the politicians, the rulers, the Big Busi
ness men, who think they can profit by it. War
injures everybody else, and in the end it injures
them, too.
"The way to handle the war question is not to
waste more and more human energy in getting
ready to hurt the other fellow. We must get
down to the foundations ; we must realize that
the interests of all the people are one, and that
what hurts one hurts us all.
"We must know that, and we must have the
courage to act on it. A nation of a hundred mil-
THE BEST PREPAREDNESS 183
lion people, of all nationalities and races, we must
work together, each of us doing what he can for
the best good of the whole. Then we can show
Europe, when at last her crippled people drag
themselves back to their ruined homes, that a
policy of peace and hopefulness does pay, that
it is practical.
"We can show them that we do mean to help
them. They will believe it, if we do not say it
behind a gun.
"If we carry a gun, we must depend on the
gun to save our nation. We must frankly say
that we believe in force and nothing else. We
must admit that human brotherhood and ideals
of mutual good will and helpfulness are sec
ondary to power and willingness to commit mur
der; that only a murderer at heart can afford to
have them. We must abandon every principle on
which our country was founded, every inch of
progress we have made since men were frankly
beasts.
"But if our country is not to go down as all
nations have gone before her, depending on force
and destroyed by force, we must build on a firm
foundation. We must build on our finest, big
gest instincts. We must go fearlessly ahead,
not looking back, and put our faith in the things
which endure, and which have grown stronger
through every century of history.
"Democracy, every man s right to comfort and
plenty and happiness, human brotherhood, mu-
1 84 HENRY FORD S OWN STORx
tual helpfulness these are the real, practical
things. These are the things on which we can
build, surely and firmly. These are the things
which will last. These are the things which will
pay.
"I have proved them over and over again in
my own life. Other men, so far as they have
trusted themjjiave proved them. America has
built on thenffne richest, most successful nation
in the world to-day. Just so far as we continue
to trust them, to build on them, we will continue
to be prosperous and successful.
"I know this. If my life has taught me any
thing at all, it has taught me that. I will spend
every ounce of energy I have, every hour of my
life, in the effort to prove it to other people.
Only so far as we all believe it, only so far as
we all use our strength and our abilities, not to
hurt, but to help, other peoples, will we help our
selves/
This is the end of my story, and the beginning
of Henry Ford s biggest fight,
THE END
RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
TO ^- 202 Main Library
LOAN PERIOD 1
HOME USE
2
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ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS
1-month leans T>ay be ^newed by casing 642-3406
1-year loans may be recharged b> bringing the books fo the Circulc
Renewals and rechatfles may be made 4 days prior to due date
DUE AS STAMPED BELOW
NOV 6 1984
: i - : : :
ber,(>
,"\ r -,
RECEIVEI
I BY
NOV 1 3 1!
J84
QCn v
CIRCULATION
SSS* * 3 %
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"HFUI 1390
JUN ^6 !"";
MAY 2 2 J
KAY 21 K
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fAPR 6 ?0
MAR 28 1992
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKI
FORM NO. DD6, 60m, 1/83 BERKELEY, CA 94720
U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
