He himself was close pressed for money. Payments on the little house, with their interest, the cost of his wife's illness and of providing for the new baby, his own living expenses, took the greater part of his salary. The situation would have been disheartening to most men. Ford set his teeth and kept on working. The one-cylinder engine bothered him. It did not give him the power he wanted. After he had worked with it for a time he took it down, cut another section from the piece of pipe and made another cylinder. The two-cylinder result was somewhat better, but still the little car jerked along over the ground and did not satisfy him. He fell back into the old routine--twelve hours at the Edison plant, home to supper and out to the shed to work the evening through on the machine. Mrs. Ford was in charge of the house again, busy keeping it neat and bright, nursing the baby, making his little dresses, washing and ironing, keeping down the grocer's bills. Meantime other men, with machines no better than Ford's, were starting factories and manufacturing automobiles. Once in a while on his way home from work Ford saw one on the street--a horseless carriage, shining with black enamel, upholstered with deep leather cushions, ornamented with elaborate brass carriage lamps. Usually they were driven by steam engines. They were a curiosity in Detroit's streets, a luxury which only the very rich might afford. Crowds gathered to look at them. Ford must have seen them with some bitterness, but apparently he was not greatly discouraged. "I didn't worry much. I knew I could put my idea through somehow," he says. "I tell you, no matter how things may look, any project that's founded on the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number will win in the end. It's bound to." He went home, ate the supper Mrs. Ford had waiting and doggedly resumed work in the old shed. The chronicle of those years from the standpoint of an onlooker would be merely a wearisome record of the machine shop--a detailed record of pistons, number of revolutions per minute, experiments in spark-timing. Only the knowledge of their result, or Ford's own story of his hopes, disappointments, mental struggles, would make them interesting. That part of his story Ford will not dwell upon. "I kept on working another eight years," he says quietly. Eight years! Some time during them he saw what was needed. Heretofore the crank shaft had made a complete revolution on a single power impulse. Ford perceived that two impulses, properly placed, would increase both the power and the smoothness of the running. The result of that quiet eight years' work was the first practical two-cylinder opposed engine mounted on a motor car. In the little shed, working alone through the long evenings, while his neighbors rested and visited on their front porches, and his wife sang the baby to sleep in the house, he built the four-cycle engine that made the gasoline automobile a possibility.