CHAPTER XX
CLINGING TO A PRINCIPLE
Ford and Cooper regarded the juggernaut car for some time in meditative silence.
"Well, I guess you've built a real racer there, all right," Cooper said admiringly.
"Yes, it looks as if I had," Ford answered. "The question is, what good is it? Is there a man on earth who'd try to drive it?"
"Well, I've got some nerve myself, and I don't want to," Cooper admitted. He walked around the car and then looked again at the engine. "How fast would the darn thing go, I wonder?" he said.
"Get in and try her," Ford suggested. Cooper climbed in, Ford cranked the engine, and again sleeping Detroit jumped from its bed. The car leaped and shot down the avenue.
When it roared back again Cooper stopped it in the middle of the street.
"That settles it for me," he said. "She must have made forty miles an hour, and she wasn't half running, at that. I won't take her out on the track."
They confronted the situation gloomily. Couzens was depending on the success of the car at the races to bring his men in line for the organization of a company; here was the car, built at the cost of months of work and some hundreds of Cooper's money, and it developed such speed that it was not safe to enter it for the race.
Suddenly Cooper had an idea.
"See here! I know a man—if there's a man on earth who would take that car out he's the one!" he said. "He isn't afraid of anything under the shining sun—a bicycle rider I raced against in Denver. Oldfield's his name—Barney Oldfield."
"Never heard of him," said Ford. "But if you think he would drive this car let's get hold of him. Where is he?"
"He ought to be in Salt Lake now," Cooper answered. "I'll wire him."
The message went to Oldfield that night. Couzens was told of the situation, and the three men waited anxiously for a telegram from Salt Lake. It came late the next day, asking some further questions about the car and stating that Oldfield had never driven an automobile. Cooper wired again.
The track meeting was to be held the next month. Time was short. Oldfield, if he came, would have to learn every detail of handling the machine. Even with an experienced man, the danger of driving that car in the races was great. Cooper and Ford haunted the telegraph offices.
At last the final reply came. Oldfield would would drive the car. He would arrive on the 1st of June, exactly one week before the date of the race.
It was a busy week. Ford and Cooper bent every energy to teaching Oldfield how to drive the car. They crammed his mind with a mass of facts about the motor, the factor of safety in making quick turns, the way to handle the steering lever. On the day before the races he took the car out on the tracks and made one circuit safely, holding it down to slow speed.
"I can handle her all right. I'll let her out tomorrow," he reported.
The day of the track meeting dawned. Ford and Cooper, tense with anxiety, went over the car thoroughly and coached Oldfield for the last time. Couzens, hiding his nervousness under a bland, confident manner, gathered his group of business men and took them into the grandstand. The free-for-all was called.
Half a dozen cars were entered. When they had found their places in the field Barney Oldfield settled himself in his seat, firmly grasped the two-handed tiller which steered the mighty car, and remarked, "Well, this chariot may kill me, but they'll say afterward that I was going some when the car went over the bank."
Ford cranked the engine, and the race was on.
Oldfield, his long hair snapping in the wind, shot from the midst of the astounded field like a bullet. He did not dare look around; he merely merely clung to the tiller and gave that car all the power it had. At the end of the first half mile he was far in the lead and gaining fast.
The crowd, astounded, hysterical with excitement, saw him streak past the grandstand a quarter of a mile ahead of the nearest car following. On the second lap he still gained. Grasping the tiller, never for a second relaxing that terrific speed, he spun around the course again, driving as if the field was at his heels.
He roared in at the finish, a full half mile ahead of the nearest car, in a three-mile race.
News of the feat went around the world, and in one day Ford was hailed as a mechanical genius.
Couzens brought the group of business men down to the track, and before Oldfield was out of the car they had made an appointment to meet Ford next day and form a company. The race had convinced them.
"Some people can't see a thing unless it is written in letters a mile high and then illustrated with a diagram," Ford says meditatively.
During the following week a company was formed, and Ford was made vice-president, general manager, superintendent, master mechanic and designer. He held a small block of stock and was paid a salary of $150 a month, the same amount he had drawn while working for the Edison company.
He was satisfied. The salary was plenty for his needs; apparently he waved that subject aside as of little importance. At last, he thought, he had an opportunity to put into practice his plans for manufacturing, to build up an organization which was to be as much a Ford factor as his car was a Ford car.
The machine idea was to be its basis. The old idea for the fifty-cent watch factory, altered and improved by years of consideration, was at last to be carried out. He planned a system of smooth, economical efficiency, producing enormous numbers of cheap, standardized cars, and he began work on it with all the enthusiasm he had felt when he first began building his car.
But almost immediately there was friction between him and the men who furnished the capital. They insisted on his designing not cheaper cars, but more luxurious ones. They demanded that his saving in reduced costs of production should be added to their profits, not deducted from the price of the car. They were shrewd, successful business men, and they intended to run their factory on business lines.
"I prefer not to talk about that year," Ford says to-day. "Those men were right, according to their lights. I suppose, anyway, some of them are still building a fairly successful car in the $3,000 to $4,000 class, and I don't want to criticize other men in the automobile field.
"The trouble was that they couldn't see things my way. They could not understand that the thing that is best for the greatest number of people is bound to win in the end. They said I was impractical, that notions like that would hurt business. They said ideals were all very well, but they wouldn't work. I did not know anything about business, they said. There was an immediate profit of 200 per cent in selling a high-priced car; why take the risk of building forty cheap cars at 5 per cent profit? They said common people would not buy automobiles anyway.
"I thought the more people who had a good thing the better. My car was going to be cheap, so the man that needed it most could afford to buy it. I kept on designing cheaper cars. They objected. Finally it came to a point where I had to give up my idea or get out of the company. Of course I got out"
Over thirty years old, with a wife and child to support, and no capital, Henry Ford, still maintaining that policy of "the greatest good to the greatest number" must win in the end, left the company which had given him an opportunity to be a rich man and announced that somehow he would manufacture his own car in his own way.