Henry Ford’s Own Story/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
"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 renoon, 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 ke, 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.