美文賞析之MACHINE MAD HENRY FORD

Growing up on a remote Michigan farm. Henry Ford knew little of all this but he soon showed signs that he belonged to a new generation of Americans interested more in the industrial future than in the agricultural past. Like most pioneer farmers, his father, William, hoped that his eldest son would join him on the farm，enable it to expand, and eventually take it over. But Henry proved a disappointment. He hated farm work and did everything he could to avoid it . It was not that he was lazy. Far from it. Give him a mechanical job to do， from mending the hinges of a gate to sharpening tools, and he would set to work eagerly. It was the daily life of the farm, with its repetitive tasks, that frustrated him. What a waste it is, he was to write years later, remembering his work in the fields, for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of houses.

Henry was excited by the possibilities for the future that were being opened up by developments in technology that could free farmers like his father from wasteful and boring toil. But these developments, in Henrys boyhood, had touched farming hardly at all and farmers went on doing things in the way they had always done. Low profits, the uncertainties of the weather, and farmers instinctive resistance to change prevented all but the richest and most far-sighted farmers from taking advantage of the new age of machines.