Henry Ford's Own Story. Rose Wilder Lane

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СКАЧАТЬ young fellows, grasping at life with both hands, wanting all of it, and wanting it right then—naturally enough they smoked, drank, experimented with love-making, turned night into day in a joyous carouse now and then. But before long Henry Ford was a leader among them, as he had been among the boys in the Greenfield school, and again he diverted the energy of his followers into his own channels.

      Pursuits that had interested them seemed to him a waste of time and strength. He did not smoke—his tentative attempt with hay-cigarettes in his boyhood had discouraged that permanently—he did not drink, and girls seemed to him unutterably stupid.

      “I have never tasted liquor in my life,” he says. “I’d as soon think of taking any other poison.”

      Undoubtedly his opinion is right, but one is inclined to doubt the accuracy of his memory. In those early days in Detroit he must have experimented at least once with the effects of liquor on the human system; probably once would have been sufficient. Besides, about that time he developed an interest so strong that it not only absorbed his own attention, but carried that of his friends along with it.

      He bought a watch. It had taken him only a few months to master his task in the drydock works so thoroughly that his wages were raised. Later they were raised again. Then he was getting five dollars a week, more than enough to pay his expenses, without night work. He left the jeweler’s shop, but he brought with him a watch, the first he had ever owned.

      Immediately he took it to pieces. When its scattered parts lay on a table before him he looked at them and marveled. He had paid three dollars for the watch, and he could not figure out any reason why it should have cost so much.

      “It ran,” he says. “It had some kind of a dark composition case, and it weighed a good deal, and it went along all right—never lost or gained more than a certain amount in any given day.

      “But there wasn’t anything about that watch that should have cost three dollars. Nothing but a lot of plain parts, made out of cheap metal. I could have made one like it for one dollar, or even less. But it cost me three. The only way I could figure it out was that there was a lot of waste somewhere.”

      Then he remembered the methods of production at the James Flower Company. He reasoned that probably that watch factory had turned out only a few hundred of that design, and then tried something else—alarm clocks, perhaps. The parts had been made by the dozen, some of them had probably been filed down by hand, to make them fit.

      Then he got the great idea. A factory—a gigantic factory, running with the precision of a machine, turning out watches by the thousands and tens of thousands—watches all exactly alike, every part cut by an exact die.

      He talked it over with the boys at the drydock works. He was enthusiastic. He showed them that a watch could be made for less than half a dollar by his plan. He juggled figures of thousands of dollars as though they were pennies. The size of the sums did not stagger him, because money was never concrete to him—it was merely rows of figures—but to the young fellows who listened his talk was dazzling.

      They 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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