Henry Ford’s Own Story quotes

He was the owner, and they were the hired men, but on a Michigan farm the measure of a man is the part he takes in man’s work.

In the cities, where men work against men, let them build up artificial distinctions; on the farm the fight is against nature, and men stand shoulder to shoulder in it.

A dark cloud was coming up in the northwest, and every man’s muscles leaped to the need for getting in the hay.

“Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working,” he says. “I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell.

In my opinion, a man makes his own heaven and hell and carries it around with him. Both of them are states of mind.

”

The works came out of the case, to the accompaniment of an agonized protest from Will; the cogs fell apart, the springs unwound.

Altogether it was a beautiful disorder, enough to delight any small boy.

“Now look what you’ve went and done!” cried Will, torn between natural emotion over the disaster to his watch and admiration of Henry’s daring.

What he does remember vividly is the passion for investigating clocks and watches that followed. In a few months he had taken apart and put together every timepiece on the place, excepting only his father’s watch.

“Every clock in the house shuddered when it saw me coming,” he says.

But the knowledge he acquired was more than useful to him later, when at sixteen he faced the problem of making his own living in Detroit.

Henry liked to play as well as any boy, but somehow in his thrifty ancestry there had been developed a strong desire to have something to show for time spent.

Swimming, skating and the like were all very well until he had thoroughly learned them, but why keep on after that?

Henry wanted to do something else then. And as for spending a whole afternoon batting a ball around, that seemed to him a foolish occupation.

Henry was facing the big problem. How was he to live on an income too small? Apparently his mind went, with the precision of a machine, directly to the answer.

“When your reasonable expenses exceed your income, increase your income.”

Simple. He knew that after he had finished his day’s work at the shops there would be a margin of several hours a day left to him. He would have to turn them into money. That was all.

“You can’t run anything on precedents if you want to make a success,” he says to-day.

“We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past.”

Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter—the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one.

He was in his early twenties then. His ambition had not yet centered about a definite purpose, and already it had met the worst enemy of ambition—love.

It was a choice between his work and the girl. The girl won, and ten million fifty-cent Ford watches were lost to the world.

“I’ve decided not to go back to Detroit,” Henry announced to the family at breakfast one day.

A couple of weeks later they returned to Greenfield, Clara with plans for the new house on the south forty already sketched in a tablet in her suitcase; Henry with a bundle of mechanics’ trade journals, and the responsibility of caring for a wife.

“A wife helps a man more than any one else,” he says to-day. And adds, with his whimsical twinkle, “she criticizes him more.”

He found that men, like horses, did their best when they were well fed, contented and not overworked. He saw that one unruly horse, or one surly, lazy man, delayed the work of the whole farm, hindered all the others.

“The only plan that will work out well in the long run is a plan that is best for every one concerned,” he decided.

“Hurting the other fellow is bound to hurt me sooner or later.”

That the undertaking was revolutionary, visionary, probably ridiculous to other people, did not deter him; he thought he could do it, and that was enough.

“Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world,” he says to-day.

“Every generation has its own problem; it ought to find its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can’t do things better than our fathers did.”

“Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world,” he says to-day. “Every generation has its own problem; it ought to find its own solutions.

There is no use in our living if we can’t do things better than our fathers did.

”

From that time his distaste for farm work grew.

Nature would not delay her orderly cycle because Henry Ford wanted to spend his days in the little farm shop.

Weeds sprang up and must be cut, crops ripened and must be harvested, morning came with a hundred imperative demands on his time and strength, and night brought the chores.

You may build that contrivance of yours and then again you may not, and look how you’ll be living in the meantime.”

But Henry was firm, with a determination which is called obstinacy when it goes with failure and great will power when it is coupled with success.

He was going to the city. That settled it.

He does not remember it now. Gilbert remembered it, but he did not go out of his way to pay any attention to Ford. He simply forgot about the mechanical work of sub-station A. He knew Ford would take care of it.

A manager spends his time and thought on the poor workmen; a good man he leaves alone.

When Ford had been with the Edison Company six months, drawing his forty-five dollars regularly and handing it to Mrs. Ford to pay the landlady, he knew the Edison plants from the basements up. He had become enthusiastic over electrical problems.

Impatient to be at work on his drawings for the gasoline engine, he was taken from end to end of the city to inspect homesites.

He was experiencing that agony of all workers, being obliged to spend so much time preparing a place to work that there was none left for the work.

