Henry Ford's Own Story

enry did not return from school in time to help with the chores. When supper time came

tched up and drove about the neighborhood looking for the boy. With characteristic reserve and independence Henry had taken no on

dryly that the boy could take care of himself and there was nothing to worry about. However, aft

e moments in any of them. He helped at the forges, made castings, assembled parts. He was happy. There were no chores or school to interrupt his absorption

for an evening job. It never occurred to him to work at anything other than machinery. He was a machine "fan," just as some boys are

He hunted up a jeweler and asked him for night work. Then he hunted up another, and another. None of t

with a jeweler. The third day, late in the afternoon, his father found him. Knowing Henry's in

f parental authority, declared sternly that the place for Henry was in school. Henry, with two days' exper

of argument. He must have been an unusually reasonable father, for the time and place. It would have been a simple matter to lead He

time you want to come back to it," he s

on his mind every day, he spent his evenings searching for night work. Before the time arrived to pay his second

a dollar a week for spending mon

id and the clothes I had were good enough for the shop. I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid-can't

even in the morning to six at night in the machine shop, from seven to eleven in the evening at work with a mic

steam engines or watches. He went to bed, rose, ate, worked on a regular schedule, following the same rout

in buying technical journals-French, English, German magazines dealing wi

trait common to all men of achievement-an apparently inexhaustible energy. His active, out-of-door boyhood had stored up physical reserves of it; his one

it," he says. "What's the value of recreation, anyho

essed by h

lower & Co., with its great force of a hundred mechanics, became familiar to him; it shrank from the huge propor

de twice alike in this place. We waste a lot of time and material assembling the

man said. "It won't take long to fit it." It was th

Scrap iron accumulated in the corners of the shop. A piece of work was abandoned half finished in order to make up time on another order, delayed by some ac

ed tool that was missing, he knew that his time was being wasted. His thrifty instincts resented it. With his mind full of pict

g dissatisfie