native mechanic in Detroit. Probably American annals contain no finer
story than that of this simple American workman. Yet from the beginning it
seemed inevitable that Henry Ford should play this appointed part in the
world. Born in Michigan in 1863, the son of an English farmer who had
emigrated to Michigan and a Dutch mother, Ford had always demonstrated an
interest in things far removed from his farm. Only mechanical devices
interested him. He liked getting in the crops, because McCormick harvesters
did most of the work; it was only the machinery of the dairy that held him
enthralled. He developed destructive tendencies as a boy; he had to take
everything to pieces. He horrified a rich playmate by resolving his new
watch into its component parts--and promptly quieted him by putting it
together again. "Every clock in the house shuddered when it saw me coming,"
he recently said. He constructed a small working forge in his school-yard,
and built a small steam engine that could make ten miles an hour. He spent
his winter evenings reading mechanical and scientific journals; he cared
little for general literature, but machinery in any form was almost a
pathological obsession. Some boys run away from the farm to join the circus
or to go to sea; Henry Ford at the age of sixteen ran away to get a job in
a machine shop. Here one anomaly immediately impressed him. No two machines
were made exactly alike; each was regarded as a separate job. With his
savings from his weekly wage of $2.50, young Ford purchased a three dollar
watch, and immediately dissected it. If several thousand of these watches
could be made, each one exactly alike, they would cost only thirty-seven
cents apiece. "Then," said Ford to himself, "everybody could have one." He
had fairly elaborated his plans to start a factory on this basis when his
father's illness called him back to the farm.

This was about 1880. Ford's next conspicuous appearance in Detroit was
about 1892. This appearance was not only conspicuous; it was exceedingly
noisy. Detroit now knew him as the pilot of a queer affair that whirled and
lurched through her thoroughfares, making as much disturbance as a freight
train. In reading his technical journals Ford had met many descriptions of
horseless carriages; the consequence was that he had again broken away from
the farm, taken a job at $45 a month in a Detroit machine shop, and devoted
his evenings to the production of a gasoline engine. His you