HENRY FORD

HENRY FORD’S OWN STORY

How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power

That Goes With Many Millions

Yet Never Lost Touch

With Humanity

AS TOLD TO

ROSE WILDER LANE

ELLIS O. JONES

FOREST HILLS NEW YORK CITY

1917

Copyright, 1915, by

THE BULLETIN

Copyright, 1917, by

ELLIS O. JONES

All rights reserved, including that of translation

into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian

FOREWORD

BY ROSE WILDER LANE

Fifty-two years ago[^[1]] 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. Sometimes he worked all night there. The neighbors saw the light burning through the cracks.

Twelve years ago half a dozen men in Detroit were actually driving the Ford automobile about the streets. Ford had started a small factory, with a dozen mechanics, and was buying material. It was freely predicted that the venture would never come to much.

Last year—January, 1914—America was startled by an announcement from the Ford factory that ten million dollars would be divided among the eighteen thousand employees as their share of the company’s profits. Henry Ford was a multimillionaire, and America regarded him with awe.

Mankind must have its hero. The demand for him is more insistent than hunger, more inexorable than cold or fear. Before a race builds houses or prepares food with its hands, it creates in its mind that demigod, that superman, standing on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, more admirable, more powerful than the others. We must have him as a symbol of something greater than ourselves, to keep alive in us that faith in life which is threatened by our own experience of living.

He is at once our greatest solace and our worst enemy. We cling to him as a child clings to a guiding hand, unable to walk without it, and never able to walk alone until it is let go. Every advance of democracy destroys our old hero, and hastily we build up another. When science has exorcised Jove, and real estate promoters have subdivided the Olympian heights, we desert the old altars to kneel before thrones. When our kings have been cast down from their high places by our inconsistent struggles for liberty, we cannot leave those high places empty. We found a government on the bold declaration, “All men are born free and equal,” but we do not believe it. Out of the material at hand we must create again our great ones.

So, with the growth of Big Business during the last quarter of a century, we have built up the modern myth of the Big Business Man.

Our imaginations are intrigued by the spectacle of his rise from our ranks. Yesterday he was a farmer’s son, an office boy, a peddler of Armenian laces. 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 lifetime he has made himself a world power; in twenty years he has made a hundred million dollars, we say. He is a Big Business Man.

Our tendency was immediately to put Henry Ford in that class. He does not belong to it. He is not a Big Business Man; he is a big man in business.

It is not strange, with this belief of millions of persons that the men who 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 assumption. Henry Ford does not. His greatness lies in that.

With millions piling upon millions in our hands, most of us would lose our viewpoint. He has kept his—a plain mechanic’s outlook on life and human relations. He sees men all as parts of a great machine, in which every waste motion, every broken or inefficient part means a loss to the whole.

“Money doesn’t do me any good,” he says. “I can’t spend it on myself. Money has no value, anyway. It is merely a transmitter, like electricity. I try to keep it moving as fast as I can, for the best 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, the same way.”

The story of Henry Ford is the story of his coming to that conclusion, and of his building up an annual business of one hundred and fifty million dollars based upon it.

CONTENTS

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 300-acre farm was well cared for, yielding richly every year; his cattle were fat and sleek, his big red barns the best filled in the neighborhood. He was not the man to let ten acres of good timothy-and-clover hay get caught in a summer shower and spoil.

They put the big hay-rack on the wagon, threw in the stone water jugs, filled with cool water from the well near the kitchen door, and drove out to the meadow. One imagines them working there, lifting great 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 swallows from the water jugs, hidden, for coolness, under a mound of hay. Then, with a look at the sky, they took up their forks.

William Ford worked with the others, doing a good day’s task with the best of them, and proud of it. He was the owner, and they were the hired men, but on a Michigan farm the measure of a man is the part he takes in man’s work. In the cities, where men work against men, let them build up artificial distinctions; on the farm the fight is against nature, and men stand shoulder to shoulder in it. A dark cloud was coming up in the northwest, and every man’s muscles leaped to the need for getting in the hay.

Suddenly they heard a clang from the great bell, hung high on a post in the home dooryard, and used only for calling in the men at dinnertime 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 William Ford dropped his fork.

“I’ll go. Get in the hay!” he called back, already 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 changed to a light drizzle and the clouds broke. Later William Ford came out of the house and crossed the soppy yard. He was grinning a little. It was all right, he said—a boy.

I believe they had up a jug of sweet cider from the cellar in honor of the occasion. I know that when they apologetically mentioned the spoiled hay he laughed heartily and asked what they supposed he cared about the hay.

“What’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, wholesome Holland Dutch wife. While he was still in pinafores, tumbling about the house or making daring excursions into the barnyard, the stronghold of the dreadful turkey gobbler, his sister, Margaret, was born, and Henry had barely been promoted to real trousers, at the age of four, when another brother arrived.

Four babies, to be bathed, clothed, taught, loved and guarded from all the childish disasters to be encountered about the farm, might well be thought enough to fill any woman’s mind and hands, but there were a thousand additional tasks for the mistress of that large household.

