Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age

by Lawrence Goldstone

  When Henry was fifteen—or thirteen, or perhaps twelve—according to friends and relatives interviewed by biographers, he was given a pocket watch for his birthday, which he immediately took apart and then put back together. From there, he is reported to have taken to repairing pocket watches for anyone in the area who was in need.5

  Whenever he did this—or even if he did it—Ford’s ability to visualize, dissect, and reimagine mechanical devices was prodigious. Any period of technological change will evoke the latent genius specific to its era, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mechanical brilliance could find expression in a variety of venues, none more so than transportation. In My Life and Work, Ford declared, “My toys were tools—they still are! Every fragment of machinery was a treasure.”6

  Ford left the farm to work in Detroit at either age sixteen or seventeen. He walked the 6 miles to the city, as he hated horses. He moved in with his aunt and worked at a variety of jobs, most in machine shops. In 1882, for reasons never made clear, Ford gave up a job at a toolmaker’s—which he later claimed to have loved—to return to the farm. Ford later insisted it was “more because I wanted to experiment than because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days.” His father also gave him 40 acres of land, hoping he would clear and till it, but Ford had other plans for the property.7

  Living at home turned out to have unexpected benefits. At a dance in 1885, Ford met a young woman named Clara Bryant, a friend of his sister’s. He claimed to know within thirty seconds that she was the girl for him, the sort of romantic embellishment that became attached to many of his reminiscences. Ford—serious and a lifelong teetotaler, although not for religious reasons—was appealing to Clara, and the two soon struck up a romance. They would be married in 1888, on Clara’s twenty-second birthday, and she would prove such a perfect mate that Ford would dub her “the believer” for her steadfast conviction in his plans, ideas, and eventual success. Ford would have had this relationship too portrayed as strife-free, but while they remained married until Ford’s death in 1947, there were some serious strains, especially in the final two decades of Ford’s life, most concerning Ford’s overbearing, even abusive treatment of Edsel, their only child.

  After the wedding, Ford remained in Greenfield, earning money by setting up a sawmill for the timber on the tract of land given to him by his father. Clara handled the family finances and drew up the plans for the couple’s first house. A turning point seemed to arrive when Henry heard that one of his father’s neighbors owned a stationary steam engine that had broken down. He convinced both men to give him a shot at repairing it. After he did so, he was hired to both operate the machine and maintain it. From there, he got himself a job repairing Westinghouse steam engines owned by the area’s farmers. He may also have set up a workshop on his father’s farm and built a steam engine of his own. Although a recent biographer is skeptical, insisting the account is “clouded” and “vague,” Ford himself was definite enough.8

  It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it developed plenty of power and a neat control—which is so easy with a steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe required an excess of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers—the engine and control problems were simple enough—and then I definitely abandoned the whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam.9

  He also claimed to have built a number of other motors including, in 1887, a scale-model Otto, which he then “gave away later to a young man who wanted it for something or other and whose name I have forgotten.” These accounts, specific as they are, may be fanciful: as loyal a Ford associate as Clara later claimed no recollection of anything of the sort.

  At some point—Ford said in 1886, although both Clara and his sister insisted it was 1890—he was called to the Eagle Iron Works, where, because of his talent with machines, he was asked to examine an Otto gas engine that had broken down. Fortunately for Ford, who was never much of a reader, he had taken to poring through magazines that described the latest advances in engine technology, including a piece on the “Silent Otto.” Tinkering with a machine he had encountered only in print, Ford nonetheless got the motor running smoothly and as a result was asked to repair similar devices (although one contemporary insists that Ford did not repair that first Otto, but merely “saw it”).10 Ford later said that he recognized instantly the need to move from coal gas to liquid fuel in order to apply the Otto to road travel. In any case, from there he was called on regularly to repair both Ottos and steam engines, traveling regularly to and from Detroit.

  In late 1891, Ford, returning from repairing an Otto in Detroit, announced to Clara that he intended to build an automobile, and perhaps even drew her a crude sketch on the back of a piece of sheet music. He further informed her that they must move to the city. Clara, the Believer, was described as “aghast” but agreed to abandon home and family and go wherever her husband had decided he needed to be.11 Whether to learn about the electricity that sparked the Otto, as he later claimed, or simply to place himself in the midst of the mechanical devices to which he was inexorably drawn, Ford got himself hired by the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, where he quickly distinguished himself with mechanical aptitude and a ferocious work ethic. Within two years, he had risen from a $45-per-month engineer at a substation to chief engineer, on call twenty-four hours a day, with a salary of $100 per month. He, Clara, and newborn Edsel moved in to a house at 58 Bagley Street, which had a brick storage structure in the backyard: perfect for a workshop.

  Although it is unlikely that Ford had been experimenting with motors before he moved to Bagley Street, as he later claimed, once there he began in earnest. His position at Edison gave him access to tools and machinery, and he even taught an engineering class at the YMCA for $2.50 a session to gain the use of their machine shop. By this time, largely because of the Daimler motor, the virtues of gasoline had begun to assert themselves, so Ford concentrated his efforts there.

