ereafter because he angered the older employees by making repairs in a ½ hour instead of the usual five hours. By 1882 Ford had left Detroit and used the family farm for his address as he traveled around from job to job. In 1885, at a party, he met Clara Jane Bryant. They married April 11, 1888 and their only child, Edsel, named after his boyhood friend Edsel Ruddiman, was born November 6, 1893. Ford had never given up his dream of a "horseless carriage." Whenever he had a spare moment he read about gas engines and experimented in his own workshop. By 1891 he and Clara had moved back to Detroit and Ford began working for Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. His promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. In 1893, Ford built a gasoline engine, and within a few years, an automobile, still a novelty item of the rich or do-it-yourself engineers. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle-the Quadricycle. The Quadricycle had four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, was steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse. Although Ford was not the first to build a self-propelled vehicle with a gasoline engine, he was, however, one of several automotive pioneers who helped this country become a nation of motorists. Ford's Quadricycle was ready for a try-out in 1896. It frightened the horses and caused many a protest, but it ran. It was through working at the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company that Ford met Thomas Edison. At a convention Ford was introduced to Edison as "the young fellow who's made a gas car." After discussing his ideas with the great inventor, Ford was glad to hear that Edison thought his ideas had merit. Edison told him, "Young man, you have it, a self-contained unit carrying its own fuel. Keep at it!" The meeting with Thomas Edison gave Henry Ford fresh inspiration and his spirit was renewed by the famous inventor's words of encouragement. By 1899 Ford had produced an operable car that was written up in the Detroit Journal. Ford was described as a "mechanical engineer." Eventually his work developing automobiles conflicted with his position at the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. Even though the company was well pleased with his work and offered him the General Superintendent position, they asked him to make a choice. Could he give up his "hobby" of automobile building and devote himself to the company? Ford made the decision. He wanted to make automobiles. In 1899 Ford left Edison to help run the Detroit Automobile Company. Cars were still built essentially one at a time. Ford hoped to incorporate ideas from other industries -- standardized parts as Eli Whitney had used with gun manufacturing, or assembly line methods George Eastman tried in photo processing -- to make the process more efficient. This idea struck others in his field as nutty, so before long, Ford quite Detroit Automobile Company and began to build his own racing cars. After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The infant company produced only a few cars a day at the Ford factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit. Groups of two or three men worked on each car from components made to order by other companies. In the winter of 1906, Ford had secretly partitioned a twelve-by fifteen-foot room in his plant, on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. With a few colleagues, he devoted two years to the design and planning of the Model T. Early on, they made an extensive study of materials, the most valuable aspect of which began in an offhand way. During a car race in Florida, Ford examined the wreckage of a French car and noticed that many of its parts were of lighter-than-ordinary steel. The team on Piquette Avenue ascertained that th

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