The Wild Wheel

TEN HISTORY’S REVENGE

THE museum first. It had to have a name; and it was named the Edison Institute Museum, to express Ford’s affection for his great friend the wizard. Then it had to have a front elevation, nothing modern, something in the way of colonial architecture, yet as grand as possible.

So now as you approach it you will see in replica not one but three historic Philadelphia buildings joined as one façade—Independence Hall, Congress Hall and the old City Hall. As you enter you have at your right a reproduction of the room in which the Declaration of Independence was signed, and on your left a reproduction of what was the chamber of the first United States Supreme Court.

In this vicinity, as if you might want to see them first, or because there was no place else to put them, are the art exhibits, such as you would find in any museum—examples of fine furniture, ceramics, silver, glass, bits of exquisite workmanship in metals and fabrics and wood, many decorative objects, some of them with histories attached—but no paintings. Somebody may tell you that Mr. Ford did not find paintings very interesting. He had once said he did not care a nickel’s worth for all the paintings in the world.

Go straight on and you come to the Main Exhibition Hall. As much of the fantasy as could make itself manifest begins there.

The Guide Book will tell you that Mr. Ford expressed his aims as follows: “When we are through we shall have reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition. For by looking at things people used and that show the way they lived, a better and truer impression can be gained than could be had in a month of reading—even if there were books whose authors had the facilities to discover the minute details of the older life.”

Main Street is over there.

You may not remember what Main Street was like in your grandfather’s time. Over the shops, called both shops and stores, were emblems of the trade—for the tinware shop a giant coffeepot, for the shoe store a gilded boot, for the jeweler a dummy watch the size of a center table top, and so on. Well, here it is. It is an illusion, and yet all the properties are real; and the people who play at keeping store or at making things as if they might be for sale if they ever get finished—they are real too. There is the harness shop and a man making harness and out in front the full-sized effigy of a dapple-gray horse. There is the barbershop, with one chair, individual shaving mugs on the shelf, water heating in a copper tank on a coal stove, and a barber with unfortunately nothing to do, because a shave and haircut, unlike a set of harness, cannot be hung on a peg at night and taken down again in the morning to be worked on during museum hours. Then a tobacco store with a wooden Indian outside, a tailor shop with out-of-style garments in the window, a boot and shoe store, a millinery and fancy-goods shop, a corner drugstore with the old urn-shaped bottles of colored water in the window, a comb shop equipped with the authentic tools of the comb-making craft, a fiddle shop and a toy store. When you come to the end of the street you can walk back on the other side, passing the gun maker, the candlestick maker, the cabinetmaker and the wheelwright. The scene generally speaking is New England, and so there is Gurdlestone & Sons, East India merchants, with ship models, chests and nautical curiosities scattered about, just as they might have been on the business premises of a Yankee firm in the clipper ship trade; and at the end of the street, where it should be, a reconstruction of the Caleb Taft blacksmith shop which Longfellow knew, equipped with a bellows forge, nail makers’ benches and the ox sling that did actually lift the ox off its feet to be shod.

You have missed a great deal, but if you are going to get through your eyes the equivalent of a month’s reading you must not dawdle too long in Main Street.

There is a section devoted to agriculture. There you will see nearly every kind of tool man has ever plowed the ground with, at least back to ancient Egyptian times, and nearly every kind of device with which he has reaped the harvest, and then the instruments for threshing and winnowing, from great antiquity down to the appearance not so long ago of power-driven farm machinery, and the very steam engine used by Henry Ford in the threshing season in 1882, when he was nineteen and still soil-bound.

And there too you will see that man has long been an ingenious animal and thoughtful of his wife, for here are the little dog treadmills he made to turn her churn, so that instead of wearing herself out with the churn plunger she could be doing something else while the dog made the butter. That would have been a high-class farmer only; most of them let their wives make butter the hard way, and there are the churns to prove it, nearly every kind of hand churn there ever was, with plungers, rollers or paddles. The butter was for bread. Baking was the woman’s job. But man made the flour, and here are flour-milling inventions all the way back to the wooden mortar and pestle used by the American Indian while the advanced people of Europe were already using water-power gristmills, like the one you are looking at.