There was milk to skim, butter and cheese to make, poultry and garden to be tended, patchwork quilts to sew, and later to fasten into the quilting frames and stitch by hand in herringbone 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 order” so dear to the pride of the Michigan farmers’ women-folk.

All these tasks Mary Ford did, or superintended, efficiently, looking to the ways of her household with all the care and pride her husband had in managing the farm. She found time, too, to be neighborly, to visit her friends, care for one of them who fell ill, help any one in the little community who needed it. And always she watched over the health and manners of the children.

In this environment Henry grew. He was energetic, interested in everything, from the first. His misadventures in conquering the turkey gobbler 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 interview 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 blacksmith work for the farm was done and the sharpening of tools. When the weather was bad outside his father or one of the men lighted the charcoal in the forge and Henry might pull the bellows 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 allowed to try it himself, just once. In time he was given a small hammer of his own.

So the years passed until Henry was 11 years old, and then a momentous event occurred—small enough in itself, but to this day one of the keenest memories of his childhood.

CHAPTER II
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 Episcopalians, and Henry was reared in that faith, although both then and later he showed little enthusiasm for church-going.

Sitting through the long service in the stuffy little church, uncomfortably conscious of his Sunday-best garments, sternly forbidden to “fidget,” while outside were all the sights and sounds of a country spring must have seemed a wanton waste of time to small Henry. To this day he has not greatly changed that opinion.

“Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working,” he says. “I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell. 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.” To cramp his joyously liberated toes again into stuffy, leather shoes seemed to him an outrage. He resented his white collar, too, and the immaculate little suit his mother cautioned him to keep clean. He was not sullen about it. He merely remarked frankly that he hated their old Sunday, anyhow, and wished never to see another.

Mother and father and the four children set out for church as usual. At the hitching posts, where William Ford tied the horses before going 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 hurried to see what it might be. It was a watch, a real watch, as large and shiny as his father’s. Henry looked at it with 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 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 dazzling 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 accompaniment of an agonized protest from Will; the cogs fell apart, the springs unwound. Altogether it was a beautiful disorder, enough to delight any small boy.

“Now look what you’ve went and done!” cried Will, torn between natural emotion over the disaster to his watch and admiration of Henry’s daring.

“Well, you SAID you was goin’ ta put it together,” he reminded that experimenter many times in the next few hours.

Dinner time came, and Will, recalling the fried chicken, dumplings, puddings, cakes, of the Sunday dinner, grew more than restless, but Henry held him there by the sheer force of his enthusiasm. The afternoon wore along, and he was still investigating those fascinating gears and springs.

When at last outraged parental authority descended upon the boys, Henry’s Sunday clothes were a wreck, his hands and face were grimy, but he had correctly replaced most of the screws, and he passionately declared that if they would only leave him alone he would have the watch running in no time.

Family discipline was strict in those days. Undoubtedly Henry was punished, but he does not recall that now. What he does remember vividly is the passion for investigating clocks and watches that followed. In a few months he had taken apart and put together every 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 horses, learned to milk and chop kindling. He recalls that his principal objection to such work was that it was always interrupting some interesting occupation he had discovered for himself in the shop. He liked to handle tools, to make something. The chores were an endless repetition of the same task, with no concrete object created.

In the winter he went to the district school, walking two miles and back every day through the snow, and enjoying it. He did not care for school especially, although he got fair marks in his studies, and was given to helping other boys “get their problems.” Arithmetic was easy for him. His mind was already developing its mechanical trend.

“I always stood well with the teacher,” he says with a twinkle. “I found things ran more smoothly that way.” He was not the boy to create unnecessary friction in his human relations, finding it as wasteful of energy there as it would have been in any of the mechanical contrivances he made. He “got along pretty well” with 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 something to show for time spent. Swimming, skating and the like were all very well until he had thoroughly learned them, but why keep on after that? Henry wanted to do something else then. And as for spending a whole afternoon batting a ball around, that seemed to him a foolish occupation.

Accordingly, he constructed a working forge in the schoolyard, and he and his crowd spent every recess and noon during one autumn working at it. There, with the aid of a blow-pipe, they melted every bottle and 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 schoolhouse, and by organizing the other boys into regular gangs, with a subforeman for each, accomplished the task so thoroughly and quickly that he had flooded two acres of potatoes before an outraged farmer knew what was happening.

But these occupations, absorbing enough for the time being, did not fill his imagination. Henry already dreamed of bigger things. He meant, some day, to be a locomotive engineer. When he saw the big, black engines roaring across the Michigan 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 and neck in the swimming pool, scratched his bare legs on blackberry briars. He learned how to drive horses, how to handle a hay fork or a hoe, how to sharpen and repair the farm tools. The “shop” was the most interesting part of the farm to him; it was there he invented and manufactured a device for opening and closing the farm gates without getting down from the wagon.

Then, when he was 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 pathetic attempt, that effort of the big, hardworking farmer to take a mother’s place to the four children.

