The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (8 page)

To secure his position as an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, Ford had approached Charles Phelps Gilbert, then general manager of the company, and inquired about work. Gilbert hired him to replace a man recently killed at a substation located at the corner of Woodward and Willis Streets, and Ford started at midnight on the very day he and Clara moved to Detroit. Edison Illuminating, founded in 1886, focused on the residential market and was furnishing electricity to three-fourths of electricity-using Detroit houses by the 1890s. Ford would be employed by Edison for much of the next decade.

He worked the night shift, from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., for $40 a month. The Willis and Woodward substation contained three large engines that generated electricity for houses in the vicinity: a 100-horsepower Beck steam engine, a 300-horsepower Rice dynamo, and an Arlington and Sims 150-horsepower generator. Ford's job was to supervise the operation of these generators and maintain them in smooth working order. Within a month, he took advantage of a disaster to enjoy his first professional triumph. The Beck engine failed, and inspection revealed major damage with a broken piston rod, a hole in the cylinder block, and a broken valve. Repairs promised to be costly and time-consuming, but Ford, confident of his abilities with steam engines, volunteered to undertake the task himself. To the amazement of his superiors, within a week he had made his own pattern, patched the block, and also fixed the piston rod and valve. Gilbert immediately gave him a $5.00-a-month raise, and did the same thing the following month. Ford's reputation and salary rose steadily, he moved to the day shift, and was promoted to the company's main station, at Washington Boulevard and State Street, within a few months. By 1893, the thirty-year-old engineer had become one of the company's most valuable employees.
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Years later, journalists interviewed Alexander Dow, who had succeeded
Gilbert as manager of Edison, and John R. Wilde, who had been Ford's first supervisor at the substation. Ford, they recalled, had been quiet, good-natured, deeply interested in his work, and unusually dedicated to learning about engine technology. In Dow's words, Ford had been a “very resourceful” figure at the company:

Many of Detroit's machinists were similarly impressed by Ford and his evident skill. Charles T. Bush, a fellow mechanic who first met Ford in the early 1890s, was struck by his drive to improve the steam engines at Edison. “He always figured that there was some little improvement that he could make,” noted Bush. “He thought he could make them run better, make them use less steam, and get more out of a ton of coal.” Ford also made an indelible impression on Frederick F. Ingram, a Detroit manufacturer who had a machine malfunction in his factory that no one could repair. He appealed to his friend Alexander Dow to send over the engineer about whom Dow always was bragging. Ingram related the following tale:

Though Ford's engineering expertise and dedication became well known in Detroit machinist circles, it was not matched by intense ambition. On the contrary, he became notorious at Edison for his relaxed work habits and prankster personality. While at the main station, Ford once got even with an employee who had left his tools and work clothes scattered about by nailing his shoes to the floor with long spikes. Another time, workers repairing an engine in the basement of an old building felt faint and began gasping for air. They ran outside to discover Ford, along with his friend John Wilde, dropping sulfur onto a large shovel filled with hot coals and squeezing
a bellows to blow the acrid fumes into the building through a knothole in the wall. Jim Bishop, one of Ford's cronies, was heading home from work one day when he saw a man riding away on his shiny new bicycle. Yelling “Stop thief!,” he ran off in pursuit. To his surprise, the thief began laughing so hard he fell off the bicycle, and Bishop caught him. It was Ford.
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In fact, Ford evinced a rather casual attitude toward his job. By 1893, his skills had made him something of a troubleshooter, so his work schedule consisted of many hours of slack time punctuated by maintenance duties and an occasional emergency repair on one of the company's generating machines. As Ford himself once admitted of his Edison days, “There wasn't much to do around the plant.” Frederick Strauss—Ford's old apprentice friend, who now worked at a neighboring shop—painted a similar portrait of the engineer's slack work routine. “Henry never used his hands, to tell the truth. He never came to work until after nine o'clock either,” Strauss recounted. “Henry was a free lance at Edison. He had to stand no watch. He would be over at my shop every day three or four hours, just monkeying around there.”
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But Ford's real interest and energy were flowing elsewhere. Though he performed his job at Edison with great dedication and skill, he was less interested in meeting the electrical needs of Detroit than in pursuing a hobby that had become a passion. Working in his spare time at home and at Edison during slack time, Ford had become consumed with building a crude internal-combustion engine. Such a motor, he had become convinced, eventually could be connected to a moving vehicle and fulfill the dream of a horseless carriage. Back in Dearborn, of course, he had tinkered with developing a farm tractor that would move under its own power, but then his focus had been on steam engines. Now he began to veer in a new direction with his experimentation.

In particular, Ford was caught up in a national craze for bicycles in the early 1890s. He bought one and began to pedal about Detroit. These jaunts on a two-wheeled machine seemed to trigger new thinking about the mechanical possibilities of transportation. Ford had begun to read articles about new, gasoline-powered engines that were starting to appear. He also visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and witnessed a two-cylinder Daimler engine from Germany that had been mounted on a firehose cart. But Ford thought it might be possible to mount the engine on a bicycle. Even though this idea proved impractical because of the engine's weight, the seed had been planted.
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Thus, in 1893, he embarked upon what would be his life's work. In December, Henry and Clara had moved to 58 Bagley Avenue, where they occupied the left half of a two-story brick house. Ford built a workshop in a
small shed behind his home, and at the Edison Company he squirreled away some tools in a basement room across the alley behind the main building. During weekends, evenings, and odd moments in the workday, he constructed a small gasoline engine from scrap-metal parts that he had salvaged. It was a crude contraption of old steam pipes, pieces of brass, steel tubing, and a handwheel from an old lathe. The four-cycle engine featured a homemade piston and rings fitted into a cylinder bored from a one-inch pipe. It was mounted at one end of an old board a foot and a half long; a flywheel was placed at the other end; a rod connected the piston to the crankshaft; and a small, two-to-one gear arrangement operated a cam, which opened the intake and exhaust valves and timed the spark, which came from the building's regular electrical current.