  At some point Ford met Charles King. Although they were said to have become friends, it must have been difficult for the hypercompetitive Ford to deal with a man five years his junior who had already achieved great acclaim as an inventor and who seemed to be far ahead in the development of the very instrument on which Ford had set his sights. More likely is that the affable King was taken with Ford’s drive and obvious talent, while Ford saw King as someone whose efforts he could trail until they could be surpassed, much as Ford would trail along on a bicycle while King drove an automobile for the first time on the streets of Detroit.*3

  First Ford shop

  With King’s support, Ford pressed on. He told of obtaining parts for his engines in odd ways, such as cylinders he fashioned from “an exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought.”12 Others worked with him, Ford admitted, but the ideas were his and he supervised the operation.

  “The hardest problems to overcome,” Ford wrote, “were in the making and breaking of the spark and in the avoidance of excess weight. For the transmission, the steering gear, and the general construction, I could draw on my experience with the steam tractors. In 1892, I completed my first motor car, but it was not until the spring of the following year that it ran to my satisfaction.”

  From there, Ford described in detail a machine that “would hold two people, the seat being suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There were two speeds—one of 10 and the other of 20 miles per hour—obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in front of the driving seat.” Finally, Ford insisted that his “gasoline buggy” was the first and for a long time the only automobile in Detroit. “It was considered to be something of a nuisance, for it made a r
acket and it scared horses. Also it blocked traffic.”

  Although eventually Ford did build the machine he described, the rest is nonsense, and that Ford thought to foist such a tale on the public only thirty years after it supposedly happened—and almost everyone involved in the early automobile business in Detroit was still alive—is testament to the hubris that he had developed from his rise to prominence. (Ford loyalists, such as Edward “Spider” Huff, one of those who was assisting Ford in the project, later swore the story was true, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) More surprising is that almost all the Ford biographies, even recent ones, have dismissed this outright lie as a lapse of memory or muddling of dates, while at the same time attributing to Ford a remarkable “magpie memory.”13

  This particular fable is made even more preposterous by being in direct conflict with another of Ford’s favorite reminiscences. On Christmas Eve 1893, according to Ford and other family members, Clara was preparing dinner for the next day, when her family, the Bryants, would be coming, and seven-week-old Edsel was sleeping in the next room. Henry had been working on a “simple experimental engine,” the one with the gas pipe cylinder that he later asserted had been mounted on his two-seater the previous spring. He had fashioned a flywheel from an old lathe.

  “He brought the engine into the kitchen, mounted it on a board, and clamped it to the sink.” The fuel had to be fed by hand, using a metal cup as a crude makeshift carburetor. The engine ran, to Henry’s great satisfaction and Clara’s delighted surprise. “I didn’t stop to play with it,” he told William Simonds. “I wanted to build a two-cylinder engine that could be used to propel a bicycle.”14

  According to King, his assistant Oliver Barthel—who later went to work for Ford—and a third man who worked for Ford at the Edison plant, “the kitchen sink/engine episode occurred at the end of 1895, not 1893,” and was performed in front of King himself.15 Furthermore, Ford’s inspiration was not self-generated, as he insisted, but was sparked by an article in the November 7, 1895, edition of American Machinist in which Edward J. Pennington described cobbling together a workable internal combustion engine from bits of scrap and other spare parts, an assertion that, ironically, turned out to be untrue, as Pennington was later exposed as a fraud. Whatever else this story tells us, it firmly establishes Henry Ford as a man willing to take credit for the work and ideas of others—and as a man willing to abet or even encourage subordinates to lie for him, traits that would dominate his reminiscences for the remainder of his life.

  When he published his autobiography, Ford included virtually nothing concerning his developmental work but encouraged the perception that he received no guidance directly or indirectly. He recounted, “I had to work from the ground up—that is, although I knew a number of people were working on horseless carriages, I could not know what they were doing.”16

  But he did, and in some detail. Not only had Daimler and Benz, among others, been marketing automobiles in Europe, with which Ford was familiar from his reading, but he quite clearly knew about the Duryea brothers’ gasoline automobiles as well. King even gave him four valves to help construct his engine when Ford could not make his work. By the time Ford began to experiment in earnest, he had no shortage of sources on which to draw and no shortage of others willing to lend him expertise and support.

  But from the first, Ford brought to his designs a vision that, if not unique, was at least rare. A report in 1898 on one of Ford’s early vehicles by R. W. Hanington, an engineer who had worked for Duryea but found that operation “a total failure,” was to the point: “The whole design strikes me as being very complete and worked out in every detail….A first-class carriage, well thought out and well constructed, but employing no novel feature of great importance. Novelty, rather than good design, has been the idea of most of the carriage builders. Simplicity, strength, and common sense seem to be embodied in Mr. Ford’s carriage, and I believe that these ideals are the essential ones for a successful vehicle.”17 Those qualities would distinguish almost every Ford car, none more than the Model T.