The next section is given to textiles and household arts. How did people clothe themselves before there were any mail-order catalogues? Here are the tools and implements they actually used with their hands, back to the tenth century—a crude cotton gin, flax breakers, spinning wheels, early examples of the spinning jenny from Wales, looms that made gingham and linsey-woolsey, a Chinese loom, a Dutch loom, one of the first Singer sewing machines, poke bonnets, and how they made their hats. And then the woman’s own tools, such, according to the Guide Book, as “carpet stretchers, niddy-noodies, lace bobbins, knee looms, old scissors, flat irons, ironing boards, mangles, washing boards, washtubs, washing machines and fluting irons.”

The section devoted to manufacture is entirely inhabited by old steam engines, beginning with a Newcomen engine, built in 1760, that ran continuously for seventy years to pump the water out of a coal mine in England, then lay on the junk pile for one hundred years, until the Earl of Stamford graciously presented it to the museum in 1930. Near it is one of the first Watt engines that also worked itself out in England—and then engines, engines as far as your eye can see, arranged more or less in the line of their evolution through three hundred years of steam power. One group of twenty is made up of steam engines for the farmer—clumsy ancestors of the tractor—and one of these bears the following note: “A Monitor portable engine, made at Ypsilanti, Michigan, vertical fire box, horizontal boiler attached at the top. A sapling which had grown through the spokes of the wheels during the years it stood in disuse was cut off at the base and remains entwined in the wheel.”

Electricity is next. Electricity suggests artificial light. There is a display of eleven hundred electric light bulbs, from one the size of a grain of wheat to one that weighs thirty-six pounds; but then, speaking of artificial light, here are Eskimo lamps, ancient clay lamps, whale oil lamps, hanging and swinging and petticoat lamps, candles, rush lights, chandeliers, candlesticks, snuffers, trays and matchholders. Electricity then suggests the vacuum cleaner and what was before that, for example, the Brussels carpet sweeper and before that the straw broom and before that the homemade brushes of the Colonists. “Modern heating and cooking devices,” says the Guide Book, “have evolved from gas equipment and kerosene, and back through early base burners, the Franklin stove and the open fire place”—as you can see for yourself. How electricity could have suggested printing is not clear. Perhaps it didn’t. Anyhow here it is—models of the wooden hand press of Blaue, the Columbian hand press, the Washington hand press, etc., “with representative products of the printing art.” Also here a section of every cable that was ever laid across the floor of the Atlantic.

Now you will have to hurry through transportation. But for the distraction of Main Street you might have started with the wheels. Here is nearly every way man has thought of moving himself and his burdens on wheels, in model, in replica and whenever possible the thing itself, from the reproduction of a two-wheeled chariot found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, through ox carts, a carriage from Russia, fancy horse-drawn vehicles from old Europe, every kind of American horse-drawn vehicle, including the Nancy Hanks sulky, a band wagon, the Hotel Del Monte bus which was the largest bus ever built, a gypsy wagon, butcher wagons, fire engines, a circus calliope, a Japanese jinrikisha, bicycles and velocipedes, all the way down to the time when mechanical power began to be added to the wheels, and from there on locomotives, railroad trains and automobiles. At the beginning of the automobile section is the first three-color highway traffic signal in the world; also the first gasoline service station.

The evolution of the Ford automobile is made visible, model by model, and there also is old “999,” Ford’s famous racing car. You will see cars that were overcome by the Ford in competition, some that were not, some with forgotten names that were famous in their time, such as an old Pierce-Arrow, a Stanley Steamer and the air-cooled Franklin that died in spite of its fans. There is also “the Lincoln that transported King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during their historic visit to this continent.”

If you were expecting a visualized history of the American automobile, complete and authentic from the beginning, it is not here. Only the story of the Ford is complete; the rest of it is a miscellany of old cars. In 199 some of them are figures which, says the Guide Book, are “dressed to period in dusters, veils and black leather gauntlets.”

And all of this on a teakwood floor laid in herringbone design on mastic, to last forever. Teakwood is logged out of the jungles of Asia by elephant power. Ford loved teakwood and used a great deal of it.

Greenfield Village is outside. There you walk or maybe you will be picked up by a horse-drawn bus. Automobiles are forbidden.

2

IF YOU can imagine a storybook coming to life, so that the things you are supposed to see with the mind’s eye become visible to the sensory eye, tangible, full size, in three-dimensional form, and arrange themselves becomingly in a park, then you may have some notion of what Greenfield Village is like. Everything is either its original self or a reproduction so true that it might as well be—or, at the very least, it is made of the same materials as the original or materials from that very place. There are eighty-six structures, each with some legend or history about it, or, if not, then a forethought of verisimilitude, as in the case of the blacksmith shop where the anvil rings, the sparks fly and the sweating smith works his bellows forge, standing, says the Guide Book, “in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree, as did the one made famous by the poet Longfellow.”

