My Life and Work
ought to produce also the finished product. Grain should be ground to
flour where it is grown. A hog-growing country should not export hogs,
but pork, hams, and bacon. The cotton mills ought to be near the cotton
fields. This is not a revolutionary idea. In a sense it is a reactionary
one. It does not suggest anything new; it suggests something that is
very old. This is the way the country did things before we fell into the
habit of carting everything around a few thousand miles and adding the
cartage to the consumer's bill. Our communities ought to be more
complete in themselves. They ought not to be unnecessarily dependent on
railway transportation. Out of what they produce they should supply
their own needs and ship the surplus. And how can they do this unless
they have the means of taking their raw materials, like grain and
cattle, and changing them into finished products? If private enterprise
does not yield these means, the cooperation of farmers can. The chief
injustice sustained by the farmer to-day is that, being the greatest
producer, he is prevented from being also the greatest merchandiser,
because he is compelled to sell to those who put his products into
merchantable form. If he could change his grain into flour, his cattle
into beef, and his hogs into hams and bacon, not only would he receive
the fuller profit of his product, but he would render his near-by
communities more independent of railway exigencies, and thereby improve
the transportation system by relieving it of the burden of his
unfinished product. The thing is not only reasonable and practicable,
but it is becoming absolutely necessary. More than that, it is being
done in many places. But it will not register its full effect on the
transportation situation and upon the cost of living until it is done
more widely and in more kinds of materials.
It is one of nature's compensations to withdraw prosperity from the
business which does not serve.
We have found that on the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton we could, following
our universal policy, reduce our rates and get more business. We made
some cuts, but the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow them!
Under such conditions why discuss the railroads as a business? Or as a
service?
CHAPTER XVII
THINGS IN GENERAL
No man exceeds Thomas A. Edison in broad vision and understanding. I met
him first many years ago when I was with the Detroit Edison
Company--probably about 1887 or thereabouts. The electrical men held a
convention at Atlantic City, and Edison, as the leader in electrical
science, made an address. I was then working on my gasoline engine, and
most people, including all of my associates in the electrical company,
had taken pains to tell me that time spent on a gasoline engine was time
wasted--that the power of the future was to be electricity. These
criticisms had not made any impression on me. I was working ahead with
all my might. But being in the same room with Edison suggested to me
that it would be a good idea to find out if the master of electricity
thought it was going to be the only power in the future. So, after Mr.
Edison had finished his address, I managed to catch him alone for a
moment. I told him what I was working on.
At once he was interested. He is interested in every search for new
knowledge. And then I asked him if he thought that there was a future
for the internal combustion engine. He answered something in this
fashion:
Yes, there is a big future for any light-weight engine that can develop
a high horsepower and be self-contained. No one kind of motive power is
ever going to do all the work of the country. We do not know what
electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything.
Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a
great future.
That is characteristic of Edison. He was the central figure in the
electrical industry, which was then young and enthusiastic. The rank and
file of the electrical men could see nothing ahead but electricity, but
their leader could see with crystal clearness that no one power could do
all the work of the country. I suppose that is why he was the leader.
Such was my first meeting with Edison. I did not see him again until
many years after--until our motor had been developed and was in
production. He remembered perfectly our first meeting. Since then we
have seen each other often. He is one of my closest friends, and we
together have swapped many an idea.
His knowledge is almost universal. He is interested in every conceivable
subject and he recognizes no limitations. He believes that all things
are possible. At the same time he keeps his feet on the ground. He goes
forward step by step. He regards "impossible" as a description for that
which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. He knows that
as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible.
That is the rational way of doing the "impossible." The irrational way
is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge. Mr.
Edison is only approaching the height of his power. He is the man who is
going to show us what chemistry really can do. For he is a real
scientist who regards the knowledge for which he is always searching as
a tool to shape the progress of the world. He is not the type of
scientist who merely stores up knowledge and turns his head into a
museum. Edison is easily the world's greatest scientist. I am not sure
that he is not also the world's worst business man. He knows almost
nothing of business.