For a time a married aunt came in and managed the household, but she was needed in her own home and soon went back to it. Then Margaret, Henry’s youngest sister, took charge, and tried to keep the house in order and superintend the work of “hired girls” older than herself. She was “capable”—that good New England word so much more expressive than “efficient”—but no one could take Mary Ford’s place in that home.

There was now nothing to hold Henry on the farm. He had learned how to do the farm work, and the little attraction it had had for him was gone; thereafter every task was merely a repetition. His father did not need his help; there were always the hired men. I suppose any need William Ford may have felt for the companionship of his second son was unexpressed. In matters of emotion the family is not demonstrative.

The boy had exhausted the possibilities of the farm shop. His last work in it was the building of a small steam-engine. For this, helped partly by pictures, partly by his boyish ingenuity, he made his own patterns, his own castings, did his own machine work.

His material was bits of old iron, pieces of wagon tires, stray teeth from harrows—anything and everything from the scrap pile in the shop which he could utilize in any imaginable way. When the engine was finished Henry mounted it on an improvised chassis which he had cut down from an old farm wagon, attached it by a direct drive to a wheel on one side, something like a locomotive connecting-rod, and capped the 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 machines he longed to handle.

Early the next spring, when the snow had melted, and every breeze that blew across the fields was an invitation to begin something new, Henry started to school as usual one morning, and did not return.

Detroit is only a few miles from Greenfield. Henry made the journey on the train that morning, and while his family supposed him at school and the teacher was marking a matter-of-fact “absent” after his name, he had already 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 before, but now it seemed stern and busy—a little too busy, perhaps, to waste much attention on a country boy of sixteen looking for a job.

Nevertheless, he whistled cheerfully enough to himself, and started briskly through the crowds. He knew what he wanted, and he was going straight for it.

“I always knew I would get what I went after,” he says. “I don’t recall having any very great doubts or fears.”

At that time the shop of James Flower and Company, manufacturers of steam engines and steam engine appliances, was one of Detroit’s largest factories. Over one hundred men were employed there, and their output was one to be pointed to with pride by boastful citizens.

Henry Ford’s nerves, healthy and steady as they were, tingled with excitement when he entered the place. He had read of it, and had even seen a picture of it, but now he beheld for himself its size and the great number of machines and men. This was something big, he said to himself.

After a moment he asked a man working near where he could find the foreman.

“Over there—the big fellow in the red shirt,” the man replied. Henry hurried over and asked for a job.

The foreman looked at him and saw a slight, wiry country boy who wanted work. There was nothing remarkable about him, one supposes. The foreman did not perceive immediately, after one look into his steady eye, that this was no ordinary lad, as foremen so frequently do in fiction. Instead, he looked Henry over, asked him a question or two, remembered that a big order had just come in and he was short of hands.

“Well, come to work to-morrow. I’ll see what you can do,” he said. “Pay you two and a half a week.”

“All right, sir,” Henry responded promptly, but the foreman had already turned his back and forgotten him. Henry, almost doubtful of his good fortune, hurried away before the foreman should change his mind.

Outside in the sunshine he pushed his cap on the back of his head, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, jingling the silver in one of them, and walked down the street, whistling. The world looked like a good place to him. No more farming for Henry Ford. He was a machinist now, with a job in the James Flower shops.

Before him there unrolled a bright future. He was ambitious; he did not intend always to remain a mechanic. One day when he had learned all there was to know about the making of steam engines, he intended to drive one himself. He would be a locomotive engineer, nothing less.

Meantime there were practical questions of food and shelter to consider immediately and he was not the boy to waste time 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 consent to board a healthy sixteen-year-old mechanic for that sum. It was late that afternoon before he found one who, after some hesitation, agreed to do it. Then he looked at the small, dirty room she showed him, at her untidy, slatternly person, and decided that he would not live there. He came out into the street again.

Henry was facing the big problem. How was he to live on an income too small? Apparently his mind went, with the precision of a machine, directly to the answer.

“When your reasonable expenses exceed your income, increase your income.” Simple. He knew that after he had finished his day’s work at the shops there would be a margin of several hours a day left to him. He would have to turn them into money. That was all.

He returned to a clean boarding house he had visited earlier in the day, paid three dollars and a half in advance for one week’s board, and ate a hearty supper. Then he went to bed.

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 independence Henry had taken no one into his confidence, but late that night his father returned with information that he had been seen taking the train for Detroit.

William Ford knew his son. When he found that Henry had left of his own accord he told Margaret 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 Detroit to look for him.

Those two days had been full of interest for Henry. He found that his hours in the machine shop were from seven in the morning to six at night, with no idle moments in any of them. He helped at the forges, made castings, assembled parts. He was happy. There were no chores or school to interrupt his absorption in machinery. Every hour he learned something new about steam engines. When the closing whistle blew and the men dropped their tools he was sorry to quit.

Still, there was that extra dollar a week to be made somehow. As soon as he had finished supper the first night he hurried out to look for an evening job. It never occurred to him to work at anything other than machinery. He was a machine “fan,” just as some boys 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 family clock. He hunted up a jeweler and asked him for night work. Then he hunted up another, and another. None of them needed an assistant. When the 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. Knowing Henry’s interests, William Ford had begun his search by inquiring for the boy in Detroit’s machine shops.

