When he had passed the second block he began to wonder how to turn and drive back. At the end of the third block he solved the difficulty. He stopped the car, jumped out, lifted it around, and headed it for home.
By this time the engine was missing again, but it continued gallantly to jerk and push the light car forward until Ford had reached his own yard. Then he stopped it, pushed the machine into the shed, and turned to Mrs. Ford.
“Well, it runs all right. Guess I’ll have some breakfast and go to bed,” he said, and Mrs. Ford hurried in to make coffee.
“How did I feel? Why, I felt tired,” he explains now. “I went to bed and slept all next day. I knew my real work with the car had just begun. I had to get capital somehow, start a factory, get people interested—everything. Besides, I saw a chance for a lot of improvements in that car.”
CHAPTER XVI
ENTER COFFEE JIM
Probably the disposition to rest on our laurels is more than anything else responsible for the mediocrity of the individual and the slow progress of the race. Having accomplished something, most of us spend some time in admiring it and ourselves. It is characteristic of big men that past achievements do not hold their interest; they are concerned only with their efforts to accomplish still more in the future.
Henry Ford had built an automobile. His four years’ work had been successful, and that little machine, scarcely larger than a bicycle, with its pulley-clutch, puffing little one-cylinder engine, and crude steering apparatus, stood for an epoch in human progress.
He might be pardoned if he had spent a month or two in self-congratulation, in driving the car up and down Detroit’s streets and enjoying the comments of the men who had laughed at him so long.
But apparently it did not occur to him. He saw already a number of possible improvements in the little machine. He was as indifferent to the praise of other men as he had been to their ridicule.
After that one day of rest he resumed almost the old routine. When a few men at the Edison plant laughingly inquired how he was getting along with the great invention he remarked quietly that the machine was running; he had been riding in it already. Then at 6 o’clock he hurried home and out to the shed for the usual evening’s work. He was trying to plan an engine which would give more power; incidentally in his odd moments he was working to improve the steering apparatus.