THE BEGINNING OF BUSINESS

On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It is out in my
museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on thirty years before and which first
ran satisfactorily along in the spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to
Dearborn and they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world in the
appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construction and materials, but
in fundamentals the two are curiously alike - except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles
that we have not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though it
had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons
of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built.
The development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the
development in basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is
the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self-starter - it is in every way a more convenient and an
easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in
the first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not
through any change in the basic principle which I take to be an - important fact demonstrating
that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around
for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as anyone can handle.
It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to better transportation. I was
born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that,
considering the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I still feel about
farming. There is a legend that my parents were very poor and that the early days were hard
ones. Certainly they were not rich, but neither were they poor. As Michigan farmers went, we
were prosperous. The house in which I was born is still standing, and it and the farm are part of
my present holding.
There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of the time. Even when
very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me
into mechanics - although my mother always said that I was born a mechanic. I had a kind of
workshop with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In those days we did
not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home made. My toys were all tools - they still are!
And every fragment of machinery was a treasure.
The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine about eight miles out of
Detroit one day when we were driving to town. I was then twelve years old. The second biggest
event was getting a watch which J happened in the same year. I remember that engine as though I
had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than horse-drawn that I had ever seen.
It was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable
engine and boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank and coal cart trailing behind. I had seen
plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but this one had a chain that made a connection
between the engine and the rear wheels of the wagon-like frame on which the boiler was
mounted. The engine was placed over the boiler and one man standing on the platform behind
the boiler shoveled coal, managed the throttle, and did the steering. It had been made by Nichols,
Shepard & Company of Battle Creek. I found that out at once. The engine had stopped to let us
pass with our horses and I was off the wagon and talking to the engineer before my father, who
was driving, knew what I was up to. The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair. He
was proud of it. He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a
belt put on to drive other machinery. He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions a
minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still
running. This last is a feature which, although in different fashion, is incorporated into modern
automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which are easily stopped and started, but it
became very important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into
automotive transportation. I tried to make models of it, and some years later I did make one that
ran very well, but from the time I saw that road engine as a boy of twelve right forward to to-day,
my great interest has been in making a machine that would travel the roads. Driving to town I
always had a pocket full of trinkets - nuts, washers, and odds and ends of machinery. Often I
took a broken watch and tried to put it together. When I was thirteen I managed for the first time
to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost
anything in watch repairing - although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount
to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how
everything is made - and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made.
Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has
any brains he will apply those ideas.
From the beginning I never could work up much interest in the labour of farming. I wanted to
have something to do with machinery. My father was not entirely in sympathy with my bent
toward mechanics. He thought that I ought to be a farmer. When I left school at seventeen and
became an apprentice in the machine shop of the Drydock Engine Works, I was all but given up
for lost. I passed my apprenticeship without trouble - that is, I was qualified to be a machinist
long before my three-year term had expired - and having a liking for fine work and a leaning
toward watches I worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. At one period of those early days,
I think that I must have had fully three hundred watches. I thought that I could build a
serviceable watch for around thirty cents and nearly started in the business. But I did not because
I figured out that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people generally would
not buy them. Just how I reached that surprising conclusion I am unable to state. I did not like
the ordinary jewelry and watch making work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then
I wanted to make something in quantity. It was just about the time when the standard railroad
time was being arranged. We had formerly been on sun time and for quite a while, just as in our
present daylight-saving days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a
good deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It had two dials and it was
quite a curiosity in the neighborhood.
In 1879 - that is, about four years after I first saw that Nichols-Shepard machine - I managed to
get a chance to run one and when my apprenticeship was over, I worked with a local
representative of the Westinghouse Company of Schenectady as an expert in the setting up and
repair of their road engines. The engine they put out was much the same as the Nichols-Shepard
engine excepting that the engine was up in front, the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied
to the back wheels by a belt. They could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the
self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. They were sometimes used as
tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner also happened to be in the threshing- machine
business, he hitched his threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from
farm to farm. What bothered me was the weight and the cost. They weighed a couple of tons and
were far too expensive to be owned by other than a farmer with a great deal of land. They were
mostly employed by people who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some
other line that required portable power.
Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light steam car that would take the
place of horses more especially, however, as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of
ploughing. It occurred to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same idea
might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A horseless carriage was a common idea.
People had been talking about carriages without horses for many years back - in fact, ever since
the steam engine was invented - but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so practical to
me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm
ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were poor and we had not the habit of getting around. One
of the most remarkable features of the automobile on the farm is the way that it has broadened
the farmer's life. We simply took for granted that unless the errand were urgent we would not go
to town, and I think we rarely made more than a trip a week. In bad weather we did not go even
that often.
Being a full-fledged machinist and with a very fair workshop on the farm it was not difficult for
me to build a steam wagon or tractor. In the building of it came the idea that perhaps it might be
made for road use. I felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all the bother of attending them
and the expense of feeding, did not earn their keep. The obvious thing to do was to design and
build a steam engine that would be light enough to run an ordinary wagon or to pull a plough. I
thought it more important first to develop the tractor. To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood
and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition. It was circumstances that
took me first into the returned, more because I wanted to experiment than because I wanted to
farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy
shop of earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided I gave up being a
machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting the timber gave me a chance to get married.
I fitted out a sawmill and a portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the
tract. Some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new farm and in it we began our
married life. It was not a big house-thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high - but it
was a comfortable place. I added to it my workshop, and when I was not cutting timber, I was
working on the gas engines - learning what they were and how they acted. I read everything I
could find, but the greatest knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of
thing - it will not always go the way it should. You can imagine how those first engines acted!
other of twenty miles per hour- obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in
front of the driving seat. Thrown forward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown back, the low
speed; with the lever upright, the engine could run free. To start the car, it was necessary to turn
the motor over by hand with the clutch free. To stop the car, one simply released the clutch and
applied the foot brake. There was no reverse, and speeds other than those of the belt were
obtained by the throttle. I bought the iron work for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and
the springs. The wheels were twenty-eight- inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The
balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more delicate mechanism I
made myself. One of the features that I discovered necessary was a compensating gear that
permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The
machine altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held three gallons
of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small pipe and a mixing valve. The ignition
was by electric spark. The original machine was air-cooled - or to be more accurate, the motor
simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more the motor heated up, and so
I very shortly put a water jacket around the cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car
over the cylinders. Nearly all of these various features had been planned in advance. That is the
way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before starting to
build. For otherwise one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and
the finished article will not have coherence. It will not be rightly proportioned. Many inventors
fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting. The largest building
difficulties that I had were in obtaining the proper materials. The next were with tools. There had
to be some adjustments and changes in details of the design, but what held me up most WHAT I
LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS
My "gasoline buggy" was the first and for a long time the only automobile in Detroit. It was
considered to be something of a nuisance, for it made a racket and it scared horses. Also, it
blocked traffic. For if I stopped my machine anywhere in town a crowd was around it before I
could start up again. If I left it alone even for a minute some inquisitive person always tried to
run it. Finally, I had to carry a chain and chain it to a lamp post whenever I left it anywhere. And
then there was trouble with the police. I do not know quite why, for my impression is that there
were no speed-limit laws in those days. Anyway, I had to get a special permit from the mayor
and thus for a time enjoyed the distinction of being the only licensed chauffeur in America. I ran
that machine about one thousand miles through 1895 and 1896 and then sold it to Charles
Ainsley of Detroit for two hundred dollars. That was my first sale. I had built the car not to sell
but only to experiment with. I wanted to start another car. Ainsley wanted to buy. I could use the
money and we had no trouble in agreeing upon a price.
