Page:The Triumph of an Idea.djvu/23

 a clutch lever in front of the driving seat. Thrown for- ward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown back, the low  speed; with the lever upright the engine could run free. To start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with the clutch free. To stop the car one simply released the clutch and applied the foot brake. There was no reverse, and speeds other than those of the belt were obtained by the throttle. I bought the ironwork for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber  tires. The balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made, and all of the more delicate mechanism I made my-  self. One of the features that I discovered necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held three gallons of gasoline which  was fed to the motor through a small pipe and a mixing  valve. The ignition was by electric spark. The original machine was air-cooled or, to be more accurate, the motor  simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more the motor heated up, and so I very shortly  put a water jacket around the cylinders and piped it to a  tank in the rear of the car over the cylinders.

An April rain had soothed Ford's neighbors to sleep when he bounced out of his yard on the eventful night  in 1893, but such were the noises of his strange vehicle  that the inhabitants were aroused forthwith. Faces appeared at all the windows roundabout. Mrs. Ford stood on the front steps, watching her husband as he vanished  jolting and clattering into the farther reaches of Bagley  Avenue.

For a long time the gasoline buggy was the only