The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (9 page)

For all of his labor, Henry Ford was not the first to drive a gasoline motor vehicle on the streets of Detroit. On March 6,1896, Charles B. King debuted his own horseless carriage. With the assistance of Oliver Barthel, King rolled out his vehicle for a public demonstration and ran it a short distance. Detroit newspapers noted, “The first horseless carriage seen in this city was out on the street last night,” and described how “when in motion the connecting rods fly like lightning.” Though this contraption impressed casual observers, however, it disappointed the more knowledgeable. King's vehicle weighed over thirteen hundred pounds, could reach a speed of only five miles an hour, and was little more than a gasoline engine clamped to a horse wagon. Ford, eager to analyze the competition, observed King's maiden voyage as he followed on a bicycle.
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Finally, the stage had been set for one of the seminal moments in American history: Ford was ready for a test run of his Quadricycle. In the early morning of June 4, 1896, after hours of last-minute adjustments at the Bagley Avenue shed, Ford prepared to wheel the vehicle out for its maiden voyage. He and Jim Bishop looked out into the night and saw a slight drizzle dampening the streets. But as they turned the Quadricycle to leave the building, Ford, to his horror, realized a terrible oversight. In his determination to build the vehicle, he had failed to notice that it was too large to fit through the shed door. He grabbed an ax and doubled the opening by knocking out some bricks. The pair then wheeled the Quadricycle out onto the cobblestoned alley.

While Clara Ford watched from the back door under an umbrella, her husband adjusted the gasoline flow, turned on the electrical current from the car's battery, choked the engine by covering the valve's air opening with his finger, and gave the flywheel a turn. After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life, and Ford slipped the clutch lever into low. He headed off, turning quickly from the alley onto the street, and proceeded down Grand River Avenue toward Washington Boulevard. Bishop pedaled ahead on his bicycle, ready to alert any passersby and clear the path. Suddenly, however, the car stopped; Ford heard the engine die. An inspection revealed only a minor problem—a spring supporting one of the electrical “ignitors” had failed—and a quick repair got the vehicle up and running once again. After a brief jaunt, the two returned triumphantly to Bagley Avenue for a nap and a sturdy breakfast, then headed off to work at Edison.

After the Quadricycle's successful trial run, Ford's immediate concern was repairing the Bagley Avenue shed. He hired two bricklayers to fix the
damage and had come home to supervise their work when William Wreford, owner of the residence, showed up to collect the rent. Viewing the damage to his shed, Wreford grew angry until Ford explained the story of the previous night's adventure with the horseless carriage. The landlord asked to see the machine, and immediately his fascination overcame his temper. According to Ford's report, Wreford exclaimed, “If those fellows put that wall back up, how are you going to get your car out again? I've got an idea. Tell those bricklayers to leave that opening and then you can put on swinging doors. That will let you in and out.” Thus was born the first automobile garage in American history.
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The early-morning run of the Quadricycle through the rainy streets of Detroit dramatically marked a new stage in Henry Ford's career: his years-long dream of building a self-powered vehicle had finally become a reality. But this episode, by itself, took him only to the threshold of success. Like the spark needed to explode the gasoline in the chamber of the Quadricy-cle's engine, another element was required to ignite a burst of energy and carry Ford forward. In the form of a dose of encouragement, it came from an unexpected quarter.

Two months after the maiden voyage of his Quadricycle, Henry Ford had an epiphany. In August 1896, he accompanied Alexander Dow, manager of the Edison Illuminating Company, and Hoyt Post, the company attorney, to a professional convention in New York City. Held at the Oriental Hotel at Manhattan Beach—this late-Victorian pleasure palace welcomed visitors with a forest of turrets, vast expanses of spacious verandas, and a constellation of elaborate light fixtures—the meeting gathered representatives of Edison electrical companies from all over the United States. Ford heard lectures, talked with electrical technicians and executives, walked on the beach, and attended receptions.

But the decisive moment at this conclave occurred on August 12, the third evening of the convention. Somehow, Ford wrangled an invitation to an exclusive dinner held in the hotel's private banquet room. In attendance were some of the leading lights in the American electrical industry. The small group included Samuel Insull of Chicago, John W. Lieb of New York, Charles Edgar of Boston, John I. Beggs of Cincinnati, and Dow from Detroit. But most important was the guest of honor, seated at the head of the table: the great inventor himself, Thomas Alva Edison. Far down the table sat the young engineer from Detroit, who so idolized Edison that he had already taken several candid snapshots of the great man on the previous
day, as he loitered about the Oriental Hotel and napped on one of its huge verandas.

