One day he called his wife out to the shed. The little engine, set up on blocks, was humming away, its flywheel a blur in the air. The high-speed revolutions that made the automobile possible were an accomplished fact.
“Oh, Henry! It’s done! You’ve finished it!” she said happily.
“No, that’s just the beginning. Now I’ve got to figure out the transmission, the steering gear and a—a lot of things,” he replied.
CHAPTER XIV
STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR
Ford was now a man of nearly 30, an insignificant, unimportant unit in the business world of Detroit, merely one of the subordinate managers in the Edison plant. Seeing him on his way home from work, a slender, stooping, poorly dressed man, the firm set of his lips hidden by the sandy mustache he wore then, and his blue eyes already surrounded by a network of tired wrinkles, men probably looked at him half-pityingly, and said: “There’s a man who will never get anywhere.”
He had his farm, unprofitable since he had left it, a small home partly paid for, and the little gas engine, to show for fourteen years of hard work.
Probably he received more than one letter from his father and brothers in Greenfield, urging him to come back to the farm, where he and his wife might live comfortably among their old friends, and he need not work so hard. It would have seemed a wise move.
But with the completion of the little one-cylinder, high-speed engine, Ford was more than ever possessed by his idea. He brought one or two of the men from the Edison shop to see it. They watched it whirring away on its pedestal of blocks, they examined its large cylinder, its short-stroke piston, noted its power, and looked at Ford with some increased respect. But most of them were nevertheless doubtful of the success of the automobile. The idea of a horseless carriage in general use still seemed to them fantastic.
“Well, looks like you could make it go,” they conceded. “But it’s going to be pretty expensive to run. Not many people’ll want to buy it. And where will you get the capital to manufacture it?”
“I’m making it cheap. I’m going to make it cheap enough so every man in this country can have one before I’m through,” Ford said.