Another Fine Mess

by Tim Moore

  Henry’s Irish father, William, emigrated from Cork at the age of twenty-one, in the year that came to be known as ‘Black ’47’, the grim nadir of the potato famine that killed a million and drove almost twice as many out of the country. William’s mother would perish on the voyage, leaving him and his father responsible for six younger siblings. They settled in Dearborn, near Detroit, built a log cabin, and found employment as navvies on the extension of the Michigan Central Railroad. Eighty acres of local woodland were in due course bought from an old Irish acquaintance, then arduously cleared and cultivated. In 1861, three years after purchasing half the family farm from his father, William married Mary Litogot, adopted daughter of another Irish neighbour. Mary was the daughter of Belgian immigrants who had both died in Dearborn before she turned three; her mother in childbirth, and her father while leading a team of oxen across the inadequately frozen Rouge River.

  Henry was William and Mary’s eldest, born in 1863, three weeks after the Civil War tide turned against the Confederacy at Gettysburg. By then, the farming Fords were beginning to prosper. Its proximity to the Great Lakes and Canada’s vast natural resources had already established Detroit as a transport hub and industrial power-in-waiting, a city whose burgeoning population – 80,000 in 1870, almost half of them foreign born – represented an ever hungrier market for the Ford family’s wheat, meat and orchard fruit. The farm doubled in size, more children arrived, and William – by now a justice of the peace and church deacon – extended the family home into a ten-roomed bungalow, imposing by the standards of the time.

  Young Henry, in common with every farm-child of the age, worked long hours in barn and field before and after school. Sunday began with an eight-mile walk to church and back. As fond as he would always be of the rural lifestyle, this routine fostered a profound resentment for manual and pedestrian chores, and a fixation with their mechanical fulfilment. His determined curiosity in this arena soon earned him a reputation as a reckless tinkerer, with an especially wayward fascination for the harnessing of power. One summer afternoon he dammed and diverted a creek to propel a small water wheel, inadvertently flooding a neighbour’s potato field. To explore the potential of steam he filled a clay pot with water, bound the lid tightly shut and surreptitiously placed it in the family’s dining-room fireplace. The resultant explosion smashed a mirror, a window and left a lifelong scar on his forehead. A later and more ambitious study involved a 10-gallon drum, a home-made tin turbine and a parallel catastrophe which burned down the schoolyard fence and bequeathed Henry another blemish, on his left cheek, that he would be wryly explaining for the rest of his days. He took apart his neighbours’ pocket watches, using his indulgent mother’s corset stays and knitting needles for tools, and sometimes successfully reassembled them. He almost lost a finger examining his father’s hay cutter. And all the while, he honed a deep loathing for agricultural inefficiency in all its forms. He nursed a particular aversion for the horse: sickly, expensive, unreliable, and each one a living reminder of the humiliation he’d once suffered when a colt dragged him all the way home on his arse, a boot stuck in the stirrups.

  ‘Horses and mules eat their fool heads off six months out of the year,’ the young Henry ranted in a notebook, his way of explaining that a quarter of all the farmland in the US was given over to feeding the nation’s twenty-five million horses. ‘And you can’t fix a dead horse with a monkey wrench,’ he added bluntly. (Many years later, after selling a million Model Ts, Henry got out his ever-ready notebook and scrawled: ‘The horse is DONE!’)

  But that homely, hapless, horse-hating heaven was turned upside down in 1876. Twelve days after delivering a stillborn baby that would have been her seventh child, Mary died. ‘I never had any particular affection for the farm itself,’ Henry would recall. ‘It was the mother on the farm I loved.’ But a month later, the thirteen-year-old Henry experienced an epiphany that provided a durable distraction from his grief, and would in due course change the world. Riding alongside his father in the family cart, Henry detected a clattering, huffing commotion from up the lane and jumped out to investigate. The source of this tumult was a Nichols and Shepard steam-powered traction engine, the first horseless vehicle he had ever beheld. (At the time over 75,000 steam engines were plying their trade across America’s Corn Belt, threshing and reaping.) Henry looked up at the machine in awe, then bombarded the operator with technical enquiries. ‘This encounter showed me I was by instinct an engineer,’ he rather blandly recollected three decades later. But as he stood there amongst the din and sooty vapour, his teenage mind was blown by the overwhelming possibilities of a self-contained, self-propelled conveyance. Henry Ford was, thenceforth, a young man obsessed. For the rest of his life he kept a photograph of a traction engine on prominent display, ‘somewhere I could see it every day’.

