The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (6 page)

Ford began work at Flower Brothers in December 1879 for $2.50 a week. Located at the corner of Woodbridge and Brush Streets, this shop made brass and iron castings on one floor and finished them on another. As an apprentice, Ford worked on a small milling machine shaping brass valves. The activities of this busy shop must have intoxicated the mechanics-mad youth. Frederick Strauss offered a description of Flower Brothers that captured the noisy, bustling atmosphere of this small-scale industrial enterprise:

Strauss also related that when the heat became too oppressive in the low-ceilinged shop, he and Henry often slipped away to a cooler building across the street for half-hour breaks.
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After some nine months, however, Ford left Flower Brothers to broaden his mechanical experience. As he explained later, apprentices in Detroit had to serve four-year terms, and the masters “showed us how to do a few things very well. That's why I changed; so that I could learn more about different things.” Thus, in August 1880, he moved to the Detroit Dry Dock Company, the largest shipbuilding factory in the city, although he had to take a pay cut to $2.00a week. Sitting at the foot of Orleans Street on the Detroit River, this enterprise sprawled along the riverfront for seven hundred feet and encompassed two large docks, a machine shop, an engine works, a brass-and-iron foundry, and a boiler shop. The company manufactured a variety of iron ships—steamers, barks, barges, schooners, tug-boats—and built engines ranging from 600to 3,500horsepower to power them along. Ford was assigned to the engine works and came into contact with a wide variety of power plants.
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He always looked back fondly upon his days at the Detroit Dry Dock Company, viewing it as the place where he received his basic mechanical training. “I passed my apprenticeship without trouble—that is, I was qualified to be a machinist long before my three-year term had expired,” he related in
My Life and Work.
While at this factory, he also had a memorable encounter with its chief engineer, Frank E. Kirby. One day, as Ford related the story, he was struggling to push a heavy wheelbarrow up a gangplank into a ship when Kirby walked by, spotted him, and called out encouragingly, “Stick in your toenails, boy, and you'll make it!” Ford added impishly, “I've been sticking in my toenails ever since.” He greatly admired Kirby, and in 1918he hired the engineer to help construct Eagle Boats during World War I. When Ford built a huge engineering laboratory in Dearborn, he ordered that the names of over a dozen celebrated scientists and inventors be carved above the large entry portal. Alongside Galileo, Copernicus,
Edison, Newton, and several others stands a name in letters equally tall: KIRBY.
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On weekends, after the long days spent laboring at the Detroit Dry Dock Company, Ford soaked up the sights and sounds of this booming industrial city. He would often accompany Frederick Strauss, who now was working at the Grand Trunk Railroad roundhouse, to his home for Sunday dinner, after which the two would stroll down to the river to watch the watercraft, especially the steamboats. They skipped rocks and engaged in boyish horseplay. According to Strauss, his companion was overflowing with plans for making things, although they were rarely fulfilled. Ford bought castings for a little steam engine that was never assembled; he secured a small galvanized boiler that was never put into operation; he got his hands on some lumber for building a boat, but the craft never made it into the water. “Henry always had another idea,” Strauss recalled many years later.
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Ford's industrious nature proved more fruitful in another area. During evenings, he worked a second job, with jeweler Robert Magill, who had a shop on Baker Street, cleaning clocks and watches. One evening when the owner was absent, the youth audaciously exceeded his authority.

After putting in a ten-hour day at the shipbuilding company, Ford spent six evenings a week laboring over watches for a wage of fifty cents per night. This was probably a necessity, since his lodging and food cost of $3.50 a week—by now he was staying at a boardinghouse—outstripped his modest salary of $2.00. Around this same time, according to Ford, he began to dream that “I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents and nearly started in the business.” He figured that a production of two thousand watches a day would allow him to meet this low cost, and he started planning and designing machinery. The prospect of selling over a half-million watches a year eventually scuttled the plan, but, as Ford observed, “Even then I wanted to build something in quantity.”
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Within a couple of years, Henry had settled into the life of a young Detroit machinist. When Magill sold his clock shop, the youth's Dry Dock Company salary had risen sufficiently for him to quit evening work altogether.
He visited the Ford farm occasionally on weekends, and increasingly spent after-work hours pondering mechanical issues. He read back copies of publications such as
Scientific American
and studied closely Michael Fara-day's book,
Treatise on the Steam Engine.
In an English magazine,
World of Science,
he encountered a story about a new “silent gas engine” that had recently appeared. Called the Otto engine, it featured a single large cylinder and ran on illuminating gas. Ford followed the development of this innovation, particularly “the hints of the possible replacement of the illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline.” He began tinkering with mechanical gadgets. He built a small turbine, powered it with water pressure by attaching it to a faucet in the shed behind his boardinghouse, and hooked up a small lathe to the turbine. He ran the lathe in his room most evenings, but politely refrained from doing so on Sunday to avoid offending the family who owned the boardinghouse, who were “Sabbatarians of the old-school, rigid type.”
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Happily ensconced in an urban world of manufacturing and machines, Ford seemed to have made a complete transition from farm boy to city mechanic. So why, given the relatively smooth course of this youthful vocational journey and its happy conclusion, did he continue to embellish the story of his father as obstructionist, even a tyrant? Several factors came into play. First, resentment of William over Mary's untimely death continued to fester. Second, Ford betrayed a fundamental personality trait that would reappear throughout his life: an unwillingness, or inability, to grant others any measure of credit for his achievements. This impulse forced him to demonize his father to emphasize his own heroic, mythical quest to discover the mechanical future. Finally, by mid-adolescence his mechanical bent had become so single-minded that any kind of opposition, no matter how measured or mild, seemed like a gigantic barrier. Thus William's caution and mild skepticism cast him as a villain in his son's dream of abandoning farm life altogether and making the pilgrimage toward the mechanical glow of the nearby city.

