Re told by Ellen C. Babbitt - "More Jataka Tales"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1573"

Andrew Lang, Ed. - "The Pink Fairy Book"

Louisa May Alcott - "Little Women"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: My Life and Work

H >> Henry Ford >> My Life and Work




There is no more sense in having extra weight in an article than there
is in the cockade on a coachman's hat. In fact, there is not as much.
For the cockade may help the coachman to identify his hat while the
extra weight means only a waste of strength. I cannot imagine where the
delusion that weight means strength came from. It is all well enough in
a pile-driver, but why move a heavy weight if we are not going to hit
anything with it? In transportation why put extra weight in a machine?
Why not add it to the load that the machine is designed to carry? Fat
men cannot run as fast as thin men but we build most of our vehicles as
though dead-weight fat increased speed! A deal of poverty grows out of
the carriage of excess weight. Some day we shall discover how further to
eliminate weight. Take wood, for example. For certain purposes wood is
now the best substance we know, but wood is extremely wasteful. The wood
in a Ford car contains thirty pounds of water. There must be some way of
doing better than that. There must be some method by which we can gain
the same strength and elasticity without having to lug useless weight.
And so through a thousand processes.

The farmer makes too complex an affair out of his daily work. I believe
that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5 per
cent of the energy that he spends. If any one ever equipped a factory in
the style, say, the average farm is fitted out, the place would be
cluttered with men. The worst factory in Europe is hardly as bad as the
average farm barn. Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not
only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to
logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a
rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of
putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra
work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into
improvements as an expense. Farm products at their lowest prices are
dearer than they ought to be. Farm profits at their highest are lower
than they ought to be. It is waste motion--waste effort--that makes farm
prices high and profits low.

On my own farm at Dearborn we do everything by machinery. We have
eliminated a great number of wastes, but we have not as yet touched on
real economy. We have not yet been able to put in five or ten years of
intense night-and-day study to discover what really ought to be done. We
have left more undone than we have done. Yet at no time--no matter what
the value of crops--have we failed to turn a first-class profit. We are
not farmers--we are industrialists on the farm. The moment the farmer
considers himself as an industrialist, with a horror of waste either in
material or in men, then we are going to have farm products so
low-priced that all will have enough to eat, and the profits will be so
satisfactory that farming will be considered as among the least
hazardous and most profitable of occupations.

Lack of knowledge of what is going on and lack of knowledge of what the
job really is and the best way of doing it are the reasons why farming
is thought not to pay. Nothing could pay the way farming is conducted.
The farmer follows luck and his forefathers. He does not know how
economically to produce, and he does not know how to market. A
manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to market would not
long stay in business. That the farmer can stay on shows how wonderfully
profitable farming can be.

The way to attain low-priced, high-volume production in the factory or
on the farm--and low-priced, high-volume production means plenty for
everyone--is quite simple. The trouble is that the general tendency is
to complicate very simple affairs. Take, for an instance, an
"improvement."

When we talk about improvements usually we have in mind some change in a
product. An "improved" product is one that has been changed. That is not
my idea. I do not believe in starting to make until I have discovered
the best possible thing. This, of course, does not mean that a product
should never be changed, but I think that it will be found more
economical in the end not even to try to produce an article until you
have fully satisfied yourself that utility, design, and material are the
best. If your researches do not give you that confidence, then keep
right on searching until you find confidence. The place to start
manufacturing is with the article. The factory, the organization, the
selling, and the financial plans will shape themselves to the article.
You will have a cutting, edge on your business chisel and in the end you
will save time. Rushing into manufacturing without being certain of the
product is the unrecognized cause of many business failures. People seem
to think that the big thing is the factory or the store or the financial
backing or the management. The big thing is the product, and any hurry
in getting into fabrication before designs are completed is just so much
waste time. I spent twelve years before I had a Model T--which is what
is known to-day as the Ford car--that suited me. We did not attempt to
go into real production until we had a real product. That product has
not been essentially changed.

We are constantly experimenting with new ideas. If you travel the roads
in the neighbourhood of Dearborn you can find all sorts of models of
Ford cars. They are experimental cars--they are not new models. I do not
believe in letting any good idea get by me, but I will not quickly
decide whether an idea is good or bad. If an idea seems good or seems
even to have possibilities, I believe in doing whatever is necessary to
test out the idea from every angle. But testing out the idea is
something very different from making a change in the car. Where most
manufacturers find themselves quicker to make a change in the product
than in the method of manufacturing--we follow exactly the opposite
course.

