Together they wandered over the works, and the foreman, shouting to make himself heard in the clanging, pounding uproar, pointed out here and there a new device, an improved valve, a different gearing. Ford saw it all with interest, he was wider awake, more alive than he had been for months.
When he was leaving the shop some time later he had a sudden expansive impulse which broke through his customary reticence.
“I’m thinking of building an engine myself,” he said. “A little one, to use on the farm. I figure I can work something out that will take the place of some of my horses.”
The foreman looked at Ford in amazement. It is hard to realize now how astounding such an idea must have seemed to him. Here was a man who proposed to take a locomotive into his cornfield and set it to plowing! The wild impossibility of the plan would have staggered any reasonable person. The foreman decided that this was one of Ford’s quiet jokes. He laughed appreciatively.
“Great idea!” he applauded. “All you’ll need then’ll be a machine to give milk, and you’ll have the farm complete. Well, come around any time, glad to see you.”
Ford made the rounds of Detroit’s machine shops that day, but he did not mention his idea again. It was gradually shaping itself in his mind, in part a revival of his boyish plan for that first steam engine he had built of scraps from his father’s shop, in part adapted from the article he had read about the horseless carriage.
He was obliged to keep enough horses to handle the work of the farm when it was heaviest; in the slack season and during the winter the extra animals were necessarily idle, wasting food and barn space, and waste of any kind was an irritation to his methodical mind. It seemed to him that a machine could be built which would do a great part of the horses’ work in the fields and cost nothing while not in use.
That the undertaking was revolutionary, visionary, probably ridiculous to other people, did not deter him; he thought he could do it, and that was enough.
“Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world,” he says to-day. “Every generation has its own problem; it ought to find its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can’t do things better than our fathers did.”
That belief had been steadily growing in him while his inherited thrift and his machine-ideas improved on the farming methods of Greenfield; it crystallized into a creed when his old friend laughed at his idea of replacing horses with a machine.