  Two years before Hanington’s report, in spring 1896, Henry Ford had completed his first vehicle, largely the same as the one he had described as being completed three years earlier, although the actual product was missing a number of the refinements he included after the fact.*4 He called it the “quadricycle,” and it was essentially a motorized four-wheel bicycle, with chain drive, a tiller for steering, and no brakes or reverse gear.

  But before Ford could test his invention on the street, King beat him to it. On the night of March 6, King took his motorized carriage out for a drive. “Motorized dray cart” would be a better description, since that is what King’s contraption most resembled, down to its 1,300-pound weight and heavy metal-capped wood wheels that clattered over the cobblestone streets. But it ran, and it was first.

  King’s ride was widely reported in the press the following day, an account that was eerily similar to the one Ford attributed to his own vehicle in My Life and Work. As the Detroit Free Press described the event, “The first horseless carriage seen in this city was out on the streets last night. It is the invention of Charles B. King, a Detroiter, and its progress up Woodward Avenue about 11 o’clock caused a deal of comment, people crowding around it so that its progress was impeded. The apparatus seemed to work all right, and went at the rate of 5 or 6 miles an hour at an even rate of speed.”18 King himself observed, “Horseless carriages are extensively used in Paris as delivery wagons, carriages, and even ambulances. I understand the Prince of Wales has ordered one. They are much in vogue among the English aristocracy, and will undoubtedly soon be here. I am convinced they will in time supersede the horse.”19 Although one biographer observes that “if [Ford] felt at all crestfallen that King had beaten him to the street, he has left no record of it,” it is difficult to believe that, pedaling along behind, a man with a temperament like Ford’s did not experience some level of resentment.20

  Ford quadricycle

  In any event, the machine that Ford took out on the streets three months later was superior to King’s in almost every way. It was almost a half-ton lighter, more maneuverable—going forward, at any rate—and had a superior motor, although he did suffer a breakdown that was repaired with materials from the Edison plant. As would be true for the machine Hanington critiqued, nothing was particularly inventive on the quadricycle—Ford had seen similar transmissions as well as motors, and the overall design was a hybrid of many already in use—but the combination of the elements and the construction he used was extremely effective.21 From almost the moment the first quadricycle was completed, Ford began sketching out the improvements.

  The first order of business was to change what was almost a totally wood frame to metal. For this, Ford employed a blacksmith he had hired at Edison. Another key change was the addition of a water jacket around the engine block to replace the air-cooling of the original. Before this, the engine had run so hot that drops of molten solder were deposited on the street.

  Ford now had a team of three capable assistants to help remake his machine. Working nights and weekends, they assembled a vastly improved quadricycle—though Ford did little of the physical work. “I never saw Mr. Ford make anything,” the blacksmith recalled. “He was always doing the directing.” The end result was a stronger, more durable, better-running machine that could seat two—or three, if Clara was holding Edsel—while not being appreciably heavier.

  Ford drove this new version extensively, occasionally as far out of town as Greenfield and Dearborn, often accompanied by Charles King, who seemed as pleased for Ford’s achievement as Ford himself.

  Work on the improved quadricycle also set the tone of Ford’s approach to business, at least until he had grown so wealthy that his interests began to include broad national and international questions. For much of that early period, he slept as often at work as he did at home. There was always a cot at his disposal, even when his factories grew to be immense. He consid
ered himself a family man and focused intently on Clara and Edsel—but he simply wasn’t around that much.

  His one lifelong passion that was neither work- nor family-related was birds. Ford often marked significant occasions in his life by how they coincided with the migratory patterns of local species. He endowed bird sanctuaries well before he had even considered other philanthropic endeavors. While he never publicly stated that he liked birds more than people, it would hardly be a surprise if that was the case.

  —

  Working for the Edison Company had proved a boon. Ford had availed himself of employees, shop space, and materials, all while performing his duties superbly and advancing rapidly. By 1896, he was earning more than $150 per month, heady numbers for those days. As a result, in August, Ford was chosen as a delegate to the Edison Illuminating Company convention in Manhattan Beach, then a posh resort area in Brooklyn, New York, where the founder himself would be present. Edison, the only other man to attain stunning wealth during the industrial age while also being credited as an inventor, was similar to Ford in temperament. He asked to meet the younger man when he was told that an employee of his had built a gas car that ran. They sat and talked, Edison asking a number of pointed questions about the machine’s operation. “Young man,” Edison is reported to have said, banging his hand on the table, although the source was the often unreliable William Simonds, “that’s the thing. You have it. Your car carries its own power plant—it’s self contained—no fire, no boiler. You have the thing. Keep at it.”22 Simonds went on to assert that Edison’s comment was “a turning point in Henry Ford’s life,” coming “at a moment when he was disheartened, uncertain whether to follow a conventional pattern of a comfortable job and an assured future,” or abandon all that to pursue his life’s dream. Ford is reported to have said, much later in life, “The bang on the table meant the world to me,” although the episode is conspicuously absent in My Life and Work.23