# Henry Ford’s Own Story/Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX
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 ​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."