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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 1, 1908
Detroit, Michigan, USA
118 years ago
The Ford Model T, introduced on October 1, 1908, the simple, rugged, affordable automobile
that turned the car from a rich man's toy into an everyday tool.
On October 1, 1908, the Ford Motor Company began selling a new car from its Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. The Model T had a four-cylinder, twenty-horsepower engine, a top speed of around forty miles per hour, and a high chassis built to cope with the rutted dirt tracks that passed for roads in most of America. The touring version cost 850 dollars. That was not cheap, but it was far less than most competing cars, and Henry Ford intended to push the price lower every year.
He did. By the mid-1920s a new Model T runabout could be had for under 300 dollars, which put it within reach of farmers, clerks, and the factory workers who assembled it. When production finally ended in 1927, more than fifteen million had been built. For a stretch in the early 1920s, more than half of all the cars on Earth were Model Ts.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The moving assembly line, introduced at Ford's Highland Park plant in 1913, which cut the
time needed to assemble a chassis from more than twelve hours to about an hour and a half.
The car itself was only half the story. To meet demand, Ford and his engineers reorganized production at the new Highland Park factory. In 1913 they introduced the moving assembly line for chassis production, borrowing ideas from meatpacking plants, grain mills, and the interchangeable parts tradition of American arms makers. Instead of workers moving to the car, the car moved past the workers, each of whom performed one small task. Chassis assembly time fell from about twelve and a half hours to roughly ninety-three minutes.
The work was fast, repetitive, and numbing, and workers quit in enormous numbers. In January 1914 Ford responded with the five-dollar day, roughly doubling the prevailing wage and shortening the shift to eight hours. Turnover collapsed, applicants mobbed the factory gates, and Ford's own workers could now afford the product they made. Between 1914 and 1925 the car came only in black, partly because the black enamel Ford used dried quickly enough to keep pace with the line.
The consequences spread far beyond Detroit. Cheap cars created demand for paved roads, filling stations, motels, suburbs, and oil. Rural isolation eased as farm families could reach town in an hour rather than half a day. Mass production methods were copied by industries from refrigerators to radios. By the time the last Model T rolled off the line in May 1927, outsold at last by more comfortable and stylish rivals, the machine that Americans called the Tin Lizzie had rearranged the geography of daily life.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The Model T made car ownership ordinary. Before 1908 the automobile was a luxury. Falling prices turned it into a household purchase, and societies built around the private car, with all their freedoms and costs, followed from that shift.
The moving assembly line became the template for modern manufacturing. Breaking complex work into simple, timed steps raised output dramatically and lowered prices, and the method spread to nearly every mass-produced good of the twentieth century.
The five-dollar day linked high wages to mass consumption. Ford's wage policy was driven by turnover rather than generosity, but it helped establish the idea that well-paid workers are also customers, a principle that shaped the economy of the century that followed.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 1, 1908, Ford put a plain, tough, affordable car on sale. Fifteen million Model Ts later, the automobile was an everyday object, the assembly line was the standard way to make things, and the landscape of the modern world had been redrawn around the road.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“I will build a motor car for the great multitude.”
— Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922)
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Ford Model T, the moving assembly line, the five-dollar day, and the way one car changed how the world lives and works?