He spoke to the foreman and took Henry outside. There was an argument. William Ford, backed by the force of parental authority, declared sternly that the place for Henry was in school. Henry, with two days’ experience 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 argument. He must have been an unusually reasonable father, for the time and place. It would have been a simple matter to lead Henry home by the ear and keep him there until he ran away again, and in 1878 most Michigan fathers in his situation would have done it.

“Well, you know where your home is any time you want to come back to it,” he said finally, and went back to the farm.

Henry was now definitely on his own resources. With urgent need for that extra dollar a week weighing more heavily on his mind every day, he spent his evenings searching for night work. Before the time arrived to pay his second week’s board he had found a jeweler who was willing to pay him two dollars a week for four hours’ work every night.

The arrangement left Henry with a dollar a week for spending money. This was embarrassing riches.

“I never did figure out how to spend the whole of that dollar,” he says. “I really had no use for it. My board and lodging were paid and the clothes I had were good enough for the shop. I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid—can’t squander it on myself without hurting myself, and nobody wants to do that. Money is the most useless thing in the world, anyhow.”

His life now settled into a routine eminently satisfactory to him—a routine that lasted for nine months. From seven in the morning to six at night in the machine shop, from seven to eleven in the evening at work with a microscope, repairing and assembling watches, then home to bed for a good six hours’ sleep, and back to work again.

Day followed day, exactly alike, except that every one of them taught him something about machines—either steam engines or watches. He went to bed, rose, ate, worked on a regular schedule, following the same route—the shortest one—from the boarding-house to the shops, to the jeweler’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.

Few boys of sixteen could endure a routine so exacting in its demands on strength and endurance without destroying their health, but Henry Ford had the one trait common to all men of achievement—an apparently inexhaustible energy. His active, out-of-door boyhood had stored up physical reserves of it; his one direct interest gave him his mental supply. He wanted to learn about machines; that was all he wanted. He was never distracted by other impulses or tastes.

“Recreation? No, I had no recreation; I didn’t want it,” he says. “What’s the value of recreation, anyhow? It’s just waste time. I got my fun out of my work.”

He was obsessed by his one idea.

In a few months he had mastered all the intricate details of building steam engines. The mammoth shop of James Flower & Co., with its great force of a hundred mechanics, became familiar to him; it shrank from the huge proportions it had at first assumed in his eyes. He began to see imperfections in its system and to be annoyed by them.

“See here,” he said one day to the man who worked beside him. “Nothing’s ever made twice alike in this place. We waste a lot of time and material assembling these engines. That piston rod’ll have to be made over; it won’t fit the cylinder.”

“Oh, well, I guess we do the best we can,” the other man said. “It won’t take long to fit it.” It was the happy-go-lucky method of factories in the seventies.

Men were shifted from job to job to 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 corners of the shop. A piece of work was abandoned half finished in order to make up time on another order, delayed by some accident. By to-day’s standards it was a veritable helter-skelter, from which the finished machines somehow emerged, at a fearful cost in wasted time and labor.

When Henry was switched from one piece of work to another, taken from his job to help some other workman, or sent to get a needed tool that was missing, he knew that his time was being wasted. His thrifty instincts resented it. With his mind full of pictures of smoothly running, exactly adjusted machines, he knew there was something wrong with the way the 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 concerned, 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 began 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 customary. Efficiency experts, waste-motion experiments, mass production—in a word, the machine idea applied to human beings was unheard of then.

Henry knew there was something wrong. He did not like to work there any longer. Two weeks after the additional fifty cents had been added to his pay envelope he left the James Flower Company. He had got a job with the Drydock Engine works, manufacturers of marine machinery. His pay was two dollars and a half a week.

To the few men who knew him he probably seemed a discontented boy who did not know when he was well off. If any of them took the trouble to advise him, they probably said he would do better to stay with a good thing while he had it than to change around aimlessly.

He was far from being a boy who needed that advice. Without knowing it, he had found the one thing he was to follow all his life—not machines merely, but the machine idea. He went to work for the 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 problems, his natural liking for human companionship 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-thinking and ambitious, as most mechanics are. After the day’s work was finished they rushed through the wide doors into the street, with a whoop of delight in the outdoor air, jostling each other, playing practical jokes, enjoying a little rough horseplay among themselves. In the evenings they wandered about the streets in couples, arms carelessly thrown over each other’s shoulders, commenting on things they saw. They learned every inch of the 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 energy of his followers into his own channels.

Pursuits that had interested them seemed to him a waste of time and strength. He did not smoke—his tentative attempt with hay-cigarettes in his boyhood had discouraged that permanently—he did not drink, and girls seemed to him unutterably stupid.

“I have never tasted liquor in my life,” he says. “I’d as soon think of taking any other poison.”

Undoubtedly his opinion is right, but one is inclined to doubt the accuracy of his memory. In those early days in Detroit he must have experimented at least once with the effects of liquor on the human system; probably once would have been sufficient. Besides, about that time he developed an interest so strong that it not only absorbed his own attention, but carried that of his friends along with it.

