Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/69

 handle the work of the farm when it was heaviest; in the slack season and during the winter the extra animals were necessarily idle, wasting food and barn space, and waste of any kind was an irritation to his methodical mind. It seemed to him that a machine could be built which would do a great part of the horses work in the fields and cost nothing while not in use.

That the undertaking was revolutionary, visionary, probably ridiculous to other people, did not deter him; he thought he could do it, and that was enough.

"Precedents and prejudice are the worst things in this world," he says to-day. "Every generation has its own problem; it ought to find its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can t do things better than our fathers did."

That belief had been steadily growing in him while his inherited thrift and his machine-ideas improved on the farming methods of Greenfield; it crystallized into a creed when his old friend laughed at his idea of replacing horses with a machine.

He had visited the shops which interested him, ordered the material he wanted, and was on his way to the station to take the train home when he remembered the shopping list Mrs. Ford had given him, and her repeated injunctions to attend to it "the very first thing he did."

With the usual exclamation of a husband saved by a sudden thought on the very brink of