  At this point we had better apply a finger to the fast-forward button, and hold it there, watching blurry sepia figures dart to and fro before our eyes with entertaining haste. Zoom, there goes the sixteen-year-old Henry, scooting away to Detroit to work in a streetcar factory. Then at a dry dock. Then as an apprentice machinist. Three years pass and he’s speeding back home, operating and fixing traction engines for neighbouring farmers. Look, he’s getting married to Clara Bryant, and they’re living on a farm his dad gave them. What’s he up to? Doesn’t look like farming. Nope, he’s using a steam engine to log wood. For two years. And now – whee! – he’s off again, whisking Clara to Detroit where he’s bagged an engineering job at the Edison Illuminating Company. Pop! Their only child, Edsel, is born at the new family home in November 1893. Bang! A month later, on Christmas Eve, our man rigs up a little petrol engine in his kitchen sink, with Clara dripping the fuel in while Henry – seriously, mate? – holds a wire from the ceiling light socket to the spark plug. Three years on, and Henry is still clocking in at Edison, but whizzing in and out of his woodshed late into the night. He’s only gone and built a car! But – what are you like, Hezza? – it’s too big to get out through the shed door, so there he is demolishing half the front wall at 4 a.m. to take his petrol-powered Quadricycle for its debut run through the Detroit dawn. Hmm, looks a bit rubbish, like a big pram steered by a narrow-boat tiller. Still, it soon gets attention and look, there he is scuttling about in a smart new coat and a big moustache, getting well in with Thomas Edison, the mayor of Detroit and plenty of bigwig moneymen and industrialists. It’s 1899 and Henry has left the electric company to head up the new Detroit Automobile Company. But his backers have no interest beyond a quick buck, and if we slow the action we can see them losing patience with Henry’s vision of a perfectly engineered car pitched at a mass market that doesn’t yet exist. Within two years the firm folds. Henry is pushing forty and has to date built twenty-three cars. Let’s hit pause, just as he’s shaving his ’tache off.

  At the hectic dawn of the automobile age, Ford found himself up against 2,500 rival US start-ups, with Detroit home to more backstreet car makers than any other city. Had the cards fallen differently, we might all now be driving about in Kerosene Surreys, or American Beauties, or Juveniles, Gaylords and Cuckmobiles. Like some pioneering but less punchable Richard Branson, Henry decided that a grand gesture was needed to set himself and his cars apart from the crowd, a daredevil publicity stunt. And so, summoning the youthful bravado that had scarred him for life and laid waste to half of Dearborn, in the autumn of 1901 he entered the first motor race Michigan had ever hosted.

  Ford was by then entering middle age, and the only vehicle he’d driven with any regularity was that wobbly 20mph Quadricycle. His sole competitor for the $1,000 prize would be Alexander Winton, millionaire owner of the largest petrol-engined car manufacturer in the US, and the nation’s most famous racing driver. It was a dramatic statement of Henry Ford’s relentless, unbounded ambition, and from Clara’s viewpoint a pigheadedly irresponsible one.

  The event, held at Detroit’s Grosse Pointe race track on 10 October, incited great excitement in the nascent
Motor City. Shops closed for the day. Courts were adjourned. Eight thousand spectators travelled to the track, in packed streetcars that ran from the city centre every thirty seconds. Yet when the two rivals puttered up to the start line, the crowd were dismayed by an embarrassing mismatch. Winton’s mighty 70hp Bullet dwarfed Ford’s Sweepstakes, a frail-looking, stripped-down machine with a 26hp engine that Henry had built with his young associate Ed Huff. Huff, a self-taught electrical engineer who had worked with Ford since the age of sixteen, had fitted Sweepstakes with a revolutionary fuel-injection system incorporating porcelain insulators – in effect the first modern spark plug – fashioned to order from denture ceramic by a local dentist. However, he was now making a rather more conspicuous contribution: in order to facilitate on-the-move adjustments to his ignition set-up, Huff would spend the entire race clinging to the car’s running-board. The plucky and dextrous adhesion he displayed that afternoon earned him a lifelong nickname: Spider.

