Henry’s Attic: Some Fascinating Gifts to Henry Ford and His Museum

3 Horse-Drawn Vehicles and Cycles

CHAPTER 3 Horse-Drawn Vehicles and Cycles IENRY FORD was no horse lover. Part of his aversion to these animals no doubt stemmed from an incident that occurred when he was nine years old. He had been ridinga high-spirited colt named Jennie when a cow suddenly loomed up out of a ditch. Jennie bucked and threw Henry, but his foot caught in the stirrup, and he had a most uncomfortable ride all the rest of the way home. Not only did he forever after consider horses "not worth their keep"; he was also not the least remorseful about their possible extinction. In 1909, when a man who had just motored into New York City from the countryside— terrifying horses, cows, chickens, and himself along the way—suggested to Henry that his motor cars were creating a social problem, Henryreplied: No, my friend, you're mistaken. I'm not creating a social problem at all. I am going to democratize the automobile. . . . When I'm through, everybody will be able to afford one.. . . Horse[s] will have disappeared from the highways [and] be driven from the land. Their troubles will soon be over. Henry was, of course, almost right. The horse population of America diminished so fast in the wake of automobiles and gasoline tractors that it caused a minor agricultural revolution, as thousands of acres previously devoted to hay were switched to other crops. In 1872, when Jennie dragged Henry home by the foot, there were eight million horses in the land. Fifty years later, after the U.S. Census Bureau had recorded enormous declines in the horse population, Henry jubilantly noted in one of his "jotbooks"—the logs in which he wrote down his random thoughts—that "the Horse is DONE." Nevertheless, in another of the paradoxes for which Henry Ford was famous, he had by 1924 amassed an impressive collection of horse-drawn vehicles. On July 4 of that year, he and his wife organized a parade in Dearborn entitled "Pageant: Carriages of Two Centuries." Henry and Clara rode dressed in costumes of the 1860s in a horse-drawn carriage surrounded by a fleet of horse-drawn chaises, gigs, coaches, buckboards, buggies, and wagons. In addition, Henry saw to it that Greenfield Village offered both horse-drawn carriage rides and a riding school. Henry Ford's disdain of horses seems to have put him at a disadvantage in his early courting days. When he set off for country dances at about the age of twenty, he went by foot no matter what the distance. He is said to have then wanted to marry a farm girl by the name of Christine Gleason, but she turned him down to marry a young blacksmith who owned a fine span of chestnut horses and an elegant carriage. Cycles, being mechanical devices, seem to have occupied a somewhat higher place than the horse in Henry's esteem. Just when the first cycle came into existence is uncertain, but these machines went through many configurations before they gripped the imagination of Americans—including Henry Ford's—in the 1890s. The earliest cycles required the "riders" to push them along with their feet. The French photography pioneer Nicephore Niepce built such a device in the early 1800s, and at around the same time in Germany, Baron Karl von Drais de Saverbrun came up with a slightly better version. Other inventors copied and improved on the draisine, as it was called, but it was not until the 1830s that a Scotsman named KirkpatrickMcMillan built a cycle operated by a treadle attached to its rear axle. It was the first cycling machine riders could propel without touching their feet to the ground. The next significant advance in cycles 71 occurred in a Paris workshop between 1855 and 1863, when Pierre and Ernest Michaux and their employee Pierre Lallement developeda machine with a rotary crank and pedals attached to the front wheel. Whether the Michaux brothers or Lallement conceived the idea of the pedal-operated rotary crank is disputed, but the type of cycle they built became known as the velocipede. The Michaux brothers seem to have received most of the credit for the pedaldriven velocipede, and Lallement soon immigrated to America. Settling in Connecticut, he proceeded to build the first American velocipede—also quite aptly known as the "boneshaker"—and in 1866 he patented his design of the rotary crank. Velocipedes enjoyed a brief vogue in America, but they were heavy—often weighing eighty to...