EIGHT HOURS, BUT NOT FOR HIMSELF
When Henry Ford became manager of the mechanical department the workmen
in the Edison plants were working twelve-hour shifts as a matter of
course. In those days the theory of practically all employers was that
men, like the rest of their equipment, should be worked to the limit of
their strength.
"We had about forty men on the regular list and four or five substitutes
who were kept busy filling in for the regular men who were sick or tired
out," he said. "I hadn't been in charge long before it struck me there
was something wrong. If our machines had broken down as often as our men
did anybody would have known we weren't handling them right.
"No good engineer will run a machine at the limit of its power and speed
for very long. It hurts the machine. It isn't sentimentalism to take
care of the machine; it's plain common sense and efficiency. It isn't
sentimentalism to look out for the interests of the men.
"The sooner people get over the idea that there's a difference between
ideals of brotherhood and practical common sense the sooner we'll do
away with waste and friction of all kinds and have a world that's run
right. The only trouble now is that people haven't the courage to put
their ideals to work. They say, 'Oh, of course, theoretically we believe
in them--but they aren't practical!' What's the use of believing in
anything that isn't practical? If it's any good at all it's practical.
The whole progress of the world has been made by men who went to work
and used their impractical theories.
"Well, I figured over the situation quite a while and I found out that
by putting the substitutes on the regular list and shifting the men
around a little I could give them all an eight-hour day without
increasing the pay roll. I did it.
"Yes, there was a howl from the stockholders when they heard about it.
Nobody had ever tried it before; they thought I was going to turn
everything upside down and ruin the business. But the work was going
along better than before. The men felt more like work, and they pitched
in to show they appreciated being treated right. We had fewer breakdowns
after that; everything went better.
"After the thing was done it was easy enough to prove that it paid, and
the stockholders quieted down after one or two complaints.
"As a matter of fact, I don't believe in any hours for work. A man ought
to work as long as he wants to, and he ought to enjoy his work so much
that he wants to work as long as he can. It's only monotonous, grinding
work that needs an eight-hour day. When a man is creating something,
working to get results, twelve or fourteen hours a day doesn't hurt
him."
Ford put this theory into practice as apparently he had done with all
his theories. He himself worked more than fourteen hours a day.
From 6 to 6 he worked in the Edison plant, for his eight-hour régime did
not apply to himself. Then he hastened home to the little house on
Edison avenue, ate supper and hurried out to his improvised workshop in
the old shed. He turned on the big electric lights and there in the
glare lay materials for his self-propelling gasoline engine--his real
work, which at last he could begin!
Until late at night the neighbors heard the sound of his tools and saw
the glare of light through the cracks.
"The Smiths are giving a party to-night--I suppose we can't go?" Mrs.
Ford said one evening, wistfully. "Oh, well--when the gasoline engine is
finished--how long do you think it's going to take?"
"I don't know--I'm working on the cylinder now. I'll have to have a
larger bore to get the speed--and then there'll be the transmission."
Ford stopped speaking and was lost in the problems. He finished supper
abstractedly and pushed back his chair.
"Oh, about the party. Too bad. I hope you don't mind much. When I get
the gasoline engine finished," he said apologetically, and hurried out
to work on it. In a few minutes he was absorbed with the cylinder.
He had found that day a piece of pipe, thrown into the scrap heap at the
Edison plant, and it had struck him at once that it would do for his
cylinder, and that using it would save him the time and work of making
one. He brought it home, cut it to the right length and set it in the
first Ford engine.
Meantime, in the house Mrs. Ford cleared away the supper dishes, took
out her sewing and settled down with a sigh. The neighbors were going by
to the Smiths' party. She could hear them laughing and calling to each
other on the sidewalk outside. In the shed her husband was filing
something; the rasp of the file on the metal sounded plainly.
After all, she thought, she might as well give up the idea of parties.
She couldn't give one herself; she knew Henry would refuse to leave his
hateful engine even for one evening. She was very homesick for
Greenfield.
The months went by. Ford worked all day at the Edison plant, half the
night in his own shop. The men he met in his work had taken to looking
at him half in amusement, half in good-humored contempt. He was a
"crank," they said. Some of the younger ones would laugh and tap their
foreheads when he had gone past them.
One night he came home and found Mrs. Ford crying. The neighbors were
saying that he was crazy, she sobbed. She'd told Mrs. Lessing just
exactly what she thought of her, too, and she'd never speak to her
again! But, oh, wouldn't he ever get that horrid engine finished so they
could live like other people?
It all hurt. No man was ever friendlier, or enjoyed more the feeling of
comradeship with other men than Ford. But it was a choice between that
and his automobile. He went on with his routine of work, fourteen or
sixteen hours of it every day, and he drew more into himself, became
more reserved with every month that passed.
If any man ever followed Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance, giving up
friends and family in his devotion to his own work, that man was Henry
Ford in those days.
There was nothing dramatic about it--just an obscure machinist with an
idea, willing to give up social pleasures, restful domestic evenings,
the good opinion of his neighbors, and work hard in an old shed behind
his common little house. Only an ordinary man turning his back on
everything most of us want, for an "impractical" theory. That was all.
He continued to work for two years. He built the engine slowly, thinking
out every step in advance, drawing every casting before he made it,
struggling for months over the problem of the electrical wiring and
spark. Sometimes he worked all night.
"Sick? No, I never was sick," he says. "It isn't overworking that breaks
men down; it's overplaying and overeating. I never ate too much, and I
felt all right, no matter how long I worked. Of course, sometimes I was
pretty tired."
One day he called his wife out to the shed. The little engine, set up on
blocks, was humming away, its flywheel a blur in the air. The high-speed
revolutions that made the automobile possible were an accomplished fact.
"Oh, Henry! It's done! You've finished it!" she said happily.
"No, that's just the beginning. Now I've got to figure out the
transmission, the steering gear and a--a lot of things," he replied.