  When the flag fell, nobody was surprised to see Bullet roar away to an impressive lead. Unburdened by relevant experience, Ford struggled to control his car at 60mph through the corners, requiring Huff to supplement his alfresco tinkering with dramatic redistributions of body weight. But the lighter car began to close the gap after five laps, and when Bullet overheated on lap 8, sputtering and misfiring, Sweepstakes sped past. As the precarious combo took the flag, the crowd erupted into something approaching mass hysteria. ‘The people went wild,’ wrote a relieved but alarmed Clara to her brother. ‘One man threw his hat up and when it came down he stamped on it. Another man had to hit his wife on the head to keep her from going off the handle.’

  To the victor, the spoils. Alexander Winton, the first man to put a steering wheel on a car, builder of the first V8 engine and the first presidential motor carriage, is no more than a footnote in motoring history. But Henry’s memorable triumph, in his first and last motor race, made his name and that of the cars that would bear it. Speed sold cars to the rich few; the hare-and-tortoise reliability that had won the day for Sweepstakes was a far greater draw to the mid-market masses. (Though just for the hell of it, at the age of forty-one Henry upset Clara one last time by setting a world land speed record of 91.37mph on the frozen waters of Detroit’s Lake St Clair.) ‘It is not uninteresting,’ noted a rather dry press advertisement, ‘that the builder and driver of this car is also the designer and builder of the regular Ford Runabout.’ The public would keep the faith for seven years, one further failed company and nine models of gently ratcheting appeal, before Henry Ford and his team – Spider Huff prominent amongst them – launched their self-styled Universal Car, the world-changing Model T.

  CHAPTER 3

  My determination to complete a full coast-to-coast journey meant I first had to drive 160 miles back to the Atlantic shore, heading south-east against the American road trip’s magnetic westward lure. I can’t say this detour troubled me when there was so much else on my metaphorical plate, much of it already spilling into my metaphorical lap. Indeed, I’d already blithely bolted on another detour, factoring in a side trip to Detroit – a city which had roundly rejected Trump, but one that in the circumstances seemed to demand a pilgrimage.

  After a nerve-settling preamble on empty side roads, during which I reoriented the car rightwards in compliance with native traffic regulations, I turned on to a thoroughfare which quite quickly swelled into Charlottesville’s many-laned bypass. I grasped the wheel as tight as my slickened palms allowed and tucked into the slow lane, nodding rigidly to acknowledge the supportive waves and toots of passing motorists. Green light, green light, green light. Neil Tuckett’s headline mantra spooled through my head: If you can stop a T, you can drive a T. Green light, green light, red li—PISS AND FREAKING TITS. High up on an overhead gantry with a giant sun for company, the first stop signal took me by spleen-shrivelling surprise. With the front wheels almost up to the white junction line I stamped both feet on the pedals, any pedals, and flipped the hand levers aloft. If it hadn’t been a Sunday, these would have been my final actions on earth. The T squirrelled about the tarmac, the motor popped and died and I came to rest, at a rakish angle, about two feet past the six-lane intersection’s deserted geometrical centre.

  Humming reedily, I punched the starter. Ker-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-wheeeck. Then silence. I tried again, and again. The motor just wouldn’t catch. Again. Again. Again, and by now the battery was audibly tiring. At this point an extremely large blue object entered my right-side peripheral vision at great speed, while an extremely loud air horn tore through every hole in my head.

  ‘Hail pew?’

  My eyes were clamped shut, braced for terminal impact or death by embarrassment. I opened them and saw a very round and very red face, underpinned by a moist smile accessorised with a small number of beige teeth. I realised these words were an offer of assistance when two meaty hands grasped the frame of the windshield and began pushing the car backwards to safety. As we inched out of the junction and on to the verge-side gravel a many-wheeled blue truck, hissing and rumbling, weaved slowly past in front of us.