He bought a watch. It had taken him only a few months to master his task in the drydock works so thoroughly that his wages were raised. Later they were raised again. Then he was getting five dollars a week, more than enough to pay his expenses, without night work. He left the jeweler’s shop, but he brought with him a watch, the first he had ever owned.

Immediately he took it to pieces. When 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 production at the James Flower Company. He reasoned that probably that watch factory had turned out only a few hundred of that design, and then tried something else—alarm clocks, perhaps. The parts had been made by the dozen, some of them had probably been filed down by hand, to make them fit.

Then he got the great idea. A factory—a gigantic factory, running with the precision of a machine, turning out watches by the thousands and tens of thousands—watches all exactly alike, every part cut by an exact 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 thousands of dollars as though they were pennies. The size of the sums did not stagger him, because money was never concrete to him—it was merely rows of figures—but to the young fellows who listened his talk was dazzling.

They joined enthusiastically in the scheme. Then their evenings became merely so much time to spend up in Ford’s room, figuring estimates and discussing plans.

The watch could be made for thirty-seven cents, provided machinery turned it out by tens of thousands. Henry Ford visualized the factory—a factory devoted to one thing, the making of ONE watch—specialized, concentrated, with no waste energy. Those eager young men planned the whole thing from furnaces to assembling rooms.

They figured the cost of material by the hundred tons, estimated the exact proportions each metal required; they planned an output of 2,000 watches daily as the point at which cost of production would be cheapest. They would sell the watch for fifty cents, and guarantee it for one year. Two thousand watches at a profit of thirteen cents each—$260 daily profit! They were dazzled.

“We needn’t stop there—we can increase that output when we get started,” Henry Ford declared. “Organization will do it. Lack of organization keeps prices up, for its cost must be charged in on the selling price; and high prices keep sales down. We will work it the other way; low prices, increased sales, increased output, lower prices. It works 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 for the machines he planned and cut dies for making the different parts of the watch.

His plan was complete—a gigantic machine, taking in bars of steel at one end, and turning out completed watches at the other—hundreds of thousands of cheap watches, all alike—the Ford watch!

“I tell you there’s a fortune in it—a fortune!” the young fellows in the scheme exclaimed to each other.

“All we need now is the capital,” Ford decided at last.

He was turning his mind to the problem of getting it, when he received a letter from his sister Margaret. His father had been injured in an accident; his older brother was ill. Couldn’t he come home for a while? They needed him.

CHAPTER VI
BACK TO THE FARM

The letter from home must have come like a dash of cold water on Henry’s enthusiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future, planning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead. It has always been his instinct to do just that.

“You can’t run anything on precedents if you want to make a success,” he says to-day. “We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past.”

Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter—the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one.

There was never any real question as to the outcome. The machine-idea has been the controlling factor in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to each other, 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 future just ahead, on the other his father’s need of him. He went home.

He intended at the time to stay only until his father was well again—perhaps for a month or so, surely not longer than one summer. The plans for the watch factory were not abandoned, they were only laid aside temporarily. It would be possible to run up to Detroit for a day or two now and then, and keep on working on plans for getting together the necessary capital.

But no business on earth is harder to leave than the business of running a farm. When Henry reached home he found a dozen fields needing immediate action. The corn had been neglected, already weeds were springing up between the rows; in the house his father was fretting because 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, harvesting, setting the pace for the others to follow, as an owner must do on a farm. He was learning, so thoroughly that he never forgot it, the art of managing men without losing the democratic feeling of being one of them.

In the mornings he was up before daylight, and out to the 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, driving down the farm lanes to the fields, while the sun rose, and the meadows, sparkling with dew, scented the air with clover.

The sun rose higher, pouring its heat down upon them as they worked, and a shrill, whirring noise rose from all the tiny insects in the grass, a note like the voice of the heat. Coats and vests came off, and were tossed in the fence corners; sleeves were rolled up, shirts opened wide at the neck.

“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, stopping gladly enough when the great bell clanged out the welcome news that Margaret and the girls had prepared the huge dinner their appetites demanded.

In the afternoons Henry, on the little gray mare, rode to the far fields for a diplomatic, authoritative word with the men plowing there, or perhaps he went a little farther, and bargained with the next neighbor for a likely looking yearling heifer.

Then back at night to the big farm-yard, where the cows must be milked, the horses watered, fed and everything made comfortable and safe for the night.

It was a very different life from that in the machine shop, and Henry Ford thought, when he pored over his mechanic journals by the sitting-room lamp in the evenings, that he was wasting precious time. But he was learning a great many things he would find useful later.

Margaret Ford was by this time a healthy, attractive young woman, with all the affairs of the household and dairy well in hand. The social affairs of the community began to center around her. In the evenings the young men of the neighborhood rode over to propose picnics and hay-rides; after church on Sundays a dozen young people would come trooping out to the farm with her, and Margaret would put a white apron over her best dress and serve a big country dinner.

