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.