waiting and doggedly resumed work in the old shed.
The chronicle of those years from the standpoint of an onlooker would be merely a wearisome record of the machine shop—a detailed record of pistons, number of revolutions per minute, experiments in spark-timing. Only the knowledge of their result, or Ford's own story of his hopes, disappointments, mental struggles, would make them interesting. That part of his story Ford will not dwell upon.
"I kept on working another eight years," he says quietly. Eight years!
Some time during them he saw what was needed. Heretofore the crank shaft had made a complete revolution on a single power impulse. Ford perceived that two impulses, properly placed, would increase both the power and the smoothness of the running.
The result of that quiet eight years' work was the first practical two-cylinder opposed engine mounted on a motor car. In the little shed, working alone through the long evenings, while his neighbors rested and visited on their front porches, and his wife sang the baby to sleep in the house, he built the four-cycle engine that made the gasoline automobile a possibility.
In the spring of 1901 he finished it, mounted it on the old car which he had made nine years before of discarded bicycle wheels and rough boards, and drove it out of the shed. It was
