October 1 - Model T Ford

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On this day, in 1908, the first production Model T Ford was completed at the Piquette Avenue Ford plant in Detroit, Michigan. The first motorized vehicle was designed in 1672 by a Flemish missionary in China. It was a steam powered toy for the emperor and we don’t know if it was ever actually built. Nearly a hundred more years would pass before a Frenchman, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, would build a self-propelling tricycle (that could actually carry people). It, too, was powered by steam and can be considered the world’s first automobile. Other inventors tried to improve on Cugnot’s design, but keeping enough steam pressure going to get very far proved to be a tough nut to crack.  Couple the lack of consistent power with the massive size (and weight) needed for a boiler and you can see why motorized vehicles took a while to take off.

 

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In 1807, another French inventor,  Nicéphore Niépce, introduced the world’s first internal combustion engine. He attached it to a boat rather than a land vehicle and it was only marginally useful. The world had to wait 81 more years before a gas powered engine was developed that would be small enough and powerful enough to propel people and goods across the country. This leap forward came from Germany this time, as Carl Benz introduced the world’s first car and built the world’s first car company. In 1896, Benz and Co. managed to produce a whopping 576 cars in one year. Since all cars were custom built at that time, more than one a day was an almost unheard of amount.

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America began building its own cars for the first time in 1893 when the Duryea Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts got into the game. Studebaker and Oldsmobile followed suit four years later. Henry Ford didn’t start a company, the Henry Ford Company, until 1901. He parted ways with his first attempt, took the rights to his name with him (the firm changed its name to the Cadillac Motor Company) and started a new company, the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Henry then began a dual period of refinement trying to make his cars more powerful and cheaper to produce. His first design was called the Model A. With each improvement, he changed the model designation to the next letter in the alphabet, making a handful of each iteration. The Model N was particularly popular, selling 7,000 units during its two year production run. By 1908, when Henry’s twentieth model was ready for production, there were barely 200,000 cars in total terrorizing pedestrians across the country and most of those were playthings of the wealthy. That was all about to change.

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By the time the Model T Ford was ready to go into production, Henry had made several innovations in his factory on Piquette Avenue. One was to implement assembly line techniques that had first been developed by Oldsmobile. The second was to focus on making one model of car and one only. This allowed Ford to develop the concept of interchangeable parts and reduce the number of specific jobs required to assemble a car. When Model Ts began rolling off the line, it took about 12.5 hours to put one together, a vast improvement over the weeks (or even months) required for hand built cars. These efforts also put the price point of a Model T at $825 (just over $23,000 today), which was about four months of an assembly line worker’s wages and well under the cost of most other cars of the day.

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The low price point and relative ease of driving (compared to other cars of the era; it was still a fairly complex process compared to today’s cars) made the Ford Model T an instant hit. And it had an initial top speed of 40 miles per hour. (Literally) hold onto your hats folks! Within days of being introduced, Ford had over 15,000 orders for more. Only 11 cars were built during the first month of production, but Henry and his crew were up to the challenge. With more design improvements, a gradual change to an assembly line system where the cars moved rather than the workers and a move to a new, bigger facility in Highland Park, Ford reduced the build time on the Model T from 12.5 hours to only 93 minutes by 1914. Every three minutes a new Model T rolled off the end of the line and was available for purchase. That year Ford produced more new cars than every other car company combined and, by 1918, more than half of all cars in the world were Model Ts. So many were purchased over the two decades they were made, it would be the best selling model car ever for more than forty years after production stopped (the Volkswagen Beetle finally surpassed it in 1972).

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One of the most famous Henry Ford quotes is about his company’s best-selling car ever: Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black. While this may lead most people to believe that the Model T only ever came in black, that wasn’t initially true. When first introduced, customers could get their new car in gray, green, blue or red. Notice what color isn’t on that list. As production sped up, however, it was discovered that the black paint the automotive industry used at the time was the only shade that dried quickly enough to satisfy the demands of a moving assembly line. The original four colors were discontinued by 1914 and black was the singular choice for the next fourteen years. No one seemed to care as Model Ts continued to be sold as fast as Ford could churn them out.

By the mid-Twenties, the era of the domination of the Model T was coming to a close. As consumers became more sophisticated, they began demanding more style in their automobiles. The Model T started being viewed as an okay starter car but not something an upwardly mobile citizen would want to be seen driving. As sales began to decline, Ford responded by doing a complete redesign of their product and ended production of the Model T in 1927, after building more than 15 million of them. You might think the Model T’s successor was the Model U, but it wasn’t. Ford’s next vehicle was called a Model A again. The official line was that so much was new that Henry thought they should go back to the beginning of the alphabet again. I say it’s fairly obvious why car makes eventually got names instead of letter designations. Not that the Model T didn’t earn a variety of nicknames over the years: Tin Lizzie, Leaping Lena (which I had never heard before researching this post), a jitney and, my favorite, a flivver. No matter what you called it, the Model T Ford was the vehicle that opened going for a drive up to the burgeoning middle class and basically started America’s love affair with the car all on its own. Now whether that’s been a good thing or not since then is a topic for endless debate, but whenever you pile a bunch of your friends into your car and head out to the beach, you can thank a flivver for paving the road travel.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Dame Julie Andrews