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18. Getting Started
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18 Getting Started Henry Ford grew up on a prosperous farm in Springwells Township about seven miles due west of Detroit. He attended school through the sixth grade and in 1879, at age sixteen, despite his father’s wishes, walked into Detroit and obtained work at the Michigan Car Company Works, where streetcars were built. But Henry was fired from the job after only six days. Henry’s father then arranged for him to become an apprentice machinist at the James Flower & Brothers Machine Shop. Henry was then much more interested in machinery than in farming. In 1880, his apprentice wages of $2.50 per week were a dollar less than his room and board, inducing him to seek evening work in a jewelry store to provide the difference. In 1881, Henry was working for the Detroit Drydock Company, where he learned a great deal about heavy industry, but by the summer of 1882, he was back on the farm operating a small steam traction engine for a neighboring farmer, Jim Gleason, and soon after was repairing such engines manufactured by the Westinghouse Company. While home on the farm, he met Clara Bryant; the two married in April 1888 and set up housekeeping on an eighty-acre farm given to Henry by his father in 1886. Henry had no intention of farming the land as his father would have expected. Instead, he spent the next two years using a steam engine to cut wood off his land and that of his neighbors. After they had built their honeymoon cottage, the “Square House,” it was rather shocking to Clara, who liked living in the country, to find Henry in September 1891 wanting to move into Detroit to accept a position as night operating engineer at a substation of the Edison Illuminating Company for forty dollars a month. They moved into a rented flat at 618 John R Street on September 25, 1891. The position at Edison Illuminating appealed to Henry because he would be learning electrical engineering as well as steam engineering. 134 Previously published in the Dearborn Historian, Vol. 36, No. 4, 1996. By October 1892, Henry and Clara Ford were living in a flat at 162 Cass Avenue, where they were paying fifteen dollars a month rent. That same year, Henry was called upon to take charge of maintenance of steam engines in the main downtown Edison power plant on Washington Boulevard and State Street, with a salary of seventy-five dollars per month. He was on twenty-four-hour call. He did not have an engineer’s license and perhaps could not have passed the test for one, for he had had no formal training. It is said that he was “free lance and got by with it; that he never liked to stay around the big engines at the powerhouse but needed to be nearby in case something went wrong.” This was a bonanza for Ford, for he then had plenty of free time to experiment with gasoline engines. He utilized not only the Edison boiler room as a workshop but also the basement of a storage building across the alley, where, with his mechanically inclined cronies, he spent 135 Henry Ford, at left with mustache, in the generator room of the main powerhouse of the Edison Illuminating Company. With him are William F. Bartels and George W. Cato. This was 1893, the year Henry bought a bicycle and the year Edsel was born. The balcony above the stairs is filled with switches, meters, and gauges. The new generating engine at right, built by the Edison Electric Light Company of New York, reveals a patent date of September 14, 1882, and displays number A-14. Ford’s diary of this period records repairs he made on engines numbered 11, 12, and 13. (0.491) [18.234.202.202] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:13 GMT) many hours discussing and experimenting with gasoline engines. For use of this space, Ford is said to have paid seventy-five cents a month. He was spending most of his time directing his experimental gasoline engine work in these two shops. Ford had the ideas and had the knack to get others to do the work. He was spending very little time at home. Frederick Strauss, a machinist, relates that in 1893, while Ford was 136 Inside this brick woodshed behind the residence at 58 Bagley Avenue is where Henry Ford assembled his first vehicle, the Quadricycle, in 1896.The shed...