Page:The Triumph of an Idea.djvu/19

 at odd moments in the next two years, mostly at night in his home shop, when he had finished a day's  work on his regular job. He read everything within reach on scientific topics, including the tale of Gottlieb  Daimler's petroleum-burning engine which was attached to a bicycle, causing great astonishment among  the inhabitants of Mannheim, Germany. Doubtless he scanned, without much attention, the newspaper  columns of 1886 chronicling the Chicago anarchist  riots, Steve Brodie's leap from the Brooklyn Bridge, the  Charleston earthquake, and the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, and in the next year the theater fires of Paris and Exeter with their hundreds of victims, and the drowning of nearly a million  Chinese in the Hoang-ho River floods. It is not recorded whether he heard until afterward that Panhard and Levassor bought the French rights of Daimler's invention and in 1887 actually built a motorcar, which was an object of mirth rather than serious interest among the Parisians.

About the time this equipage was clattering over the boulevards, Ford built an engine on the Otto four-cylinder plan, with a one-inch bore and a three-inch  stroke, operated by gasoline, and somewhat lighter in  weight than the original. Soon afterward he returned to his father's farm, rigged up a workshop for further  experiments, and married Miss Clara J. Bryant. They began their life together in a small cottage, a few  months before his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1888. When he was not cutting timber, he worked on gas engines.

In the year 1888 the first pneumatic tire was produced