From the veranda of Clinton Inn you may look up and down the Village Green.

Before railroads, Clinton Inn was the first overnight stop on your way from Detroit to Chicago by stagecoach. It was brought here in a dilapidated condition and restored to live a second life. The taproom is dry. Otherwise it is all as much the way it was as anybody could imagine, with its rag carpets, horsehair furniture in the parlor, lace curtains, a three-candle ratchet chandelier from the central ceiling beam, the fireplaces, old bottles and old prints.

To your left is the Chapel of Mary and Martha. The bell in the steeple was cast by Paul Revere, Jr. The Guide Book tells you that “the bricks in the building and the doors are from the girlhood home of Mrs. Henry Ford”—and it seems to have no other historical importance, except as rather a fine facsimile of an old New England church.

The garden between the inn and the church is said to be “a replica of an herb garden in Greece in the thirteenth century,” and the only explanation of it is that it is “an expression of Mrs. Henry Ford’s interest in herb gardening.” The name of it is the “Garden of the Leavening Heart.”

In all sweetness, why not? Any collector may have this experience. His wife comes with something that doesn’t belong and says, “I’d like to put this here.” And besides, how could he say no to a thirteenth-century Grecian herb garden when he himself had brought to Greenfield Village the Sir John Bennett Jewelry Shop from Cheap-side, London, with some of the original façade and certainly the original giants Gog and Magog, striking the quarter hours with hammers, only because it touched his fancy?

But what are these two black cylindrical objects against the sky, a little to the right of the church steeple? If you were old enough to remember you would say they were the twin smokestacks of the kind of stern-wheeler that used to navigate American rivers. You would be right. That is what they are. Over there is a circular artificial lagoon named the Suwanee River, since it could be named anything, and riding on the captive water is a real stern-wheeler, sometimes with steam up, also named Suwanee.

All of that is backdrop. Ford had a strong sentimental weakness for the old folk songs of Stephen C. Foster and a particular fondness for “The Old Folks at Home,” with the refrain, “Way down upon the Suwanee River.” He acquired the house in which Foster was supposed to have been born and had the notion, besides, of keeping in it an everlasting flame lighted by the hand of a lineal descendant. The Guide Book expects you to be thrilled as your eyes rest upon an association of objects described as follows: “The stern wheeler Suwanee floats on the quiet waters of the Suwanee River in the valley just northeast of the Village Green. Stephen Foster’s house overlooks the lagoon bearing the name of the river his song made famous.”

3

YOU are still on the veranda of Clinton Inn. The bell in the steeple rings. From the little red schoolhouse on the other side of the green children spill out and come toward you. They will have lunch at the inn.

The village maintains an educational system, complete from kindergarten to high school. Several buildings are devoted to that use. The one you are looking at across the green—the one the children are coming from—is the Scotch Settlement School, where Ford learned his ABC’s. It is just as it was then—the old-fashioned stove, kerosene lamps, the old blackboards, the old desks with hearts and boy-and-girl initials carved on them by stealthy jackknives, and the organ. Modern lighting, heating and ventilation have been installed, but all such contraptions are concealed so as not to spoil the antique effect. There is another school on the green, and a third one a little way off, and then at some distance the Noah Webster house, where, instead of learning home economics out of books, groups of girls take turns at keeping house. This Noah Webster house, where the lexicographer wrote his dictionary, stood on the campus of Yale University until it had to make room for modern buildings; then the wreck of it was brought here for resurrection.

Some of the buildings in the Edison group were resurrected, that is, the pieces were recovered from dumps and salvage yards and put together; some were carefully dismembered where they stood and raised again here. Therefore, it is all original—the laboratory where Edison explored the properties of matter, his office and library, his glass house where the first incandescent light bulbs were blown, his machine shop, the carpenter shop, and even Sarah Jordan’s boardinghouse, where some of the Edison workers lived. One day they strung some wires from the machine shop to Sarah’s place, and that made it historic as the first house ever to be lighted by electricity. The Guide Book asks you to notice that these Edison buildings stand on reddish soil, unlike the black soil of Michigan; and this, it explains, “is due to the fact that Mr. Ford has surrounded the buildings with soil from Menlo Park, New Jersey,” that is, the very soil on which they were built in the first place.