  I thanked my saviour, who appeared to have deserted his vending duties at a fruit-stacked roadside trestle table some way behind us. ‘Your car is a old car,’ he said, with great deliberation, and I sensed his utility might have peaked. I clanked open a bonnet flap and was met by an almost visible wave of heat. The Model T motor’s prodigious talent for thermal radiation would always amaze me. It was as if Henry had made a terrible miscalculation and perfected the external combustion engine.

  Having burned deep welts in the tips of three fingers and failed to stare the T better, I remembered how I had regularly coaxed my old Morris Minor van back to life in these exact circumstances. Thus inspired, I bent down, removed my right shoe and whacked its sole firmly and repeatedly against anything that looked like part of the ignition system. Then I leapt back in and hit the starter. Ker-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-whockwhockwhock-wheeeeeeck. ‘That were no good,’ noted my assistant, drawing the back of a large hand slowly across his nostrils. The rattlesnake thermometer was already past 100, and broiled befuddlement was pushing my stupidity levels into the red zone. I phoned Ross.

  In the hour that followed I rearranged my Model T’s contents, and quite large parts of the car itself, into a creative roadside installation across the hot gravel. The toolbox that Bob Kirk had bolted on to the passenger running-board donated its well-used wrenches and screwdrivers to the base layer. Atop these, and between the two plastic crates that had accommodated them in the rear-seat footwell, lay the spare parts and touring essentials donated by Ross or thrown in by Bob. A military cartridge case with its heavy top flap agape, exposing a jostle of small bottles, jars and cardboard boxes of archaic appearance. A heap of little chewing-tobacco tins with legends such as ‘COTTER KEYS’ and ‘STARTER PARTS’ scrawled on their lids in shaky marker pen. A 2-gallon plastic drum full of petrol, a smaller one full of water, and three quarts of oil. A sheaf of cable ties, a roll of duct tape and sundry aerosol solvents. A box of gaskets and a foot pump I’d found under the rear-seat cushion. The rear-seat cushion. The bonnet, which had completely detached itself when I raised the opposing side flap, now stood on its hinges in the dust. And draped over this, like one of Salvador Dali’s floppy clocks, the heavy black folds of an inner tube.

  I performed this grand transplant, before the placid, curious gaze of my rescuer, in futile search of an electrical test probe that Ross had left somewhere in the car, and which he advised I would need to inaugurate the diagnostic process. I had begun my hunt, after that first brief call, with quite a detailed mental image of the device in question: it would be a calculator-sized affair with a needled meter window and two poky contact sticks. This was such a compelling personal vision that I felt no need to ask Ross to confirm its accuracy. Now, sweatily assessing my pop-up junkyard, I reappraised a tool sticking out from the bottom of the heap, one of the earliest items extracted, and called him back. ‘This probe
thing. I don’t suppose it looks like a screwdriver with a big cable coming out the end?’

  This episode’s useful legacy was in finally convincing Ross that all my declarations of mechanical hopelessness had no roots in false modesty. I really was attempting to keep a needy, fragile relic on the road for 6,000 miles from a position of the profoundest imbecility. The very first time I talked to Ross on the phone, he’d sought to fix my whereabouts on the foothills of basic mechanical competence by asking if I had ever removed a cylinder head. ‘Well, you’re going to have some fun,’ he’d said after I told him I hadn’t. ‘On every Model T trip I’ve done there are people and cars that don’t make it.’

  Now I held the phone to my reddening ear expecting, and deserving, to hear a long period of silence, followed by an exasperated imprecation and a terminal click. Instead, Ross very patiently talked me through the electro-analytics, sympathetically recalibrating his tone to that of an emergency-services operator asking a toddler to assess a comatose parent’s vital signs. And then to surgically resuscitate them, because having pinpointed the fault I now had to remedy it – with Ross on speaker phone – by taking the distributor to pieces, then retarding and advancing the ignition timing through a memorable combo of intricate, thousandth-inch twiddles and lusty, cast-iron heaves on the crank handle. These activities greatly excited my companion, who sidled closer, lowered his large round head into the engine bay, and began to gurgle.