During a lull in the dinner conversation, which had been addressed to the problem of charging storage batteries for electric cars, Dow offered an interesting observation. “This young fellow here has made a gas car,” he informed the group, and nodded at Ford. Someone asked the young engineer how he got his vehicle to go, and he started to explain his gasoline engine. Edison, who was hard-of-hearing, strained to listen, so his neighbor traded places and allowed Ford to move up and sit near the head of the table. Edison peppered him with questions about the workings of the engine—he was especially interested in how an electric spark was used to explode the gas in the cylinder—and Ford took a pencil and began to draw on the back of a menu card. In Ford's account:

Henry Ford never forgot the encounter. Up to this point, many of his professional acquaintances had scoffed at his project. They dismissed the gasoline-driven Quadricycle, insisting that he was wasting his time since the future of power lay clearly with electricity. But now the demigod of American technological progress had offered words of encouragement. “That bang on the table was worth worlds to me. No man up to then had given me any encouragement,” Ford related later. “I had hoped I was right, sometimes I knew I was, sometimes I only wondered if I was, but here … out of a clear sky the greatest inventive genius in the world had given me a complete approval.”
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Ford's conversation with Edison initiated a famous friendship. Over the following three decades, the two men would see each other frequently. The Michigan mechanic admired the New Jersey inventor and considered him to be the greatest man not just in the United States but in the world. Ford would acclaim Edison's accomplishments in public print at every opportunity, memorialize his work at Greenfield Village, and glory in the many conversations
they enjoyed on rustic vacations they took together. But in the 1890s, at the outset of their relationship, Edison personified something that the younger man yearned to be: a practical-minded inventor whose technological creations transformed daily life. As the last decade of the nineteenth century drew to a close, this desire had become a crucial element in the makeup of Henry Ford.

By 1896, of course, Thomas Edison already had achieved legendary status as a technological revolutionary. The Wizard of Menlo Park—so named after the New Jersey town that housed his research laboratory—had migrated from rural Ohio to New York City in 1868 and burst on the scene with his invention of the stock-quotation printer, which was quickly adopted by Western Union. In subsequent years, a long parade of Edison's creations came out of Menlo Park to transform the American landscape: the “talking machine,” or phonograph, in 1877; the incandescent light in 1879; the multiplex telegraph; improved versions of the telephone and the typewriter; the basic elements of a central power-generating system for bringing electricity to homes, businesses, and factories; a new, efficient dynamo suitable for industrial use; and many other patented devices. These achievements popularized Edison as a kind of self-made genius of the Gilded Age. He captured the American imagination as both a heroic individual and a modern organizer who could put together a research organization, manufacture millions of lightbulbs, and gain the financial backing of J. P. Morgan to establish the nation's first power-generating plant in New York City. Part rural self-made man and part urban industrial engineer, Edison appealed to Americans in their struggle to accommodate the old and the new.
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To Ford, he was a god. As he once confessed, “The Edison who came into my life in this remarkable way [at Manhattan Beach] had been my ideal since boyhood. I first heard of him in a way that impressed me during 1879 or '80 when the invention and quick adoption of the incandescent light made him a world figure and filled the newspapers with articles about him.” Edison's electrical technology alone had cut a wide swath in the daily lives of modern Americans, providing the wherewithal for a great leap forward in industrial production while also illuminating the homes of common citizens. Edison's inventions had ushered the United States into the modern age, and Ford noted, “He takes the strictly practical view—which he has carried through all his work—that results and results alone count.”
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Even more important to Ford, however, were two other qualities. First, Edison brought to his work a combination of mental habits that Ford found inspiring. Edison's clarity and logic in addressing scientific issues were matched by his imagination and creativity in coming up with technological innovations. His practicality led him to use science not for abstract or esoteric
purposes, but to solve daily problems in life. “He was a scientist but also he was a man of extraordinary common sense. It was a new combination,” Ford observed. “[He] ended the distinction between the theoretical man of science and the practical man of science.” Edison matched this utilitarian bent with a finely honed sense of efficiency in concentrating his mental resources. As Ford said, “His whole life is arranged on a program of economy of effort—he dislikes doing anything which is not necessary for him to do.”
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But Edison's powerful work ethic most impressed his disciple. As Ford confessed:

Edison's concern for bettering the lot of common people also prompted Ford's veneration. Rather than seeking to build a huge fortune, the inventor found greatness as “a servant of humanity.” Money in itself had little meaning for Edison, but provided merely the means to a greater reward: conducting more experiments and providing service to the public. In “the age of Edison,” Ford insisted,

Edison served as a role model for Ford. From the moment of their first acquaintance, Ford sought to emphasize their kinship as inventors. He liked to tell others, for example, how Edison, the day after their dinner meeting at Manhattan Beach, invited him to go on the train back to New York City. “We talked mostly of the difficulties of obtaining the right kind of materials
and supplies in the working out of new inventions,” Ford described. “For instance, I told him that for my first car I could find no suitable tires and had to use bicycle tires, and he told me something of the trouble which he had met in finding suitable bulbs for the incandescent light and how he had to have them blown himself.” Ford's conclusion spoke volumes about his identification with the great man: “The pioneers in every art may plan perfectly, but always their first products must be compromises, for they can never obtain the right materials.”
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