For twenty years or more,
ever since he’d left his father’s farm when he was sixteen to get a job in a Detroit machineshop, Henry Ford had been nuts about machinery. First it was watches, then he designed a steamtractor, then he built a horseless carriage with an engine adapted from the Otto gasengine he’d read about in The World of Science, then a mechanical buggy with a onecylinder fourcycle motor, that would run forward but not back;
at last, in ninetyeight, he felt he was far enough along to risk throwing up his job with the Detroit Edison Company, where he’d worked his way up from night fireman to chief engineer, to put all his time into working on a new gasoline engine,
(in the late eighties he’d met Edison at a meeting of electriclight employees in Atlantic City. He’d gone up to Edison after Edison had delivered an address and asked him if he thought gasoline was practical as a motor fuel. Edison had said yes. If Edison said it, it was true. Edison was the great admiration of Henry Ford’s life);
and in driving his mechanical buggy, sitting there at the lever jauntily dressed in a tightbuttoned jacket and a high collar and a derby hat, back and forth over the level illpaved streets of Detroit,
scaring the big brewery horses and the skinny trotting horses and the sleekrumped pacers with the motor’s loud explosions,
looking for men scatterbrained enough to invest money in a factory for building automobiles.
He was the eldest son of an Irish immigrant who during the Civil War had married the daughter of a prosperous Pennsylvania Dutch farmer and settled down to farming near Dearborn in Wayne County, Michigan;
like plenty of other Americans, young Henry grew up hating the endless sogging through the mud about the chores, the hauling and pitching manure, the kerosene lamps to clean, the irk and sweat and solitude of the farm.
He was a slender, active youngster, a good skater, clever with his hands; what he liked was to tend the machinery and let the others do the heavy work. His mother had told him not to drink, smoke, gamble or go into debt, and he never did.
When he was in his early twenties his father tried to get him back from Detroit, where he was working as mechanic and repairman for the Drydock Engine Company that built engines for steamboats, by giving him forty acres of land.
Young Henry built himself an uptodate square white dwellinghouse with a false mansard roof and married and settled down on the farm,
but he let the hired men do the farming;
he bought himself a buzzsaw and rented a stationary engine and cut the timber off the woodlots.
He was a thrifty young man who never drank or smoked or gambled or coveted his neighbor’s wife, but he couldn’t stand living on the farm.
He moved to Detroit, and in the brick barn behind his house tinkered for years in his spare time with a mechanical buggy that would be light enough to run over the clayey wagonroads of Wayne County, Michigan.
By 1900 he had a practicable car to promote.
He was forty years old before the Ford Motor Company was started and production began to move.
Speed was the first thing the early automobile manufacturers went after. Races advertised the makes of cars.
Henry Ford himself hung up several records at the track at Grosse Pointe and on the ice on Lake St. Clair. In his 999 he did the mile in thirtynine and fourfifths seconds.
But it had always been his custom to hire others to do the heavy work. The speed he was busy with was speed in production, the records records in efficient output. He hired Barney Oldfield, a stunt bicyclerider from Salt Lake City, to do the racing for him.
Henry Ford had ideas about other things than the designing of motors, carburetors, magnetos, jigs and fixtures, punches and dies; he had ideas about sales,
that the big money was in economical quantity production, quick turnover, cheap interchangeable easilyreplaced standardized parts;
it wasn’t until 1909, after years of arguing with his partners, that Ford put out the first Model T.
Henry Ford was right.
That season he sold more than ten thousand tin lizzies, ten years later he was selling almost a million a year.
In these years the Taylor Plan was stirring up plantmanagers and manufacturers all over the country. Efficiency was the word. The same ingenuity that went into improving the performance of a machine could go into improving the performance of the workmen producing the machine.
In 1913 they established the assemblyline at Ford’s. That season the profits were something like twentyfive million dollars, but they had trouble in keeping the men on the job, machinists didn’t seem to like it at Ford’s.
Henry Ford had ideas about other things than production.
He was the largest automobile manufacturer in the world; he paid high wages; maybe if the steady workers thought they were getting a cut (a very small cut) in the profits, it would give trained men an inducement to stick to their jobs,
wellpaid workers might save enough money to buy a tin lizzie; the first day Ford’s announced that cleancut properly-married American workers who wanted jobs had a chance to make five bucks a day (of course it turned out that there were strings to it; always there were strings to it)
such an enormous crowd waited outside the Highland Park plant
all through the zero January night
that there was a riot when the gates were opened; cops broke heads, jobhunters threw bricks; property, Henry Ford’s own property, was destroyed. The company dicks had to turn on the firehose to beat back the crowd.
The American Plan; automotive prosperity seeping down from above; it turned out there were strings to it.
But that five dollars a day
paid to good, clean American workmen
who didn’t drink or smoke cigarettes or read or think,
and who didn’t commit adultery
and whose wives didn’t take in boarders,
made America once more the Yukon of the sweated workers of the world;
made all the tin lizzies and the automotive age, and incidentally,
made Henry Ford the automobileer, the admirer of Edison, the birdlover,
the great American of his time.
But Henry Ford had ideas about other things besides assemblylines and the livinghabits of his employees. He was full of ideas. Instead of going to the city to make his fortune, here was a country boy who’d made his fortune by bringing the city out to the farm. The precepts he’d learned out of McGuffey’s Reader, his mother’s prejudices and preconceptions, he had preserved clean and unworn as freshprinted bills in the safe in a bank.
He wanted people to know about his ideas, so he bought the Dearborn Independent and started a campaign against cigarette-smoking.
When war broke out in Europe, he had ideas about that too. (Suspicion of armymen and soldiering were part of the midwest farm tradition, like thrift, stickativeness, temperance and sharp practice in money matters.) Any intelligent American mechanic could see that if the Europeans hadn’t been a lot of ignorant underpaid foreigners who drank, smoked, were loose about women and wasteful in their methods of production, the war could never have happened.