A little way off, as it had to be, is the Smith’s Creek Depot. It was bought from the Grand Trunk Railroad, taken down brick by brick and rebuilt here, platform and all, because that was where one night a young news butcher named Thomas A. Edison was thrown off the train after having caused a fire by spilling some acid out of his portable chemical laboratory. There is a piece of railroad track in front of it, and when Golden Light’s Jubilee was celebrated in 1929 the funny old Grand Trunk train itself chuffed up to the depot. President Hoover came out of it, with Edison by the arm, and “led him,” says the Guide Book, “to the same platform on which he had been deposited by the conductor sixty-seven years earlier.”

4

WILL you take a walk?

You may want to see the house where William Holmes McGuffey was born, appointed with “McGuffey furniture,” or the Logan County Court House, where Abraham Lincoln practiced law and where the everlasting flame in the fireplace was lighted by President Hoover; or the house where Orville Wright was born, and beside it the Wright Bicycle Shop where the brothers made bicycles before they made the first successful flying machine; or the birthplace of Henry Ford, an old farmhouse with the original steel windmill; or some log cabins in authentic reproduction and the Georgia slave huts.

If you are interested in the economic activities of ye olden time you will want to see the general store, exactly as it was in 1854 at Waterford, Michigan, with “the original counters, spice and coffee grinders, cracker barrels, hoop skirts, fancy jewelry, skates and comic valentines”; and the old apothecary shop, with its wood stove, herb drawers, drug bottles and jars for leeches; and the tintype studio, with tintypes of many famous modern persons on the walls, who sat for fun; and the cooper shop where a cooper could go right to work on his hoops and staves; and the Sandwich glass shop from Massachusetts; a tile works, a pottery, a gristmill, a weave shed, a cotton gin, a sawmill, a cider mill, a planing mill, a sorghum molasses mill, a carriage shop, a Cape Cod windmill of the Dutch type, and a reproduction of the first power plant of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, where Henry Ford worked as an engineer for forty dollars a month and where in his spare time he made his first automobile.

You may have missed the Cotswold Cottage, brought from England, and the Floral Clock, of which the Guide Book says: “It used to stand at the entrance of Waterworks Park. The works originally were turned by water power, but were never very efficient. When they became so inefficient that it was decided to destroy the old landmark, Mr. Ford brought it to Greenfield Village. One family of plants makes up the dial. Telanthera in various colors are used in the design of both the border of the innermost circle of the dial and the outside border, as well as the large center star. Several thousand plants are in the dial, and require constant watering and trimming. They are imbedded in soil six inches deep held in place by chicken wire. During the winter the plants are replaced by a painted replica.”

On the way back to the green you will pass the Toll House Shoe Shop. It was built in 1828 at one end of a covered bridge between Rocks Village and West Newbury on the Merrimack River. The Guide Book says: “John Greenleaf Whittier was fond of sitting in the shop. He wrote in ‘The Countess’ of ‘the tollman in his cobbler’s stall.’ The first toll collector made shoes as a side line and each succeeding collector followed that trade. Today one hears the shoemaker’s hammer from the little shop, but no longer does its wielder collect a fare from travelers. Inside are many little things of interest—a rabbit gun, a telescope, the cobbler’s violin and shelves filled with shoes made by the craftsman working there.”

And it would be too bad if you had missed the Village Fire Department. Over the doorway is the word Deluge. The engine, says the Guide Book, “is of the suction type, built in 1845 by the Hunneman Fire Engine Works for Rocks Village, Mass.” On the walls are examples of the capes, belts and hats the volunteer firemen wore, and their decorated buckets; and the small white pine building enclosing all of this once housed the village hearse of Newton, New Hampshire. The hearse is forever lost.

As the Ford Motor Company was Ford’s personal tool, so Greenfield Village was his personal toy. Both were in his native landscape, from which he never departed; and both in a curious way were manifestations of the same spirit. But whereas the tool was disciplined by the pure logic of function, the toy was anything he imagined it to be. It was the one thing he ever made that did not have to work. He thought he was creating the image of a life he had done more to destroy than any other man of his time.

History had its revenge. The man who had said history was bunk, not knowing any better, came to be fascinated by any object that had a history, so only it was something he could touch. Current time claimed his mind and the future his imagination, but his heart belonged to the past.

