"I never did figure out how to spend the whole of that dollar," he says. "I really had no use for it. My board and lodging were paid and the clothes I had were good enough for the shop. I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid--can't squander it on myself without hurting myself, and nobody wants to do that. Money is the most useless thing in the world, anyhow." His life now settled into a routine eminently satisfactory to him--a routine that lasted for nine months. From seven in the morning to six at night in the machine shop, from seven to eleven in the evening at work with a microscope, repairing and assembling watches, then home to bed for a good six hours' sleep, and back to work again. Day followed day, exactly alike, except that every one of them taught him something about machines--either steam engines or watches. He went to bed, rose, ate, worked on a regular schedule, following the same route--the shortest one--from the boarding-house to the shops, to the jeweler's, back to the boarding-house again. Before long he found that he could spend a part of his dollar profitably in buying technical journals--French, English, German magazines dealing with mechanics. He read these in his room after returning from the jeweler's. Few boys of sixteen could endure a routine so exacting in its demands on strength and endurance without destroying their health, but Henry Ford had the one trait common to all men of achievement--an apparently inexhaustible energy. His active, out-of-door boyhood had stored up physical reserves of it; his one direct interest gave him his mental supply. He wanted to learn about machines; that was all he wanted. He was never distracted by other impulses or tastes. "Recreation? No, I had no recreation; I didn't want it," he says. "What's the value of recreation, anyhow? It's just waste time. I got my fun out of my work." He was obsessed by his one idea. In a few months he had mastered all the intricate details of building steam engines. The mammoth shop of James Flower & Co., with its great force of a hundred mechanics, became familiar to him; it shrank from the huge proportions it had at first assumed in his eyes. He began to see imperfections in its system and to be annoyed by them. "See here," he said one day to the man who worked beside him. "Nothing's ever made twice alike in this place. We waste a lot of time and material assembling these engines. That piston rod'll have to be made over; it won't fit the cylinder." "Oh, well, I guess we do the best we can," the other man said. "It won't take long to fit it." It was the happy-go-lucky method of factories in the seventies.