Our big changes have been in methods of manufacturing. They never stand
still. I believe that there is hardly a single operation in the making
of our car that is the same as when we made our first car of the present
model. That is why we make them so cheaply. The few changes that have
been made in the car have been in the direction of convenience in use or
where we found that a change in design might give added strength. The
materials in the car change as we learn more and more about materials.
Also we do not want to be held up in production or have the expense of
production increased by any possible shortage in a particular material,
so we have for most parts worked out substitute materials. Vanadium
steel, for instance, is our principal steel. With it we can get the
greatest strength with the least weight, but it would not be good
business to let our whole future depend upon being able to get vanadium
steel. We have worked out a substitute. All our steels are special, but
for every one of them we have at least one, and sometimes several, fully
proved and tested substitutes. And so on through all of our materials
and likewise with our parts. In the beginning we made very few of our
parts and none of our motors. Now we make all our motors and most of our
parts because we find it cheaper to do so. But also we aim to make some
of every part so that we cannot be caught in any market emergency or be
crippled by some outside manufacturer being unable to fill his orders.
The prices on glass were run up outrageously high during the war; we are
among the largest users of glass in the country. Now we are putting up
our own glass factory. If we had devoted all of this energy to making
changes in the product we should be nowhere; but by not changing the
product we are able to give our energy to the improvement of the making.

The principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge. If there is a single
principle on which our business rests it is that. It makes no difference
how finely made a chisel is or what splendid steel it has in it or how
well it is forged--if it has no cutting edge it is not a chisel. It is
just a piece of metal. All of which being translated means that it is
what a thing does--not what it is supposed to do--that matters. What is
the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light
blow on a sharp chisel will do the work? The chisel is there to cut, not
to be hammered. The hammering is only incidental to the job. So if we
want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest
possible fashion? The cutting edge of merchandising is the point where
the product touches the consumer. An unsatisfactory product is one that
has a dull cutting edge. A lot of waste effort is needed to put it
through. The cutting edge of a factory is the man and the machine on the
job. If the man is not right the machine cannot be; if the machine is
not right the man cannot be. For any one to be required to use more
force than is absolutely necessary for the job in hand is waste.

The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery
of true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due
largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing
of it. Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness. I have striven
toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of
human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit,
depending for the total profit upon the volume of distribution. In the
process of manufacturing I want to distribute the maximum of wage--that
is, the maximum of buying power. Since also this makes for a minimum
cost and we sell at a minimum profit, we can distribute a product in
consonance with buying power. Thus everyone who is connected with
us--either as a manager, worker, or purchaser--is the better for our
existence. The institution that we have erected is performing a service.
That is the only reason I have for talking about it. The principles of
that service are these:

1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One
who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure
is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no
disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What
is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.

2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the
one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another
man--criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the
condition of one's fellow man--to rule by force instead of by
intelligence.

3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business
cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit.
Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but
profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It
cannot be the basis--it must be the result of service.

4. Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process
of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of
cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving
it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only
to clog this progression.

How all of this arose, how it has worked out, and how it applies
generally are the subjects of these chapters.




CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF BUSINESS


On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It
is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on
thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the
spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and
they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world
in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in
construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously
alike--except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have
not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy,
even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour
and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and
is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of
manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in
basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car,
which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter--it is in
every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than
the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the
first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the
making and not through any change in the basic principle--which I take
to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start
with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around
for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as any one can
handle.

It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to
better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at
Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering
the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I
still feel about farming. There is a legend that my parents were very
poor and that the early days were hard ones. Certainly they were not
rich, but neither were they poor. As Michigan farmers went, we were
prosperous. The house in which I was born is still standing, and it and
the farm are part of my present holding.

There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of
the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be
done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics--although my
mother always said that I was born a mechanic. I had a kind of workshop
with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In
those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home
made. My toys were all tools--they still are! And every fragment of
machinery was a treasure.

