"It's plain common sense, I tell you," Ford insisted, and in spite of good advice, in spite of sound business reasoning, that obstinate man went on in his own way and acted on that belief.
The Ford cars were cheap. Already underpriced nearly a thousand dollars in comparison with other cars, they were to be sold still cheaper, Ford insisted. Every cent he could save in construction, in factory management, in shrewd buying of material was deducted from the selling price.
The cars sold. Orders accumulated faster than they could be filled in the shop on Mack avenue. The profits went back into the factory. More men were added to the pay-roll, more machinery was installed, and still the orders came and the output could not keep up with them.
Mrs. Ford could afford to buy her own hats instead of making them, to get a new set of furniture for the parlor, to purchase as many gloves and shoes as she wanted. She did these things; she even talked of getting a hired girl to do the cooking. But Ford himself made little change in his way of living. He had always dressed warmly and comfortably, eaten when he was hungry, slept soundly enough on an ordinary bed. He saw no way to increase his comforts by spending more money on himself.
"More than enough money to keep him comfortable is no use to a man," he says. "You can't squander money on yourself without hurting yourself. Money's only a lubricant to keep business going."
He continued to work hard, designing simpler, cheaper cars, struggling with business difficulties as they arose, planning a new factory. Most of all he was interested in the new factory.
The success of his four-cylinder car provided money enough to warrant building it at last. A small tract of land on Piquette avenue was bought and Ford prepared to move from the rented Mack avenue place.
The watch-factory dream was finally to be realized. Henry Ford declared that by a large equipment of special machinery and a sympathetic organization of the work, cars could be produced at a hitherto unheard-of price. He planned to the smallest detail, to the most minute fraction of space, time, labor, the production of those cars.
Every part was to be machined to exact size. No supplementary fitting in the assembling room was to be necessary. From the time the raw iron entered one end of the factory till the finished car rolled away from the other end, there was not to be a moment's delay, a wasted motion. The various parts, all alike to the fraction of an inch, were to fit together with automatic precision. And Ford announced that he would produce 10,000 cars in a single year.