In his little museum at Dearborn, Henry Ford has the evolution of dolls, from the types that the Pilgrim children played with up to the most modern dolls that talk and say mamma when you squeeze them. He has the evolution of lamps from the old Hurricane lamps, with a candle burning in them, up to the most modern electric lights. He has the evolution of melodeons, organs, horns, trumpets, and every type of a musical instrument. He has the evolution of stoves, from foot-warmers to electric stoves.

He was showing me an old-fashioned foot-warmer in this collection; the type they used to use in churches in the olden days when churches were not so warm as they are now, and, with a twinkle in his eyes, he said: "What we need in churches now are more heart-warmers in the pulpits rather than foot-warmers in the pews."

After marrying Clara Bryant, Henry Ford went straight on to Detroit to learn the mechanic's trade. He worked at the Edison Electric plant and from 1887 up to the time he organized the Ford Automobile Company he was the chief engineer of the Edison Company.

The Ford Motor Works have grown by leaps and bounds each year until it is now the largest automobile manufacturing company in the world, and is indeed world-wide in its scope. The Ford Company has

its plants now in nearly every country on the globe and in the new expansion programme, recently an nounced, the plan is to encircle the globe with manufacturing and assemblying plants. Such plants are already occupying the great industrial centers of the United States, including New York, Boston, Troy, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, with plans for a plant in San Francisco. Mr. Ford will build in China, India, and the Far East. He already has plants in Copenhagen, Ireland, England. Plans are on foot for plants in Mexico and South America.

In Detroit there are two great plants: the original plant at Highland Park, which is the show plant of the organization; the plant through which visitors are taken; and the River Rouge plant, which is between. Detroit and Dearborn.

The Highland Park plant is stupendous in its size and terrifying to the visitor on his first visit. The great system of efficiency in manufacturing was worked out in this plant. Here it was that the first great strides of the industry were taken. Here it was that the great social plans were born. Here the famous assembly line was instituted and developed; that assembly line that attracted so much attention at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco during the exposition. This was one of the

most unique contributions to manufacturing efficiency. This is the famous line where the parts of a Ford car are assembled.

One man puts on the wheels to the body as it runs along a track, another man puts on the seat, another the battery, another the tires, another the wheelsteering gear, another the wind shield, another the top, and at the end of the line the last man shoots in a gallon of gasoline, jumps in and off goes the car on its own power, like a thing of magic. It is one of the most fascinating adventures in American industry to watch this process; as millions have watched it in the last ten years. The Ford Company encourages visitors to the Highland Park plant and thousands take advantage of this free service every week. They are taken through the plant by specially trained guides.

But the great River Rouge plant makes the Highland Park plant look like a play-house. It is here, close to his Dearborn home, close to his boyhood playplace that Mr. Ford is working out his biggest plans.

Along the winding River Rouge Henry Ford played as a boy. He knows every inch of its way. He has swum in its deep holes in summer time, hunted through the woods that flank its winding way, skated on its ice-bound surface in the winter. He has walked across the Indian trails that run along the River Rouge from earliest boyhood days and now he is build

ing his most stupendous plants within sight of his own home and within sight of his birth-place.

One day when I visited this great plant I saw four great piles of raw material which had just been dumped from Mr. Ford's own ships. Recently he has dredged the River Rouge and has made it deep enough so that his own ships may come up to within a few hundred feet of his River Rouge plant.

It is a striking cycle that he works out in this plant. From his own coal fields in West Virginia and Kentucky, he hauls his own coal, over his own railroad, in his own specially made coal-cars, and in his own ships, and dumps his own coal in great piles back of the blast furnace at the River Rouge.

Second: he takes his own cars, and his own ships and hauls his own iron ore from his own mines up at Iron Mountain, Mich., and he dumps these huge piles of iron ore back of the blast furnace at the River Rouge.

Third: he cuts his own timber from his own forests up in Michigan; hauls it in his own ships and over his own roads, in his own cars and dumps it in great stacks back of the blast furnace at the River Rouge.

I stood on the top of the blast furnace, one winter's day with Edwin Markham, the great American poet, and to our back we saw four great piles of raw material: iron ore, limestone, coal, and lumber.

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Turning around we could see, about a half a mile finished tractors running out of the factory on their own wheels and under their own power. From where we stood we could see the miracle under our

very eyes.

They dumped that raw material into the blast furnace. It was melted into flowing metal by direct process. That flowing metal was run in streams into the foundry which was just below us and in front of us. There it was moulded into engines. These, in turn were shot into the tractor factory and within fortyeight hours those four piles of raw material were converted into tractors by the thousands.

"Talk about the miracle of the loaves and fishes,' said Mr. Markham, the poet, "this is more of a miracle than that. This is the great industrial miracle of all time going on before our very eyes this day as we look down upon it."

To give my readers some idea of the comparative size of the new River Rouge plant with the original Highland Park plant, which most visitors see when they come to Detroit, I will say that there is one great electric dynamo in the River Rouge plant which will generate more power than all of the Highland Park plant put together, and, there are to be eight or ten of these dynamos in the River Rouge plant when it is completed.ht