They had a rollicking time in the grassy front yards afterwards, or out in the orchard when the plums were ripe. Late in the afternoon they separated somehow into pairs, as young people will do, and walked the three miles to church for the evening services.

It may be imagined that the girls of the neighborhood were interested when Henry appeared in church again, now a good-looking young man of twenty-one, back from the city. The social popularity of the Ford place must have increased considerably. On this point Ford is discreetly silent, but it does not require any great effort of fancy to see him as he must have looked then, through the eyes of the Greenfield girls, an alert, muscular fellow, with a droll humor and a whimsical smile. Moreover, the driver of the finest horses in the neighborhood, and one of the heirs to the big farm.

However, he is outspoken enough about his own attitude. He did not care for girls.

Like most men with a real interest, he kept for a long time the small boy opinion of them. “Girls?—huh! What are they good for?”

He was interested in machines. He wanted to get back to Detroit, where he could take up again his plans for that mammoth watch factory.

In a few weeks he had brought the farm up to its former running order, the crops were doing well and the hired men had learned that there was a boss at the head of affairs. Henry had a little more time to spend in the shop. He found in one corner of it the absurd steam engine he had built five years before, and one day he started it up and ran it around the yard.

It was a weird-looking affair, the high wagon wheels warped and wobbly, the hybrid engine on top sputtering and wheezing and rattling, but none the less running, in a cloud of smoke and sparks. He had a hearty laugh at it and abandoned it.

His father grew better slowly, but week by week Henry was approaching the time when he could return to the work he liked.

Late summer came with all the work of getting in the crops. The harvest crew arrived from the next farm, twenty men of them, and Henry was busy in the fields from morning to night. When, late in October, the last work of the summer was done and the fields lay bare and brown, waiting for the snow, Margaret Ford gave a great harvest supper with a quilting bee in the afternoon and corn husking in the evening.

All the neighbors came from miles around. The big barns were crowded with their horses and rows of them were tied under the sheds. In the house the quilting frames were spread in the big attic, and all afternoon the women sewed and talked. In the evening the men arrived and then the long supper table was spread with Margaret’s cooking—hams, sausages, fried chickens, a whole roast pig, pans of beans and succotash, huge loaves of home-made bread, pats of butter, cheese, cakes, pies, puddings, doughnuts, pitchers of milk and cider—good things which disappeared fast enough before the plying knives and forks, in bursts of laughter, while jokes were called from end to end of the table and young couples blushed under the chaffing of their neighbors.

Clara Bryant was one of the guests. Her father was a prosperous farmer who lived eight miles from the Ford place and Henry had scarcely seen her that summer. That night they sat side by side and he noticed the red in her cheeks and the way she laughed.

After supper there was corn husking in the big barn, where each young man tried to find the red ears that gave him permission to kiss one of the girls, and still later they danced on the floor of the hay-barn while the fiddler called the figures of the old square dances and the lanterns cast a flickering light on the dusty mounds of hay.

The next week Henry might have returned to Detroit and to the waiting project of the watch factory, but he did not. He thought of Clara Bryant and realized that his prejudice against girls was unreasonable.

CHAPTER VII
THE ROAD TO 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 machine shops. The plans for the watch factory, never wholly abandoned, might be carried out.

But Henry stayed at home on the farm. Gradually it became apparent to the neighborhood that Ford’s boy had got over his liking for city life. Farmers remarked to each other, while they sat in their granaries husking corn, that Henry had come to his senses and knew when he was well off; he’d have his share in as good a farm as any man could want some day; there was no need for him to get out and hustle in Detroit.

Probably there were moments when Henry himself shared the prevailing opinion; his interest in mechanics was as great as ever, but—there was Clara Bryant.

He made a few trips to Detroit, with an intention which seemed to him earnest enough to revive the plans for the watch factory, but the thought of her was always tugging at his mind, urging him to come back to Greenfield. His efforts came to nothing, and he soon lost interest in them.

He was in his early twenties then. His ambition had not yet centered about a definite purpose, and already it had met the worst enemy of ambition—love. It was a choice between his work and the girl. The girl won, and ten million fifty-cent Ford watches were lost to the world.

“I’ve decided not to go back to Detroit,” Henry announced to the family at breakfast one day.

“I thought you’d come around to seeing it that way,” his father said. “You can do better here in the long run than you can in the city. If you want to take care of the stock I’ll let one of the men go and pay you his wages this winter.”

“All right,” Henry said.

His work as a machinist seemed to all of them only an episode, now definitely ended.

He settled into the work of the farm as though he had never left it. Rising in the cold, lamp-lit mornings while the window panes showed only a square of darkness, sparkling with frost crystals, he built up the kitchen fire for Margaret. Then, with a lantern in his hand and milk pails clanking on his arm, plowed his way through the snow to the barns.

A red streak was showing in the eastern horizon; buildings and fences, covered with snow, showed odd shapes in the gray dawn; his breath hung like smoke on the frosty air.

