Eager 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.