The Wild Wheel

TWO SEEDS OF THE MONKEY WRENCH

FOR the grand mechanics work was play. If it had not been play it would have killed them. They were as men possessed. They often forgot to eat. As they drove the workers, so they drove themselves, only much harder; and machines they drove until the metal ached.

Once some machine builders were called in to bid on a special machine. The specifications called for a speed that would produce two hundred finished parts an hour. The machine builders said: “You have made a mistake here. You meant to say two hundred a day.” The Ford engineer who had made the design was called in. He said: “There is no mistake. Two hundred an hour.” The machine builders said: “No machine can do that.” The engineer said: “Before asking you to make it we made one for ourselves, to see if it would work. It’s working now. Come and see it.”

For a new machine that worked or a new wrinkle that gave time another kick in the pants their glee was like that of children with a wonderful toy. If the idea had come from a foreman, or a worker, as sometimes happened, Ford would stuff the man’s pocket with money on the spot. Yet no sooner had it worked than they all began to think of ways to make it work better, and if anybody could think of a way to do that the wonderful toy was broken up for scrap.

When it was the wonder plant of the world for doing impossible things in unheard-of ways they were still so sure they could do every thing still better that anybody was welcome to come and look, even rival motorcar makers, Ford saying: “If they can do it better than we do it they are welcome to it. Then we will go and look at what they do.”

What moved them? You may think of several motivations.

There is pride in belonging to the most famous crew in the world, even though your own part in it may be small. If you are on the top side of a crew like that you have of course a sense of achievement by association. Moreover, since it was a monarchy, almost anyone might hope to be struck by the Cinderella lightning. When a man was called from his work to go immediately to the office it could be either that he was important enough to get fired by a high executive or that he was about to be invested with a fragment of the magic carpet, holding in his hand the Ford wand that commanded men and materials in a very imperious manner. He might be sent to open a coal mine, to run a railroad or to revolutionize a lumber operation, and if he knew nothing about mining or railroading or lumbering, that was all the better. Whatever the task might be, it was supposed that he could do it better than anyone had done it before if only he possessed these four qualifications, namely, common sense, drive, a direct way of seeing and the Ford credo, which was: “We do it our way.” His instructions were always simple. Go do it. If he couldn’t, another would.

All of this could happen because Ford did not believe in experts. “Our men are not experts,” he said. “We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert. The moment one gets into the expert state of mind a great number of things become impossible. Our new operations are always directed by men who have no previous knowledge of the subject and therefore have not had a chance to get on really familiar terms with the impossible.”

One of his illustrations was glass. He thought plate glass could be made continuously in a big ribbon with no hand work at all. The glass experts of the world said all of that had been thought of before and tried and it could not be done. He gave the task of doing it to men who had never been in a glass plant.

They did it with such marvelous success that now everybody makes plate glass that way.

If experts were needed, they could always be hired, but no Ford operation was ever directed by a technician. He always knew too many things that couldn’t be done, whereas a Ford man could do anything because he didn’t know any better. The Ford man’s role was to say to the expert: “Do it anyhow.”

The question was: What moved them? The answers that have been given are all reasonable and valid, with only this reservation, that it was not a famous crew in the beginning and there was not always a Ford wand. That also had to be created.

Do you say, perhaps, it was profit, or the hope of profit? This calls for a discussion that belongs in another place, by itself. It is true that Ford was the greatest profit maker of his time. It is true also that alone among the industrialists of his time or any other time he sincerely challenged the profit motive. More of this later. It is the enigma that lies at the very core of the story of a world that almost was.

No. What moved them was something that was there from the start.

2

EVEN SO, the beginning took place under appearances which were in every way ordinary, with no signs or omens whatever. If you had witnessed it you would not remember it as anything uncommon. The same thing was happening at the same time in other places.

In a low frame building, 25 by 250 feet, you might have seen some perspiring men putting together what still were called horseless carriages. They had no machinery—only tools like monkey wrenches, hammers, screw drivers and pliers—because machinery was costly and they could not afford to buy it. The horseless carriage was not made here. The engines were made by a distant machine shop at so much apiece, the bodies were made by a carriage company, the wheels by a wheel company, and so on; and all that these men were doing was to assemble a horseless carriage from finished parts delivered at the door by horse-drawn drays. They expected to assemble ten a day. They expected also, as they sold the ten a day, to be able to pay the machine shop for the engines, the carriage shop for the bodies, the wheel company for the wheels, et cetera, and they had to do it fast with no mishap, for they had almost no money at all.

The boss mechanic, who was also vice-president and general manager, might have been seen helping to nail the completed jobs into a boxcar for shipment, with mail piling up on a little upstairs desk for a month, because nobody could take the time to open it. When at last they hired a bookkeeper, he found two wastebaskets full of unopened letters, some of them containing checks.

You would not have remembered the boss mechanic. He was a thin, tall, deep-eyed man, alternately impish and austere, who couldn’t be still. He had designed the engine that came from the machine shop. His name was on the horseless carriage.

Ten years before with his own hands he had made an automobile buggy; it was neither the first nor the best one. He had built a racing car—the famous 999—that uttered flames from the exhaust and sounded like the jungle in an animal panic; but others too had built racing cars and his was only a little bit faster. He was one of a number of men celebrated in automobile history who for years had been blowing themselves up in their woodsheds and kitchens trying to find out what happened when a mixture of air and gasoline was ignited in a cylinder—and they were all nuts. As a pioneer manufacturer of motorcars he had already failed twice, losing his backers’ money, and that was about the average.

It was a time when adventuresome men with a little money and a dim prevision of the motorcar industry were looking for inventors on whom to make their bets; and it often happened that they made their bets secretly, fearful that if their conservative business associates, and especially their bankers, found out what they were doing they would be written off as loony visionaries.

