thing 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 young wife was exceedingly concerned about his health;
the neighbors' snap judgment was that he was insane. Only two other
Americans, Charles B. Duryea and Ellwood Haynes, were attempting to
construct an automobile at that time. Long before Ford was ready with
his machine, others had begun to appear. Duryea turned out his first one
in 1892; and foreign makes began to appear in considerable numbers. But
the Detroit mechanic had a more comprehensive inspiration. He was not
working to make one of the finely upholstered and beautifully painted
vehicles that came from overseas. "Anything that isn't good for
everybody is no good at all," he said. Precisely as