But Henry Ford's melodrama with his father, all the more potent for being largely imagined, still had one more act to play out. After some three years in Detroit, his life took another important turn.

In late summer or early fall 1882, Henry halfheartedly returned to the family farm. As he had done nearly every year since his move to the city, he took some time off from the Detroit Dry Dock Company to help his family with
the harvest for several weeks. But this time he ended up staying much longer. Abandoning his job as a machinist, he began nearly a decade of ambivalence, in which he tried to straddle the worlds of Detroit and Dearborn, the city and the country, the future and the past.

A new mechanical opportunity, complete with an independent role, caused him to abandon his life as an urban mechanic. John Gleason, a neighboring farmer, had purchased a portable steam engine from Westinghouse with plans to use it on his place and then hire it out for threshing grain and sawing timber later. But his skills proved inadequate to operating this high-speed engine, and the local engineer he hired turned out to be inept. So Gleason called upon Ford for assistance. “I have an idea he was afraid of his machine,” Henry related much later. “To tell the truth I was frightened myself.” William Ford believed that the high-speed, quick-steaming engine might be too much for his son's limited experience, but he reluctantly approved. So Henry took up the task. In his own words, “It was not long before my doubts entirely disappeared, and getting a grip on the engine, so to speak, I got a grip on myself.” He seems to have discovered part of his life's calling by working and maintaining Westinghouse No. 345, with its steam boiler mounted on the rear of a small, sturdy, four-wheeled chassis:

Ford's mechanical work for Gleason opened other avenues. He started experimenting with building his own “farm locomotive,” or prototype tractor. Rescuing an old, discarded mowing machine from his father's farm, he mounted a homemade steam engine upon its large frame and connected a crude belt to its cast-iron wheels. When fired up, the contraption crawled along for forty feet but then broke down. It was a victim of what would be a
long-standing problem: power insufficient for the weight of the vehicle. He thought about alternative sources of power, such as electricity or gasoline, and continued to experiment.

In addition, while working area farms with Gleason's portable steam engine, Ford met John Cheeney, a regional manager for Westinghouse. Impressed by the young man's knowledge and enthusiasm, Cheeney hired him as a demonstrator and repairman for the company's machines. Ford traveled from farm to farm throughout southern Michigan from 1883 to 1885 working as a company troubleshooter, setting up and fixing Westinghouse steam engines. He began to encounter other types of engines, made by the Mills and Daimler companies, and broadened his knowledge by familiarizing himself with their design and characteristics. He also expanded his training in another way. During the winter season, when outdoor work with farm machines was impossible, he entered a Detroit business school called Goldsmith, Bryant & Stratton Business University—it was part of a national chain of institutions founded in the mid-nineteenth century—to study the rudiments of mechanical drawing, bookkeeping, and business practices.
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In 1886, in light of his son's successful work with farm machines, William Ford made a final effort to anchor him to the land permanently. He offered Henry eighty acres he had purchased in the 1860s, the Moir place, named after the previous owner, which included a small house and abundant forest growth. As Ford noted, William's offer was good only if “I gave up being a machinist.” But he decided to accept, not out of a newfound desire to be a farmer, but because it offered an opportunity to use his mechanical expertise. He set himself up in the lumber business. He purchased a large circular saw, rented a portable steam engine to run it, and started to harvest the timber on the tract. Within a short time, he had built up a flourishing business and was supplying lumber to neighbors and to shipyards, factories, and shops in Detroit.
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But Ford had another compelling reason for taking his father's offer. At a dance on New Year's Night, 1885, at the Martindale House in nearby Greenfield, he had been introduced to a pretty local girl named Clara Jane Bryant by one of his cousins. He was enthralled. They courted, and were engaged on April 19, 1886. Since Ford had so little money, a quick marriage was not possible. So, when William offered the Moir place, Henry saw an opportunity to amass a respectable sum of money. After two years of hard work and saving, he married Clara on April 11, 1888. Though they set up housekeeping in the small house he had been occupying as a bachelor, they began to design a new abode; over the next year, Ford constructed what became known as the Square House. This story-and-a-half cottage was
built with lumber from his farm and featured a wraparound porch, dormer windows, and gingerbread columns and balustrades. The couple moved into their new home in June 1889.
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