Several of these, having looked over the field, picked on Henry Ford, partly on their guess that he was a good inventor and partly because he had a name that might help to sell a car—the name of a man who had built the fastest racing car and had driven it himself. In My Life and Work he remembered his last race, the purpose of which was to advertise the Ford car, already on the market. This was his recollection of it:

“Winning a race or making a record was then the best kind of advertising. So I fixed up the Arrow, the twin of the old 999—in fact practically remade it—and a week before the New York automobile show I drove it myself over a surveyed mile straightaway on the ice. I shall never forget that race. The ice seemed smooth enough, so smooth that if I had called off the trial we should have secured an immense amount of the wrong kind of advertising; but instead of being smooth, that ice was seamed with fissures which I knew were going to mean trouble the moment I got up speed. But there was nothing to do but go through with the trial, and I let the old Arrow out. At every fissure the car leaped into the air. I never knew how it was coming down. When I wasn’t in the air I was skidding; but somehow I stayed top side up and on the course, making a record that went all over the world.”1

His biographers note that he celebrated his survival, and the record, with a muskrat dinner cooked on the spot and eaten with the man who rode along to cut off the fuel by hand in case the control mechanism froze.

3

THE men who made their bets on Ford were a coal dealer, the coal dealer’s bookkeeper and his sister, a banker who trusted the coal dealer, two brothers who owned the machine shop that made the engines, a carpenter, two lawyers, a clerk, the owner of a notions store and a man who made windmills and air rifles. The engine builders put in their good will. The carpenter put in a frame building. The total amount of cash raised among them was twenty-eight thousand dollars.

One of the lawyers, who was going to put in five thousand dollars, accounted for it in a letter to his father, saying:

“Through the country Mr. Ford is looked upon as an expert. He has won numerous racing contests and is widely known, which will be a big asset in his own car sales. The old machine which he built he sold to his former backers when he retired. He did reserve the right of his own name. They cannot take that away from him. . . . The parts are to be made under contract. . . . A small assembling plant will be rented to the company at $75 a month. In this plant there will be ten or twelve men at $1.50 a day, together with a foreman. You can see how small the manufacturing expense will be. . . . It looks like a certain fifty per cent profit. . . . They are to deliver ten machines a day. . . . It is amazing the way the thing has been started. Everything has been done since last October. Other companies with half a dozen draftsmen under lock and key have been three years making the same progress.”

That was in 1903.

Ten years later every other car you saw on the road was a Ford. The sounds of the Model T—its gutturals and verbs and lamentations and chortling—were the overtones of the American way of life. At Highland Park, in a suburban area of Detroit, was the largest automobile factory in the world, turning out a complete car every three minutes—and the boss mechanic was the same man still.

By this time he had bought out all the other stockholders, so that never again when they thought he was mad could they threaten to take him to court. They had thought he was mad when he said he was going to make automobiles at the rate of one a minute. Then in a little while, from the sour grape arbor, they saw him do it.

But even yet he had not arrived. He was on his way.

After Highland Park, where at length Model T’s did depart under their own power from the end of the assembly line at the rate of one a minute—after that came the mighty River Rouge plant at Dearborn.

That was the beginning of empire. It seemed to rise as if it contained a principle of self-creation. Ford said, “Put it here,” and there it was. So Alexander made cities to appear.

It had a river God made, not a very efficient river, and Ford dug the harbor that God forgot in order to receive ships from the inland sea. Besides ships of its own, it had its own coal and iron and lead mines, its own railroad, its own forests and sawmills. It had organs and operations in every important American city and in Canada, Europe, South America and Asia.

Anything it needed it could make for itself, and many things it made just to learn how in case its suppliers should begin to charge too much, or as insurance against the failure of its outside sources of supply. It made steel, machines, tools, the finest precision gauges in the world, glass, artificial leather, textiles, paper, cement, electric locomotives, chemicals, hydroelectric dams and airplanes. It built its own power plants, its own steam turbines and generators.

After World War I it bought a lot of Liberty Ships for scrap and then built a pair of shears to slice them up as if they were cheese.

For grand mechanics, this was Heaven. Anything they saw or anything they imagined, that they could do. The government wanted some antisubmarine boats, provided they could be built in a great hurry without interfering with any other war work. In 120 days, at River Rouge, there was a building a quarter of a mile long, 350 feet wide and 100 feet high, and inside of it Eagle Boats, stamped out of sheet steel like automobile bodies, were being engined and equipped—and this the work not of marine engineers but of mechanics who had never built a boat before.

At a nod from the boss mechanic prodigious feats were lightly undertaken and performed with the air of conjury. To uproot the entire tractor plant from the bank of the River Rouge and set it down in Ireland was a mere chore.

And this behemoth by exerting itself could produce in the world automobiles at the rate of one every ten seconds.

If you say, “And all of that in one working lifetime from an original cash capital of twenty-eight thousand dollars,” the answer is yes, as a matter of fact. That was all the money that anybody ever put in. From that time on the business made its own capital. But that is only to say—what? That one acorn grew in a fabulous manner. Why did this one grow so big and tall? Was it a true fact of nature or a capricious event out of order?

That is what now stands to be explored.

 

2My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1922 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

• 1* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
• 2That was in his book Today and Tomorrow,* which he did in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in 1926. The complete theory had by that time arrived—the theory, namely, that the wage earner is more important as a consumer than as a producer. How much of that formulation was Ford’s and how much of it Crowther’s one cannot say. They wrote several books together, with Ford speaking in the first person as I or we, and the ideas were entirely his own, but as he conceived them they were wordless revelations or sudden flashes of insight. It was Crowther’s part to clothe them with reason and argument and house them in proper premises.