Henry Ford：My Life and Work, Additional Excerpt 35

I built a steam car that ran. It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it developed plenty of power and a neat control--which is so easy with a steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe required an excess of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers--the engine and control problems were simple enough--and then I definitely abandoned the whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. I knew that in England they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam tractor for use on a large farm. But ours were not then English roads; they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest road tractor. And anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
Locator：Additional excerpt 35 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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