Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/68

 a different gearing. Ford saw it all with interest, he was wider awake, more alive than he had been for months.

When he was leaving the shop some time later he had a sudden expansive impulse which broke through his customary reticence.

"I'm thinking of building an engine myself," he said. "A little one, to use on the farm. I figure I can work something out that will take the place of some of my horses."

The foreman looked at Ford in amazement. It is hard to realize now how astounding such an idea must have seemed to him. Here was a man who proposed to take a locomotive into his cornfield and set it to plowing! The wild impossibility of the plan would have staggered any reasonable person. The foreman decided that this was one of Ford's quiet jokes. He laughed appreciatively.

"Great idea!" he applauded. "All you'll need then'll be a machine to give milk, and you'll have the farm complete. Well, come around any time, glad to see you."

Ford made the rounds of Detroit's machine shops that day, but he did not mention his idea again. It was gradually shaping itself in his mind, in part a revival of his boyish plan for that first steam engine he had built of scraps from his father's shop, in part adapted from the article he had read about the horseless carriage.

He was obliged to keep enough horses to