“This thing has to stop,” he said in desperation to his wife one evening. “I’ve been inquiring around a little, and I think the best place to buy is out on Edison avenue.

The only trouble now is that people haven’t the courage to put their ideals to work. They say, ‘Oh, of course, theoretically we believe in them—but they aren’t practical!’

What’s the use of believing in anything that isn’t practical? If it’s any good at all it’s practical.

The whole progress of the world has been made by men who went to work and used their impractical theories.

If any man ever followed Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance, giving up friends and family in his devotion to his own work, that man was Henry Ford in those days.

There was nothing dramatic about it—just an obscure machinist with an idea, willing to give up social pleasures, restful domestic evenings, the good opinion of his neighbors, and work hard in an old shed behind his common little house.

Only an ordinary man turning his back on everything most of us want, for an “impractical” theory. That was all.

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.

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 knew no one with money.

He was still a poor man, working for wages, with only his brain and hands for equipment.

Nearly thirteen years of hard work had produced his motor car, but he had very little money and no financial backing for its manufacture. His closest friend was Coffee Jim.

“Take the money; that’s all right. Pay it back when you can. Your word’s good enough for me,” he said. He believed in Ford.

It was a demonstration of the practical value of friendship—a pure sentiment which had come unexpectedly to the rescue when all material means had failed.

Hard work, real ability, business sagacity, had been unable to give Ford the start which his friendship with the owner of the little lunch wagon had brought him.

Couzens brought the group of business men down to the track, and before Oldfield was out of the car they had made an appointment to meet Ford next day and form a company. The race had convinced them.

“Some people can’t see a thing unless it is written in letters a mile high and then illustrated with a diagram,” Ford says meditatively.

During the following week a company was formed, and Ford was made vice-president, general manager, superintendent, master mechanic and designer.

“Sure, give him a chance,” Ford’s voice came over the wire.

“He’s a man, isn’t he? He’s entitled to as good a chance as any other man.”

The ex-convict was given a job in the shops. For a couple of months his work was poor. The foreman reported it to the manager.

That surging mob of men outside this factory during the week following the announcement of his profit-sharing plan had impressed indelibly on Ford’s mind the tremendous importance of a job.

“A workingman’s job is his life,” he says.

“No one man should have the right ever to send another man home to his family out of work.

War! The news caught at the heart of the world, and stopped it.

For a time the whole business structure of every nation on earth trembled, threatened to crumble into ruin, under this weight, to which it had been building from the beginning.

The city is full of criminals—what are the police doing? we inquire testily. We build another prison, erect another gallows.

We are like an architect who, seeing threatening cracks in the walls of the building, would hurriedly fill them with putty and add another story.

Henry Ford read the news from Europe. He saw there a purposeless, useless and waste of everything valuable. He saw a machine, wrongly built for centuries so that each part would work against all the other parts, suddenly set in motion and wrecking itself.

Ford had these things; he had also a tremendous fortune at his command. He cast about for ways of using that fortune in this fight, and again the uselessness of money was impressed upon him.

“Money is of no real value whatever,” he says.

“What can I do with it now? I cannot pay a man enough to make him change his real opinions. The only real resource this country has now is the intelligence of our people.

“Money is of no real value whatever,” he says. “What can I do with it now? I cannot pay a man enough to make him change his real opinions.

The only real resource this country has now is the intelligence of our people.

They must think right, they must know the true principles on which to build a great, strong nation.

“Shall we turn our factories into munition plants? Shall we build dreadnoughts? The submarine destroys them. Shall we build submarines? Other nations will make submarine-destroyers. Shall we build submarine-destroyers? Other nations will build war-aeroplanes to destroy them.

We must make something worse than the aeroplanes, and something worse still, and then something still more horrible, bidding senselessly up and up and up, spending millions on millions, trying to outdo other nations which are trying to outdo us.

“For if we begin to prepare for war we must not stop. We can not stop. I read articles in the magazines saying that we might as well have no navy at all as the one we have;

“The way to handle the war question is not to waste more and more human energy in getting ready to hurt the other fellow.

We must get down to the foundations; we must realize that the interests of all the people are one, and that what hurts one hurts us all.

“We must know that, and we must have the courage to act on it. A nation of a hundred million people, of all nationalities and races, we must work together, each of us doing what he can for the best good of the whole.