It was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty fashion. I was looking ahead to
production, but before that could come, I had to have something to produce. It does not pay to
hurry. I started a second car in 1896; it was much like the first but a little lighter. It also had the
belt drive which I did not give up until sometime later; the belts were all right excepting in hot
weather. That is why I later adopted gears. I learned a great deal from that car. Others in this
country and abroad were building cars by that time, and in 1895 I heard that a Benz car from
Germany was on exhibition in Macy's store in New York. I traveled down to look at it but it had
no features that seemed worthwhile. It also had the belt drive, but it was much heavier than my
car. I was working for lightness; the foreign makers have never seemed to appreciate what light
weight means. I built three cars in all in my home shop and all of them ran for years in Detroit. I
still have the first car; I bought it back a few years later from a man to whom Mr. Ainsley had
sold it. I paid one hundred dollars for it.
During all this time I kept my position with the electric company and gradually advanced to chief
engineer at a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. But my gas-engine
experiments were no more popular with the president of the company than my first mechanical
leanings were with my father. It was not that my employer objected to experiments - only to
experiments with a gas engine. I can still hear him say: "Electricity, yes, that's the coming thing.
But gas - no."
He had ample grounds for his skepticism- to use the mildest terms. Practically no one had the
remotest notion of the future of the internal combustion engine, while we were just on the edge
of the great electrical development. As with every comparatively new idea, electricity was
expected to do much more than we even now have any indication that it can do. I did not see the
use of experimenting with electricity for my purposes. A road car could not run on a trolley even
if trolley wires had been less expensive; no storage battery was in sight of a weight that was
practical. An electrical car had of necessity to be limited in radius and to contain a large amount
of motive machinery in proportion to the power exerted. That is not to say that I held or now
hold electricity cheaply; we have not yet begun to use electricity. But it has its place, and the
internal combustion engine has its place. Neither can substitute for the other which is
exceedingly fortunate.
I have the dynamo that I first had charge of at the Detroit Edison Company. When I started our
Canadian plant, I bought it from an office building to which it had been sold by the electric
company, had it revamped a little, and for several years it gave excellent service in the Canadian
plant. When we had to build a new power plant, owing to the increase in business, I had the old
motor taken out to my museum - a room out at Dearborn that holds a great number of my
mechanical treasures.
The Edison Company offered me the general superintendency of the company but only on
condition that I would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful. I had
to choose between my job and my automobile. I chose the automobile, or rather I gave up the job
there was really nothing in - the way of a choice. For already I knew that the car was bound to be
a success. I quit my job on August 15, 1899, and went into the automobile business.
It might be thought something of a step, for I had no personal funds. What money was left over
from living was all used in experimenting. But my wife agreed that the automobile could not be
given up - that we had to make or break. There was no "demand" for automobiles - there never is
for a new article. They were accepted in much the fashion as was more recently the airplane. At
first the "horseless carriage" was considered merely a freak notion and many wise people
explained with particularity why it could never be more than a toy. No man of money even
thought of it as a commercial possibility. I cannot imagine why each new means of transportation
meets with such opposition. There are even those to-day who shake their heads and talk about the
luxury of the automobile and only grudgingly admit that perhaps the motor truck is of some use.
But in the beginning, there was hardly anyone who sensed that the automobile could be a large
factor in industry. The most optimistic hoped only for a development akin to that of the bicycle.
When it was found that an automobile really could go and several makers started to put out cars,
the immediate query was as to which would go fastest. It was a curious but natural development -
that racing idea. I never thought anything of racing, but the public refused to consider the
automobile in any light other than as a fast toy. Therefore, later we had to race. The industry was
held back by this initial racing slant, for the attention of the makers was diverted to making fast
rather than good cars. It was a business for speculators.
A group of men of speculative turn of mind organized, as soon as I left the electric company, the
Detroit Automobile Company to exploit my car. I was the chief engineer and held a small
amount of the stock. For three years we continued making cars more or less on the model of my
first car. We sold very few of them; I could get no support at all toward making better cars to be
sold to the public at large. The whole thought was to make to order and to get the largest price
possible for each car. The main idea seemed to be to get the money. And being without authority
other than my engineering position gave me, I found that the new company was not a vehicle for
realizing my ideas but actual manufacture of road cars. I found eventually that people were more
interested in something that would travel on the road than in something that would do the work
on the farms. In fact, I doubt that the light farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm
had not the farmer had his eyes opened slowly but surely by the automobile. But that is getting
ahead of the story. I thought the farmer would be more interested in the tractor. I built a steam car
that ran. It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it developed plenty of power and a neat control
which is so easy with a steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power
without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work under high pressure;
sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe
required an excess of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years I kept
experimenting with various sorts of boilers - the engine and control problems were simple
enough - and then I definitely abandoned the whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. I
knew that in England they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines
of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam tractor for use on a large
farm. But ours were not then English roads; they would have stalled or racked to pieces the
strongest and heaviest road tractor. And anyway, the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a
few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worthwhile.
