On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It
is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on
thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the
spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and
they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world
in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in
construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously
alike--except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have
not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter--it is in every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not through any change in the basic principle--which I take to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as any one can handle.
It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to
better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at
Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering
the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I
still feel about farming. There is a legend that my parents were very
poor and that the early days were hard ones. Certainly they were not
rich, but neither were they poor. As Michigan farmers went, we were
prosperous. The house in which I was born is still standing, and it and
the farm are part of my present holding.
There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of
the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be
done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics--although my
mother always said that I was born a mechanic. I had a kind of workshop
with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In
those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home
made. My toys were all tools--they still are! And every fragment of
machinery was a treasure.