Emotionally he was an incurable rustic, with a smell of the soil about him and a touch of clownishness in moments of impulsive behavior. Once he arrived very late at a dinner where some tycoons were solemnly waiting and astonished them by taking the top of the table in one long-legged stride and kicking the chandelier. As he sat down he was the only one in the room not in the least embarrassed. He was late one morning to keep an appointment with the editor of the Manchester Guardian at the chapel in Greenfield Village. When he appeared he was leaping up the steps like a tardy schoolboy. The editor said: “Why do you do that, a man of your age?” He grinned and said: “Just to show off.”

5

OLD inns enchanted him. A beautiful one at South Sudbury, Massachusetts, cast its spell upon him at sight, and he bought it. When with lavish pains he had completely restored its olden character there was still one thing that seemed very wrong. The highway in front of it was full of disrespectful automobile traffic. The fact that most of the automobiles were Fords did nothing to soften the discordant note. It was easier to move the highway than to uproot the inn. So he moved the highway out of sight and sound, by leave of the State of Massachusetts, if he would bear the entire cost, which he did.

By this time there was almost no scar tissue left from his humiliation at Mt. Clements, where in his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune his ignorance of Colonial events had exposed him to ridicule, for now he could regard himself as the patron of New England history.

Was not the Wayside Inn a vanishing historical memento that ought to be preserved? Washington must have known its hospitality, and Lafayette, and Longfellow had enshrined it in his Tales of a Wayside Inn.

His first intention was limited. He would restore it to its original character and leave it to the public as an heirloom.

Besides doing the things that anyone might have thought of, such as to open the sixteen fireplaces that had been sealed up, to put in electric lights that looked like candles, and to make the furnishings completely and authentically Colonial, he searched the country for relics that had disappeared. One old trunk was traced to Kansas and brought back. The clock, dated 1710, got new insides and was made to run and keep time, with the worn-out parts, such as wooden gears, preserved in a glass case for anyone who wanted to see what the work of the old clock makers was like. The old Bible was lovingly repaired and then locked up in a glass case, for the eye only.

Then the intention began to grow. The native life that had surrounded the Wayside Inn—that also should be restored. So he bought the whole neighborhood. The idea now was to create not a museum of dead things but a working demonstration of life as it transacted itself in Revolutionary times. There was a rickety old gristmill with an undershot water wheel that was feebly grinding only feed. That was made into a flour mill again, just as it was in, say, 1776, with an efficient overshot wheel, to grind wheat and rye and corn. How did they grow their wheat and rye and corn in those days? That was something to be demonstrated. Old plows and rude farming tools were found and put back to work on the soil, with oxen to draw them. Also sawmills, forges and blacksmith shops, all working again, like the clock in the inn. And everything but the clock turning anticlockwise in time.

It behooved us, he said, to look backward; not only to know but actually to see how our forebears made way and what life was like before machines. He did not mean simply that if we kept reminding ourselves of the contrast and made it vivid to our senses we should be able to appreciate the present more, instead of taking it so much for granted. Not that at all. He said again and again that from the rise of modern industry life had suffered a positive loss. The gains, to be sure, were immensely greater than the loss; nevertheless, we should not forget the loss nor undervalue it. By not forgetting it, by keeping the sense of it alive, we could be more hopeful of sometime finding a way both to keep the gains and retrieve the loss. Yet he never could quite define what the loss was. He only felt it. The fact was that he came to have an aching nostalgia for village industry and for life as it was before machines and mass production. Or was it that he had an unconscious sense of guilt at having done more than any other one man to destroy idyllic existence?

Here at any rate lies the peak of contradiction. In the mood induced by the celestial clangor of River Rouge he could think all bucolic animals absurd and obsolete, even the cow. In the mood induced by Wayside Inn he could think there was something to be learned by putting oxen back to work on the soil.

6

ONE of his late discoveries was old-fashioned dancing, for which he organized classes, hired teachers, invented an orchestra around a dulcimer and a cymbalum from Budapest, searched the backwoods for old fiddle players who could remember both the words and the tunes, provided a teakwood floor in the Engineering Laboratory at Dearborn, and wrote a severe book of rules.