John Burroughs was another of those who honoured me with their
friendship. I, too, like birds. I like the outdoors. I like to walk
across country and jump fences. We have five hundred bird houses on the
farm. We call them our bird hotels, and one of them, the Hotel
Pontchartrain--a martin house--has seventy-six apartments. All winter
long we have wire baskets of food hanging about on the trees and then
there is a big basin in which the water is kept from freezing by an
electric heater. Summer and winter, food, drink, and shelter are on hand
for the birds. We have hatched pheasants and quail in incubators and
then turned them over to electric brooders. We have all kinds of bird
houses and nests. The sparrows, who are great abusers of hospitality,
insist that their nests be immovable--that they do not sway in the wind;
the wrens like swaying nests. So we mounted a number of wren boxes on
strips of spring steel so that they would sway in the wind. The wrens
liked the idea and the sparrows did not, so we have been able to have
the wrens nest in peace. In summer we leave cherries on the trees and
strawberries open in the beds, and I think that we have not only more
but also more different kinds of bird callers than anywhere else in the
northern states. John Burroughs said he thought we had, and one day when
he was staying at our place he came across a bird that he had never seen
before.
About ten years ago we imported a great number of birds from
abroad--yellow-hammers, chaffinches, green finches, red pales, twites,
bullfinches, jays, linnets, larks--some five hundred of them. They
stayed around a while, but where they are now I do not know. I shall not
import any more. Birds are entitled to live where they want to live.
Birds are the best of companions. We need them for their beauty and
their companionship, and also we need them for the strictly economic
reason that they destroy harmful insects. The only time I ever used the
Ford organization to influence legislation was on behalf of the birds,
and I think the end justified the means. The Weeks-McLean Bird Bill,
providing for bird sanctuaries for our migratory birds, had been hanging
in Congress with every likelihood of dying a natural death. Its
immediate sponsors could not arouse much interest among the Congressmen.
Birds do not vote. We got behind that bill and we asked each of our six
thousand dealers to wire to his representative in Congress. It began to
become apparent that birds might have votes; the bill went through. Our
organization has never been used for any political purpose and never
will be. We assume that our people have a right to their own
preferences.
To get back to John Burroughs. Of course I knew who he was and I had
read nearly everything he had written, but I had never thought of
meeting him until some years ago when he developed a grudge against
modern progress. He detested money and especially he detested the power
which money gives to vulgar people to despoil the lovely countryside. He
grew to dislike the industry out of which money is made. He disliked the
noise of factories and railways. He criticized industrial progress, and
he declared that the automobile was going to kill the appreciation of
nature. I fundamentally disagreed with him. I thought that his emotions
had taken him on the wrong tack and so I sent him an automobile with the
request that he try it out and discover for himself whether it would not
help him to know nature better. That automobile--and it took him some
time to learn how to manage it himself--completely changed his point of
view. He found that it helped him to see more, and from the time of
getting it, he made nearly all of his bird-hunting expeditions behind
the steering wheel. He learned that instead of having to confine himself
to a few miles around Slabsides, the whole countryside was open to him.
Out of that automobile grew our friendship, and it was a fine one. No
man could help being the better for knowing John Burroughs. He was not a
professional naturalist, nor did he make sentiment do for hard research.
It is easy to grow sentimental out of doors; it is hard to pursue the
truth about a bird as one would pursue a mechanical principle. But John
Burroughs did that, and as a result the observations he set down were
very largely accurate. He was impatient with men who were not accurate
in their observations of natural life. John Burroughs first loved nature
for its own sake; it was not merely his stock of material as a
professional writer. He loved it before he wrote about it.
Late in life he turned philosopher. His philosophy was not so much a
philosophy of nature as it was a natural philosophy--the long, serene
thoughts of a man who had lived in the tranquil spirit of the trees. He
was not pagan; he was not pantheist; but he did not much divide between
nature and human nature, nor between human nature and divine. John
Burroughs lived a wholesome life. He was fortunate to have as his home
the farm on which he was born. Through long years his surroundings were
those which made for quietness of mind. He loved the woods and he made
dusty-minded city people love them, too--he helped them see what he saw.
He did not make much beyond a living. He could have done so, perhaps,
but that was not his aim. Like another American naturalist, his
occupation could have been described as inspector of birds' nests and
hillside paths. Of course, that does not pay in dollars and cents.
When he had passed the three score and ten he changed his views on
industry. Perhaps I had something to do with that. He came to see that
the whole world could not live by hunting birds' nests. At one time in
his life, he had a grudge against all modern progress, especially where
it was associated with the burning of coal and the noise of traffic.
Perhaps that was as near to literary affectation as he ever came.
Wordsworth disliked railways too, and Thoreau said that he could see
more of the country by walking. Perhaps it was influences such as these
which bent John Burroughs for a time against industrial progress. But
only for a time. He came to see that it was fortunate for him that
others' tastes ran in other channels, just as it was fortunate for the