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In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /330792t VIII. THE BELIEVER TAKES A TEST A gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing . .. -HENRY FORD ) In 1886 Henry began to clear the trees off the woodland of the nearby Moir farm. He did not farm a lick. He had no horses, no cows, no chickens, no crops, no farm tools. There is not a grain of evidence that he ever did intend to farm the land. Henry said only: "Cutting the timber gave me a chance to get married." As always, he made a date with another machine. For $250-perhaps his own moneyHenry bought a circular sawmill, rented a twelve-horsepower portahle engine to run it and set himself up in husiness. The forty acres were mainly woodland: hlack oak, elm, maple, ash, beech and basswood; Henry sawed up his own trees to sell as lumher for huilding and as cordwood in Detroit. He took his engine around the area wherever a neighhor would pay to have his land cleared. This was profitable work. He took Clara along, so she could ride one of the machines that fascinated him. She was wonderfully willing to listen to him talk about machines; she did not halk at riding the portable engine; she cheerfully came along to watch him pulling stumps-and all this must have convinced him that here was the girl for Henry Ford. To add to his income, he worked two summers for the Buckeye Harvester Company, setting up and repairing their Eclipse portahle farm engines . Then he worked his sawmill the rest of each year. In the winter of 1887 he worked in his home shop trying to build a four-cycle engine "just to see if I understood the principles." ... The little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch hare and a three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did not develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the engines being offered 45 commercially. I gave it away later to a young man.... it was eventually destroyed. That was the beginning of the work with the internal combustion engine. The acres he cut for himself had once belonged to one George Moir, who sold them to William Ford in 1865; and as is the country custom, in 1886 it was still called "the Moir Place." A little house on the property was called "the Moir House," and there Henry prepared to settle with his bride-to-be. Henry had set his sawmill up on Ford Road, along Emerson Road "north of the corners." Logs were usually hauled to the mill during the winters, since sleighs operating on snow were the most practical means to transport large logs. And lumbering was always winter work: farm summers are full enough of other matters. He put up his sawmill on a small rise. The land sloped three hundred feet down to the county ditch. He stretched a pipe from the ditch up to the top of the rise, where he dug a well-really a pond hole-close to his engine, about ten feet square and seven feet deep. A small pump brought water up from the ditch to this water basin. The boiler pulled water from the basin, and Henry fired the boiler with scraps from the lumber brought in either by sleighs in snowy weather or on stone-boats in dry weather. He used a pair of oxen, as they were not frightened by the puffing thump of the steam-engine. Henry sold his lumber to lumber yards and furniture factories, and found a particularly good market for large oak timbers in the shipyards of Detroit. He was industrious, and for five years he cut more than 200,000 feet of lumber each year. Unquestionably these years put iron into his phYSique. 54a, b. lie had the usual small-businessman's troubles. Here we see how he attempted to get his proper pay for some wagon tongues he had cut-and how seven years later he was still after the money. 55. The Moil' House, first home of the newlyweds , Henry and Clara Ford. The shed in back came later; here Henry moved his machine shop from the Homestead. Here he said he continued his experiments with gas engines, all of them...

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