Finding the old fiddlers was an exciting pastime. He would hear of one here and another one there and he would go himself to inveigle them. One day he gathered up his doctor companion, Roy McClure, saying: “Come on. I’ve heard of a good one.” It was a long drive into the country. On the way he said: “It will probably be a little farmhouse. The woman won’t be expecting us, and yet nothing will do but she must feed us. Let’s feed her.” At the next town they stopped at a hardware store and got something that would do for a grill and at the butcher’s for some steaks and at a grocery store for salt and pepper and bread and butter. When they arrived the fiddler was not at home and Ford astonished the woman by asking her not to send for him but to eat with them while they waited. He made a fire, got some green corn out of the field and cooked a very good dinner. This he loved to do. It reminded him of the muskrat stew he cooked on the ice at the end of his race in the “999.” So the ancient fiddler found them when he returned to his rooftree, his own woman enlisted on the side of the strangers, and there was no escape.

Ford’s delight in his forty fiddlers, especially one who at eighty-five could dance and fiddle at the same time, gave his new fantasy the necessary touch of incongruity. He tingled to lively folk tunes and had a feeling in his feet for the hillbilly capering that went with them; but his serious intention was to restore old-fashioned dancing in true and elegant form.

The idea came to him suddenly as he gazed at what had been a fine Colonial ballroom in the Wayside Inn. His imagination re-created there the stately scenes of a past time, such as he may have seen prints of in New England albums and scrapbooks, the gallants and their ladies treading the rhythmic measures, perhaps even Lafayette himself in this very place, all behaving in a grand and formal manner. This he compared with modern dancing, to jazz music, not in ballrooms but in huddling places, and his resolve was made. Life had lost its most charming and graceful adornment. He would bring it back.

He went about it with vestiges of the Model T spirit. First the ballroom, partitioned off on the teakwood floor of the Engineering Laboratory at Dearborn, big enough for seventy couples. That was the chassis. Then an orchestra which he designed himself. That was the power plant. Then a search for suitable old music. That would be the ignition system. After that a book of rules as rigid as the old Ford manual that went with every Model T, so that every man might be his own mechanic. Everybody had to dance in absolutely the correct way. It was all there in the book, and the reason for it was that what made old-fashioned dancing so attractive was the deportment. There could be no cutting in. It was forbidden for ladies to enter the ballroom without escort; the ladies must slightly precede the gentlemen. No one under any circumstances should cross the center of the dance floor.

But what of the customers? Dancing, like everything else, had to attract customers and satisfy them, else you might know there was something wrong with the product. Here was no question of price. It was all free. Yet two difficulties appeared. The only people who could remember the old dances thought they were too old to dance and the young people who liked to dance had never heard of them. Well, then, he would teach them—the old to dance again and the young to learn how. For that he needed dancing masters and classes, both of which he provided; and the bi-weekly dance night at the Engineering Laboratory became the affair 213 most de rigueur in the social life of Detroit. One effect, probably not intended, was to soften the old and bitter feud between the Philistinism of Dearborn and the aristocracy of Grosse Pointe. The very best people came. The passing generation had mellowed and was forgetful; the new generation was too bored to care what the quarrel had been about.

Ford said no one ever objected to the formality. They liked it. Certainly. It was implicit in the book of rules that you had to like it. For Ford executives and their wives an invitation was like a royal command. The Grosse Pointers had reasons of their own for coming. In any case, the groaning was done at home, before and after. Ford never heard it.

As a cultural renascence it turned out to be a brave little flame from dying embers. Not a trace of it survives.

7

IF HE had been born a hillbilly, with no wheels in his head, he might have been a fine whittler. One day on his Georgia plantation he was showing some guests a new sawmill. Suddenly he left them sitting on a log and vanished into the mill, and was gone so long that they felt obliged to go looking for him. They found him whittling the wooden handle of a control lever. He was just finishing. “See,” he said, “how much better it is now. How it fits the hand.”

A little later in the house he uncovered for them the secret model of a new engine. For years the idea of a five-cylinder engine had been tormenting him, because for one reason his engineers said it was not feasible, and he had been working on it here. The engine was still wrong, but the handle he had just whittled was perfect. As he whittled he was probably not thinking about the engine; yet, according to his theory, something about the engine might have popped into his head while his hands were busy with the jackknife. Certainly nothing could ever happen to you while your hands were still.

 

Life and work and play all as one thing, like a three-ply thread, until the mysterious weaver has used it up and the end runs off the empty spool. On the night of that terminal event a terrific storm broke upon Dearborn and the wonderful Edisonian world was blocked out while Henry Ford died by the light of a coal oil lamp.