But I did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. The work with the Westinghouse
representative only served to confirm the opinion I had formed that steam was not suitable for
light vehicles. That is why I stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that
the big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to waste time on something
that would lead nowhere. A few years before - it was while I was an apprentice - - I read in the
World of Science, an English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming out
in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating gas, had a single large
cylinder, and the power impulses being thus intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel.
As far as weight was concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as even a possibility for road
use. It was interesting to me only as all machinery was interesting. I followed in the English and
American magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and most
particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by
the vaporization of gasoline. The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first
time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received
with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal
combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated
conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might
carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people - they are so wise and practical that
they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations.
That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair
means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I
could be sure they would do little work.
The gas engine interested me and I followed its progress, but only from curiosity, until about
1885 or 1886 when, the steam engine being discarded as the motive power for the carriage that I
intended someday to build, I had to look around for another sort of motive power. In 1885 I
repaired an Otto engine at the Eagle Iron Works in Detroit. No one in town knew anything about
them. There was a rumour that I did and, although I had never before been in contact with one, I
undertook and carried through the job. That gave me a chance to study the new engine at first
hand and in 1887 I built one on the Otto four-cycle model just to see if I understood the
principles. "Four cycle" means that the piston traverses the cylinder four times to get one power
impulse. The first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the third is the explosion or
power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the waste gas. The little model worked well
enough; it had a one-inch bore and a three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did
not develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the engines being offered
commercially. I gave it away later to a young man who wanted it for something or other and
whose name I have forgotten; it was eventually destroyed. That was the beginning of the work
with the internal combustion engine.
I was then on the farm to which I had It was in 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It
was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes the fly-wheel
had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the first four- cycle engine of the Otto type and the
start on a double cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. I fairly
knew my way about. The double cylinder I thought could be applied to a road vehicle and my
original idea was to put it on a bicycle with a direct connection to the crankshaft and allowing for
the rear wheel of the bicycle to act as the balance wheel. The speed was going to be varied only
by the throttle. I never carried out this plan because it soon became apparent that the engine,
gasoline tank, and the various necessary controls would be entirely too heavy for a bicycle. The
plan of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering power the other
would be exhausting. This naturally would not require so heavy a fly-wheel to even the
application of power. The work started in my shop on the farm. Then I was offered a job with the
Detroit Electric Company as an engineer and machinist at forty-five dollars a month. I took it
because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and I had decided to get away from
farm life anyway. The timber had all been cut. We rented a house on Bagley Avenue, Detroit. The
workshop came along and I set it up in a brick shed at the back of the house. During the first
several months I was in the night shift at the electric-light plant - which gave me very little time
for experimenting - but after that I was in the day shift and every night and all of every Saturday
night I worked on the new motor. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work with interest is
ever hard. I always am certain of results. They always come if you work hard enough. But it was
a very great thing to have my wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that
way.
I had to work from the ground up that is, although I knew that a number of people were working
on horseless carriages, I could not know what they were doing. The hardest problems to
overcome were in the making and breaking of the spark and in the avoidance of excess weight.
For the transmission, the steering gear, and the general construction, I could draw on my
experience with the steam tractors. In 1892 I completed my first motor car, but it was not until
the spring of the following year that it ran to my satisfaction. This first car had something of the
appearance of a buggy. There were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch
stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. I made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam
engine that I had bought. They developed about four horsepower. The power was transmitted
from the motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a
chain. The car would hold two people, the seat being suspended on posts and the body on
elliptical springs. There were two speeds - one of ten and the