A few days later they signed the contract. The lot cost seven hundred dollars, fifty dollars down and the rest in monthly payments. Ford drew from the savings bank two hundred dollars, his bank balance at the time he left the farm, and bought lumber. After that he spent his evenings building the house.
While he hammered and sawed Mrs. Ford was at work in the yard. She set out rose bushes, planted a vegetable garden behind the shed. The neighboring women came over to get acquainted, and asked her to come in some time and bring her sewing as soon as she got settled. After those six months in a dreary boarding house it must have been pleasant to her to see the beginnings of a home and a friendly circle again.
“This seems to be a nice neighborhood; I think we’re going to enjoy it here,” she said later to her husband, holding the lantern while he nailed down the floors, long after dark.
“That’s good—glad you like it,” he answered. “I wish the place was finished, so I could get to work.”
Meantime, at the Edison plant, he was making his first experiments in applying his machine-idea to the managing of men.
CHAPTER XIII
EIGHT HOURS, BUT NOT FOR HIMSELF
When Henry Ford became manager of the mechanical department the workmen in the Edison plants were working twelve-hour shifts as a matter of course. In those days the theory of practically all employers was that men, like the rest of their equipment, should be worked to the limit of their strength.
“We had about forty men on the regular list and four or five substitutes who were kept busy filling in for the regular men who were sick or tired out,” he said. “I hadn’t been in charge long before it struck me there was something wrong. If our machines had broken down as often as our men did anybody would have known we weren’t handling them right.
“No good engineer will run a machine at the limit of its power and speed for very long. It hurts the machine. It isn’t sentimentalism to take care of the machine; it’s plain common sense and efficiency. It isn’t sentimentalism to look out for the interests of the men.
“The sooner people get over the idea that there’s a difference between ideals of brotherhood and practical common sense the sooner we’ll do away with waste and friction of all kinds and have a world that’s run right. The only trouble now is that people haven’t the courage to put their ideals to work. They say, ‘Oh, of course, theoretically we believe in them—but they aren’t practical!’ What’s the use of believing in anything that isn’t practical? If it’s any good at all it’s practical. The whole progress of the world has been made by men who went to work and used their impractical theories.