Inside the barns the animals stirred; a horse stamped; a cow rose lumberingly; old Rover barked when he heard Henry’s hand on the door fastening. Henry hung his lantern on a nail and set to work. He pitched down hay and huge forksful of straw; he measured out rations of bran and corn and oats; he milked the cows, stopping before he carried the brimming pails to the house to pour out some of the warm, sweet smelling milk for Rover and the cats.

Back in the kitchen Margaret had set the table for breakfast. She was standing at the stove frying sausages and turning corn cakes. The other boys came tramping in from poultry yards and 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 granaries, or shelled it, ready to take to mill; they cleaned the barn stalls, whitewashed the hen houses, sorted the apples in the cellar. In the shop Henry worked at the farm tools, sharpening the plows, refitting the harrows with teeth, oiling and cleaning the mowing machines.

After supper, when he had finished the day’s work, milked the cows again, filled the racks in the calves’ yard with hay, spread deep beds of straw for the horses, seen that everything was snug and comfortable about the big barns, he saddled the little bay and rode six miles to the Bryant farm.

It was a courtship which did not run any too smoothly. Henry was not the only Greenfield farmer’s son who admired Clara Bryant, and she was minded to divide her 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 talking politics with him while Clara and his rival popped corn or roasted apples on the hearth.

But Henry built that winter a light sleigh, painted red, balanced on cushiony springs, slipping over the snow on smooth steel runners. No girl in Greenfield could have resisted the offer of a ride in it.

In the evenings when the moon was full Clara and Henry, warmly wrapped in fur robes, flashed down the snowy roads in a chime of 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. 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 courtship, he found time to keep up with his mechanics’ trade journals, for his interest in machinery was still strong, but he planned nothing new at this time. All his constructive imagination was diverted into another channel.

More than the loss of the Ford watches is chargeable to that laughing, rosy country girl who could not make up her mind to choose between her suitors. The winter 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 third spring of Henry’s stay on the farm arrived. Henry went over his bank account, a respectable sum, made up of his earnings on the farm and a few ventures in cattle buying and selling.

“Well, father,” he said one day, “I guess I’ll be getting married.”

“All right,” his father said. “She’s a good, capable girl, I guess. I’ll give you that south forty, and you can have lumber enough from the timber lot to build a house when you get ready.”

Apparently Henry had made up his mind to settle the matter. No doubt, behind the ardor he showed Clara there was an unconscious feeling that he had spent enough time in courtship; he was impatient to get back to his other interests, to have again an orderly, smooth routine of life, with margins of time for machinery.

In April he and Clara went up to Detroit and were married. A couple of weeks later they returned to Greenfield, Clara with plans for the new house on the south forty already sketched in a tablet in her suitcase; Henry with a bundle of mechanics’ trade journals, and the responsibility of caring for a wife.

“A wife helps a man more than 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 plowshare deep into the rich, black loam, holding it steady while the furrow rolled back under his feet, he whistled to himself.

He was contented. The farm work was well in hand; his forty would bring in an ample income from the first year; in the house his rosy little wife was busy making the best butter in the whole neighborhood. He revolved in his mind vague plans for making a better plow than the one he was handling; he remembered noticing in his latest English magazine an article covering the very principle he would use.

In the evening, after the last of the chores was done, he settled himself at the table in the sitting-room, moved the big lamp nearer and opened the magazine. But Clara was busy correcting the plans for the new house; she must have the lamp light, too. Henry moved the lamp back.

“Would you have the kitchen here, or here? This way I could have windows on three sides, but the other way I’d have a larger pantry,” said Clara, stopping to chew her pencil.

“Fix it exactly to suit yourself. It’s your house, and I’ll build it just as you say,” Henry replied, turning a page.

“But I want your advice—and I can’t see how to get this back porch in without making the bedrooms too small,” Clara complained. “I want this house just so—and if I put the chimney where I want it to come in the kitchen, it will be in the wrong end of the sitting-room, best I can do. Oh, let those horrid papers alone, and help me out!”

Henry let the horrid papers alone 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 selected trees in the timber lot and hauling them down to the little sawmill which belonged to his father. There he sawed them into boards of the lengths and sizes he needed and stocked them in neat piles to season and dry. From the shorter pieces of timber he split “shakes,” or homemade shingles, and stacked them, log-cabin fashion. He was preparing to build his first house.

It rose little by little through that summer. Henry built it himself, helped by one of the hired men. It was a good, substantial, Middle-Western home, 32 × 32 feet and containing seven rooms and a roomy attic. In the evenings, after supper, dishwashing and the chores at the barn were finished, he and Clara strolled over in the twilight to inspect the day’s progress.

They climbed together over the loose boards which made temporary floors, looked at the skeleton partitions of 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 silver and black in the moonlight, and so came slowly home. Margaret had cut a watermelon, cooled in a basket in the well, and all the family sat on the back porch eating it.

Long after midnight, when every one else was sound asleep, the lamp was burning in the sitting-room, and Henry was reading that article about the horseless carriage. The idea fascinated him.

