Henry Ford's Own Story. Rose Wilder Lane
joined enthusiastically in the scheme. Then their evenings became merely so much time to spend up in Ford’s room, figuring estimates and discussing plans.
The watch could be made for thirty-seven cents, provided machinery turned it out by tens of thousands. Henry Ford visualized the factory—a factory devoted to one thing, the making of ONE watch—specialized, concentrated, with no waste energy. Those eager young men planned the whole thing from furnaces to assembling rooms.
They figured the cost of material by the hundred tons, estimated the exact proportions each metal required; they planned an output of 2,000 watches daily as the point at which cost of production would be cheapest. They would sell the watch for fifty cents, and guarantee it for one year. Two thousand watches at a profit of thirteen cents each—$260 daily profit! They were dazzled.
“We needn’t stop there—we can increase that output when we get started,” Henry Ford declared. “Organization will do it. Lack of organization keeps prices up, for its cost must be charged in on the selling price; and high prices keep sales down. We will work it the other way; low prices, increased sales, increased output, lower prices. It works in a circle. Listen to this——” He held them, listening, while he talked and figured, eliminating waste here and cutting expenses there, until the landlady came up and knocked at the door, asking if they meant to stay up all night.
It took time to get his ideas translated into concrete, exact figures. He worked over them for nearly a year, holding the enthusiasm of his friends at fever heat all that time. Finally he made drawings for the machines he planned and cut dies for making the different parts of the watch.
His plan was complete—a gigantic machine, taking in bars of steel at one end, and turning out completed watches at the other—hundreds of thousands of cheap watches, all alike—the Ford watch!
“I tell you there’s a fortune in it—a fortune!” the young fellows in the scheme exclaimed to each other.
“All we need now is the capital,” Ford decided at last.
He was turning his mind to the problem of getting it, when he received a letter from his sister Margaret. His father had been injured in an accident; his older brother was ill. Couldn’t he come home for a while? They needed him.
CHAPTER VI
BACK TO THE FARM
The letter from home must have come like a dash of cold water on Henry’s enthusiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future, planning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead. It has always been his instinct to do just that.
“You can’t run anything on precedents if you want to make a success,” he says to-day. “We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past.”
Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter—the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one.
There was never any real question as to the outcome. The machine-idea has been the controlling factor in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to each other, in making human sympathies a working business policy, that he has made his real success.
Of course at that time he did not see such a possibility. It was a clear-cut struggle between two opposing forces; on one side the splendid future just ahead, on the other his father’s need of him. He went home.
He intended at the time to stay only until his father was well again—perhaps for a month or so, surely not longer than one summer. The plans for the watch factory were not abandoned, they were only laid aside temporarily. It would be possible to run up to Detroit for a day or two now and then, and keep on working on plans for getting together the necessary capital.
But no business on earth is harder to leave than the business of running a farm. When Henry reached home he found a dozen fields needing immediate action. The corn had been neglected, already weeds were springing up between the rows; in the house his father was fretting because the hired hands were not feeding the cows properly, and they were giving less milk. The clover was going to seed, while the hogs looked hungrily at it through the fence because there was no one to see that their noses were ringed and the gates opened. Some of the plows and harrows had been left in the fields, where they were rusting in the summer sun and rain.
There was plenty of work for Henry. At first from day to day, then from week to week, he put off the trip to Detroit. He worked in the fields with the men, plowing, planting, harvesting, setting the pace for the others to follow, as an owner must do on a farm. He was learning, so thoroughly that he never forgot it, the art of managing men without losing the democratic feeling of being one of them.
In the mornings he was up before daylight, and out to the barn-yard. He fed the horses, watched that the milking was thoroughly done, and gave orders for the day’s work. Then the great bell clanged once, and he and all the men hurried into the house, where, sitting at one long table in the kitchen, they ate the breakfast Margaret and the hired girls brought to them, piping hot from the stove. After that they scattered, driving down the farm lanes to the fields, while the sun rose, and the meadows, sparkling with dew, scented the air with clover.
The sun rose higher, pouring its heat down upon them as they worked, and a shrill, whirring noise rose from all the tiny insects in the grass, a note like the voice of the heat. Coats and vests came off, and were tossed in the fence corners; sleeves were rolled up, shirts opened wide at the neck.
“Whew! it’s hot!” said Henry, stopping to wipe the sweat from his face. “Where’s the water jug? Jim, what say you run and bring it up? Let’s have a drink before we go on.”
So they worked through the mornings, stopping gladly enough when the great bell clanged out the welcome news that Margaret and the girls had prepared the huge dinner their appetites demanded.
In the afternoons Henry, on the little gray mare, rode to the far fields for a diplomatic, authoritative word with the men plowing there, or perhaps he went a little farther, and bargained with the next neighbor for a likely looking yearling heifer.
Then back at night to the big farm-yard, where the cows must be milked, the horses watered, fed and everything made comfortable and safe for the night.
It was a very different life from that in the machine shop, and Henry Ford thought, when he pored over his mechanic journals by the sitting-room lamp in the evenings, that he was wasting precious time. But he was learning a great many things he would find useful later.
Margaret Ford was by this time a healthy, attractive young woman, with all the affairs of the household and dairy well in hand. The social affairs of the community began to center around her. In the evenings the young men of the neighborhood rode over to propose picnics and hay-rides; after church on Sundays a dozen young people would come trooping out to the farm with her, and Margaret would put a white apron over her best dress and serve a big country dinner.
They had a rollicking time in the grassy front yards afterwards, or out in the orchard when the plums were ripe. Late in the afternoon they separated somehow into pairs, as young people will do, and walked the three miles to church for the evening services.
It may be imagined that the girls of the neighborhood were interested when Henry appeared in church again, now a good-looking young man of twenty-one, back from the city. The social popularity of the Ford place must have increased considerably. On this point Ford is discreetly silent, but it does not require any great effort of fancy to see him as he must have looked then, through the eyes of the Greenfield girls, an alert, muscular fellow, with a droll humor and a whimsical smile. Moreover, the driver of the finest horses in the neighborhood, and one of the heirs to the big farm.
However, he is outspoken enough about his own attitude. He did not care for girls.
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