business for speculators.

A group of men of speculative turn of mind organized, as soon as I left
the electric company, the Detroit Automobile Company to exploit my car.
I was the chief engineer and held a small amount of the stock. For three
years we continued making cars more or less on the model of my first
car. We sold very few of them; I could get no support at all toward
making better cars to be sold to the public at large. The whole thought
was to make to order and to get the largest price possible for each car.
The main idea seemed to be to get the money. And being without authority
other than my engineering position gave me, I found that the new company
was not a vehicle for realizing my ideas but merely a money-making
concern--that did not make much money. In March, 1902, I resigned,
determined never again to put myself under orders. The Detroit
Automobile Company later became the Cadillac Company under the ownership
of the Lelands, who came in subsequently.

I rented a shop--a one-story brick shed--at 81 Park Place to continue my
experiments and to find out what business really was. I thought that it
must be something different from what it had proved to be in my first
adventure.

The year from 1902 until the formation of the Ford Motor Company was
practically one of investigation. In my little one-room brick shop I
worked on the development of a four-cylinder motor and on the outside I
tried to find out what business really was and whether it needed to be
quite so selfish a scramble for money as it seemed to be from my first
short experience. From the period of the first car, which I have
described, until the formation of my present company I built in all
about twenty-five cars, of which nineteen or twenty were built with the