The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine
about eight miles out of Detroit one day when we were driving to town. I
was then twelve years old. The second biggest event was getting a
watch--which happened in the same year. I remember that engine as though
I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than
horse-drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily for driving
threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and
boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank and coal cart trailing
behind. I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but
this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the
rear wheels of the wagon-like frame on which the boiler was mounted. The
engine was placed over the boiler and one man standing on the platform
behind the boiler shoveled coal, managed the throttle, and did the
steering. It had been made by Nichols, Shepard & Company of Battle
Creek. I found that out at once. The engine had stopped to let us pass
with our horses and I was off the wagon and talking to the engineer
before my father, who was driving, knew what I was up to. The engineer
was very glad to explain the whole affair. He was proud of it. He showed
me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt
put on to drive other machinery. He told me that the engine made two
hundred revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. This last is a
feature which, although in different fashion, is incorporated into
modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which are
easily stopped and started, but it became very important with the
gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into automotive
transportation. I tried to make models of it, and some years later I did
make one that ran very well, but from the time I saw that road engine as
a boy of twelve right forward to to-day, my great interest has been in
making a machine that would travel the roads. Driving to town I always
had a pocket full of trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of
machinery. Often I took a broken watch and tried to put it together.
When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together
so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost
anything in watch repairing--although my tools were of the crudest.
There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with
things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is
made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made.
Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas
from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.

From the beginning I never could work up much interest in the labour of
farming. I wanted to have something to do with machinery. My father was
not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that
I ought to be a farmer. When I left school at seventeen and became an
apprentice in the machine shop of the Drydock Engine Works I was all but
given up for lost. I passed my apprenticeship without trouble--that is,
I was qualified to be a machinist long before my three-year term had
expired--and having a liking for fine work and a leaning toward watches
I worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. At one period of those
early days I think that I must have had fully three hundred watches. I
thought that I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents
and nearly started in the business. But I did not because I figured out
that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people
generally would not buy them. Just how I reached that surprising
conclusion I am unable to state. I did not like the ordinary jewelry and
watch making work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then I
wanted to make something in quantity. It was just about the time when
the standard railroad time was being arranged. We had formerly been on
sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving
days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a
good deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It
had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighbourhood.

In 1879--that is, about four years after I first saw that
Nichols-Shepard machine--I managed to get a chance to run one and when
my apprenticeship was over I worked with a local representative of the
Westinghouse Company of Schenectady as an expert in the setting up and
repair of their road engines. The engine they put out was much the same
as the Nichols-Shepard engine excepting that the engine was up in front,
the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied to the back wheels by
a belt. They could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the
self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. They
were sometimes used as tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner
also happened to be in the threshing-machine business, he hitched his
threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from
farm to farm. What bothered me was the weight and the cost. They weighed
a couple of tons and were far too expensive to be owned by other than a
farmer with a great deal of land. They were mostly employed by people
who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some other
line that required portable power.

Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light
steam car that would take the place of horses--more especially, however,
as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of ploughing. It
occurred to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same
idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A horseless
carriage was a common idea. People had been talking about carriages
without horses for many years back--in fact, ever since the steam engine
was invented--but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so
practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and
of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were
poor and we had not the habit of getting around. One of the most
remarkable features of the automobile on the farm is the way that it has
broadened the farmer's life. We simply took for granted that unless the
errand were urgent we would not go to town, and I think we rarely made
more than a trip a week. In bad weather we did not go even that often.

Being a full-fledged machinist and with a very fair workshop on the farm
it was not difficult for me to build a steam wagon or tractor. In the
building of it came the idea that perhaps it might be made for road use.
I felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all the bother of
attending them and the expense of feeding, did not earn their keep. The
obvious thing to do was to design and build a steam engine that would be
light enough to run an ordinary wagon or to pull a plough. I thought it
more important first to develop the tractor. To lift farm drudgery off
flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant
ambition. It was circumstances that took me first into the actual
manufacture of road cars. I found eventually that people were more
interested in something that would travel on the road than in something
that would do the work on the farms. In fact, I doubt that the light
farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm had not the farmer
had his eyes opened slowly but surely by the automobile. But that is
getting ahead of the story. I thought the farmer would be more
interested in the tractor.

I built a steam car that ran. 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. I knew that in England
they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines
of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam
tractor for use on a large farm. But ours were not then English roads;
they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest
road tractor. And anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a
few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while.

But I did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. The work with
the Westinghouse representative only served to confirm the opinion I had
formed that steam was not suitable for light vehicles. That is why I
stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that the
big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to
waste time on something that would lead nowhere. A few years before--it
was while I was an apprentice--I read in the _World of Science_, an
English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming
out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus
intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was
concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as
even a possibility for road use. It was interesting to me only as all
machinery was interesting. I followed in the English and American
magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and
most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the
illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline.
The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time
that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market.
They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not
recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could
ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated
conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never
thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way
with wise people--they are so wise and practical that they always know
to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the
limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever
I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition
with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure
they would do little work.