The new house was finished late in the fall. Clara had made a trip to Detroit to purchase furniture, and all summer she had been working on patchwork quilts and crocheted tidies. When everything was ready, the sitting-room bright with new carpet and shining varnished furniture, the new range installed in the kitchen, the cellar stocked with apples, vegetables, canned fruits, Henry and Clara moved into their own home. They were proud of it.

“It’s a fine place yet, as good as anybody could want,” Henry Ford says now. “We still have it, and we like to go down there in the summers and stay awhile. All the furniture is there, exactly as it was then. I wouldn’t ask any better place to live.”

It must have been a happy time for both of them. They had a comfortable home, plenty to eat and wear, they were surrounded by friends. There was a simple neighborly spirit, a true democracy, in that little country community. There were no very poor families there; no very rich ones; every one had plenty, and wanted no more.

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 between them. He had lived no better, spent no more, than the others.

It was in those years that he laid the foundation for his philosophy of life.

He found that the work of the farm progressed faster and produced more when every one worked together with a good will, each doing his own share and doing it well. He found that men, like horses, did their best when they were well fed, contented and not overworked. He saw that one unruly horse, or one surly, lazy man, delayed the work of the whole farm, hindered all the others.

“The only plan that will work out well in the long run is a plan that is best for every one concerned,” he decided. “Hurting the other fellow is bound to hurt me sooner or later.”

He was a good farmer. His mechanical, orderly mind arranged the work so that it was done smoothly, and on time, without overworking any one or leaving any one idle. His thrifty instincts saved labor and time just as they saved the barn manure to spread on the fields, or planned for the turning 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, rocking comfortably. “But what’s the use? We’ve got everything here we need.”

“Yes; but I’d just like to try what I could do,” Henry said restlessly.

A few days later he inspected his farm shop and announced that he was going up to Detroit for a day to get some materials.

CHAPTER IX
THE LURE OF THE MACHINE SHOPS

It was an unconscious subterfuge, that statement of Henry Ford’s that he was going up to Detroit to get material. He knew what he wanted; sitting by the red-covered table in his own dining and sitting room some evening after Clara had cleared away the supper dishes he could have written out his order, article by article, exactly what he needed, and two days later it would have arrived by express.

But Henry wanted to get back to Detroit. He was tired of the farm. Those years of quiet, comfortable country living among his Greenfield neighbors were almost finished. They had given him his viewpoint on human relations, they had saved his character, in the formative period, from the distorting pressure of the struggle of man against man in the city. They had been, from the standpoint of Henry Ford, the man, perhaps the most valuable years in his life.

At that time he saw in them only an endless repetition of tasks which had no great appeal for him, a recurring cycle of sowing, tilling, harvesting. He thought he was accomplishing nothing. A little more money in the bank, a few more acres added to the farm—that was all, and it did not interest him. Money never did. His passion was machinery.

So he gave his orders to the hired man, pocketed a list of things to buy for Clara, and caught the early train to Detroit that morning with a feeling of keen anticipation. He meant to spend one whole day in machine shops.

From the station in Detroit he hurried direct to the James Flower Iron Works. The broad, busy streets, jammed with carriages and 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 before 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 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 I can work something out that will take the place of some of my horses.”

The foreman looked at Ford in amazement. It is hard to realize now how astounding such an idea must have seemed to him. Here was a man who proposed to take a locomotive into his cornfield and set it to plowing! The wild impossibility of the plan would have staggered any reasonable person. The foreman decided that this was one of Ford’s quiet jokes. He laughed appreciatively.

“Great idea!” he applauded. “All you’ll need then’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 handle the work of the farm when it was heaviest; in the slack season and during the winter the extra animals were necessarily idle, wasting food and barn space, and waste of any kind was an irritation to his methodical mind. It seemed to him that a machine could be built which would do a great part of the horses’ work in the fields and cost nothing while not in use.

That the undertaking was revolutionary, visionary, probably ridiculous to other people, did not deter him; he thought he could do it, and that was enough.

“Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world,” he says to-day. “Every generation has its own problem; it ought to find its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can’t do things better than our fathers did.”

That belief had been steadily growing in him while his inherited thrift and his machine-ideas improved on the farming methods of Greenfield; it crystallized into a creed when his old friend laughed at his idea of replacing horses with a machine.

He had visited the shops which interested him, ordered the material he wanted, and was on his way to the station to take the train home when he remembered the shopping list Mrs. Ford had given him, and her repeated injunctions to attend to it “the very first thing he did.”

With the usual exclamation of a husband saved by a sudden thought on the very brink of domestic catastrophe, Henry Ford turned and hurried back to make those purchases. Aided by a sympathetic clerk at the ribbon counter, he completed them satisfactorily, and came out of the store, laden with bundles, just at the moment that Detroit’s pride, a new steam-propelled fire engine, came puffing 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 during the weeks that followed. In two years of marriage she had learned to understand her husband’s interests and moods fairly well; she had adjusted herself with fewer domestic discords than usual to the simple demands of his good-humored, methodical temperament.

She had begun to settle into a pleasant, accustomed routine of managing her house and poultry yard, preparing the meals, washing the dishes, spending the 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.