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."