"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.
From the kitchen window she saw him sitting idly on the horse-block in
the middle of the forenoon, twisting a straw in his fingers and frowning
intently at the side of the barn.
Sometimes after supper, instead of settling quietly down with his
papers, he walked up and down, up and down, the sitting-room, with his
hands behind his back and that same frown on his forehead. At last she
could endure it no longer. She begged him to tell her the worst.
He replied, surprised, that it was a steam engine--he couldn't figure
out the ratio of power to 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 considering them one by one,
thinking out adaptations, new devices, in an effort to overcome the
difficulty.
Still he could not see how to construct a cheap engine which would pull
across his soft fields, carry the necessary weight of water, and still
develop enough free power to be useful.
He was still struggling with the problem three months after his trip to
Detroit.
"I declare to goodness, I don't know what's got into you, Henry. You act
like a man in a dream half the time," the wife said, worried. "You
aren't coming down with a fever, are you?"
"I should say not!" Henry replied hastily, with visions of 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 returned to that problem of
the steam engine. He was sure a machine could be made to do the work of
horses; he was confident that he could make it if he persisted long
enough.
The trouble was the weight of the water. He must have it to make steam;
he must have steam to develop power, and the whole power was required to
haul the water. It looked like an inexorable circle. He went over it
again, looking for the weak spot in the reasoning--and suddenly he saw
it.
Steam was not necessary. Why not use gasoline?
The thought opened a door into unknown possibilities. Up to that time,
as far as he knew, no one had ever dreamed of a self-propelling gasoline
engine. A thousand obstacles rose immediately before his mind--the
gearing, the drive, the construction of the engine itself--a dazzling
array of problems to be faced and solved.
Difficulties innumerable stood in the way of his carrying out the
idea--difficulties apparently so insurmountable that ninety-nine men in
a hundred would have abandoned the idea as impossible after one glance
at them. Henry Ford was the hundredth man. They were mechanical
difficulties, and he loved mechanics. He was eager for the struggle with
them.
"It seemed to take me a year to finish the chores, so I could sit down
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 demands on his
time and strength, and night brought the chores. All the farm tasks were
to Ford only vexing obstacles in his way to his real work, and they kept
him from it till late at night.
Then, when all Greenfield was asleep, and Mrs. Ford, after a long
struggle to keep awake, had gone yawning to bed, he sat alone and worked
over the problem of his gasoline engine. He ransacked the piles of
mechanics' journals for suggestions; where they failed him he tried to
think his way ahead without help.
While he worked through the night, in a stillness broken only by the
crowing of a rooster in some distant 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
attention--but now and then as the night wore on toward morning he had a
dim understanding of the possibilities of horseless transportation. He
thought what it might mean to the world if every man had a machine to
carry him and his goods over the country at a speed of twenty or even
twenty-five miles an hour. It was a fantastic vision, he admitted, but
he set his teeth and declared that it was not an impossible one.
Sometimes he worked all night. Usually weariness overcame him in the
small hours and he was forced to stop and go through another day's work
on the farm before he could get back to his real interests again.
If the farm was to prosper he must give it his attention every day. The
margin of time it allowed for his work on the gasoline engine plans was
far too little. By the end of that summer he had made up his mind that
he could not spare his time for the farm. He told his wife that he had
decided to lease it to his brother and move to Detroit.
"My goodness, Henry, what for? We're doing well here; I'm sure you're
going ahead faster than 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 engine here. Even if I had the time I haven't the
equipment," he explained.
"Well, I must say. Here we've worked hard, and got a comfortable home,
and a fine farm, that pays more every year, and sixteen head of good
stock--and you're going to leave it all for a gasoline engine that isn't
even built. I don't see what you're thinking of," said poor Mrs. Ford,
confronted thus suddenly with the prospect of giving up all her
accustomed ways, her old friends, her big house with its stock of linens
and its cellar filled with good things.
"You can't begin to make as much in the city as you do here," she argued
reasonably. "And suppose the engine doesn't work, after all?"
"It'll work, all right. I'm going to keep at it till it does," Ford
said.