After several weeks of tinkering, Ford finally got the engine to run on Christmas Eve, 1893. According to the legendary story, he brought it into Clara's kitchen while she was preparing food for the next day's holiday meal. He clamped the small engine to the kitchen sink, and secured his wife's help to trickle gasoline into the intake while he turned the flywheel. After a couple of false starts that required Ford to make adjustments, the engine finally roared to life and ran for about thirty seconds. The sink vibrated intensely from the shaking, and small flames shot out of the exhaust. Ford was ecstatic. Having proved to himself that a gasoline engine could be built to run, he immediately aimed higher. “I didn't stop to play with it,” he said of his engine much later. “I wanted to build a two-cylinder engine … and started work on it right away.” Within a few days, Ford was working on this bigger engine, one that would be powerful enough to run a vehicle.
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Around this time, an important family matter also pressed upon Ford's life. A few weeks before the successful trial in the kitchen, Edsel Bryant Ford had been born to Clara and Henry, on November 6. He would be their only child. The birth inspired a burst of professional zeal on Ford's part as he launched a campaign to secure promotion and a salary increase to meet his new responsibilities. The push was successful. He had been appointed chief engineer at Edison late in 1893, and his salary almost doubled, to $90 a month. But, even more important, this new position gave him flexibility in his work schedule. Though Ford was on twenty-four-hour-a-day call, his supervisory duties varied with the demands of any given day. This allowed him considerable free time to tinker at home, to visit machine shops, to trade tips and shoptalk with mechanics, and to experiment with improving his little gasoline engine. An evening job teaching a metalworking class at the local YMCA gave him access to the school shop to work metal parts for his hobby.
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Over the next two years, Ford spent nearly every free minute refining
his engine and building a carriage that he hoped it would power. He recalled later, “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.” Some of Ford's experimentation took place in the shed behind his home at 58 Bagley. Felix Julien, a retired coal-seller who occupied the other half of the house, had become fascinated with his neighbor's mechanical work, and surrendered his half of the shed to Ford in return for being allowed to observe. So, in the evenings, the old man would pull up a chair in the shop, or sit on the windowsill, and watch Ford tinker with his engine.
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But much of the work occurred in the informal shop he had established behind the Edison Company, in a basement room across the alley. A number of cronies gathered around Ford as they built and discarded engine parts, experimented with mechanical techniques, and shared no small amount of horseplay and male camaraderie. Jim Bishop and George Cato, both skilled mechanics for Edison, were regular participants. Bishop helped Ford build the carriage body, while Cato worked on the ignition for the new engine and developed a pair of “ignitors” for the cylinders. Ed “Spider” Huff, another mechanic friend, helped with electrical work. Charles B. King, a college-trained engineer who also was working on his own motor-powered carriage, lent assistance. Oliver Barthel—King's young assistant, whom Ford had instructed in the YMCA metalworking class—joined the group and contributed his considerable skills as machinist and designer.
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Ford lured Frederick Strauss, who was now working at the Wain Machine Shop, into the mechanics circle. Strauss left a picture of the group and the setting behind the Edison Company:

As the months went on, Ford made slow but steady progress toward bringing his prototype to completion. A crucial advance came in 1896.
Barthel, an avid reader of technological literature, called Ford's attention to a pair of articles from
American Machinist
dated November 7, 1895, and January 9, 1896. The first described the successful Kane-Pennington gasoline engine, and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of this light, powerful motor. The second explained how a machinist might build a similar model from common scraps of material in any shop, and offered detailed drawings of such a project. Ford pored over the articles, as did many other machinists, and used them as the basis for his engine design.
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The labor of Ford and his associates reached a fever pitch during the winter and spring of 1896. Ford scrambled to procure materials from all over Detroit:

Clara Ford became concerned about the constant purchasing of materials. As Henry's sister Margaret recalled, Clara “wondered many times if she would live to see the bank account restored.”
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The Quadricycle, as Ford and his assistants were now calling it, gradually took shape. The engine, which moved toward completion at the Edison shop, was a four-cycle motor with two cylinders of two-and-a-half-inch bore and six-inch stroke. It generated between 3 and 4 horsepower and relied upon an ignition system with a spark breaker fitted into a hole in the cylinder. The carriage, which Ford and Bishop had mounted on sawhorses at the Bagley Avenue shed, had the look of a small, boxy buggy. A carriage seat sat above and in front of the engine, flywheel, and transmission belt; the vehicle's squared front housed its “steering bar,” connected to the front wheels. The whole was mounted on four twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The vehicle's transmission system featured two speeds—a “low” of ten miles an hour and a “high” of twenty miles an hour—and a neutral gear. A clutch lever tightened and released a belt that dictated among these three choices, and power was transferred by this belt from the motor to a countershaft, and then from the countershaft to the rear wheels, by a chain. A flywheel was spun to start the engine; a crude
brake could stop the vehicle when it was placed in neutral. The Quadricycle had a total weight of around five hundred pounds, a gasoline tank with a capacity of three gallons, and no reverse gear.
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