The Fifteen Millionth Ford Model T

The Model T is one of the most significant machines in industrial history. What it did could only be done once. It's the car that made people want cars. It was that car that the average American could afford and give them the personal freedom that they've never experienced before. The Model T defined the 20th century landscape. And so what you're looking at is the 15 millionth car that changed the world. The Model T started it all. In 1905, you would have multiple modes of transportation. So you'd have a streetcar. There would also be horses with piano box buggies. There'd be horseback riders, bicycles. But you'd also see something different as far as vehicles, too. You would see a steam-propelled vehicle. You would see an electric vehicle. You would also see petroleum-based vehicles. Think about this. The world was not a petroleum-based community at that point in time. The automobile was introduced in the United States in the 1890s, and they were available from that point forward, but they were very expensive, and they were seen as novelties. But the vehicle provided us a freedom and an independence that those other forms of transportation did not. Most people didn't go 50 miles from their home in their whole life until they got their own car. It's hard for people today to understand how transformative the Model T was. It allowed you to do things you didn't know you wanted to do. Nobody knew they wanted to careen down a highway at 25 miles an hour because they couldn't do it until they could. Of course, the Model T eventually made Henry Ford famous throughout the country and eventually the world. Henry Ford was an extraordinarily complex man. Ford went in a million different directions at 99 sides. He only had this 5th or 6th grade education and was able to build the largest organization in the world. Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, about 10 miles from Detroit. His father was a farmer. His mother died giving birth to the 8th child, so Henry Ford lost his mother when he was 12 years old. He wasn't a great student, just like the drudgery of the farm work at his father's farm. He dropped out of school and walked the 10 miles to Detroit to work in the machine shops when he was 16 years old. Over the next several years, he learned about engines. He learned about foundry techniques. He learned a lot about machines. He got a job as an engineer with the Detroit Edison Company. He rose to become the chief engineer, but he got interested in this newfangled technology that was kicking around horseless carriages, and he built himself a horseless carriage. A quadricycle, it's a little 2-cylinder, 4 or 5-horsepower engine finished on June the 4th of 1896. Mr. Ford makes about a mile loop, comes back, goes to work that morning and just knows that he can build a car. People become aware of the work he's doing. His boss invited him to a convention of Edison engineers. He is introduced to Thomas Edison. He draws a picture of the car on a napkin. Edison is said to have slammed his fist down on the table and said, young man, that's the right idea, stick with it. Mr. Ford said that no man up to that time had given him any encouragement, and that pound on the table was worth worlds to him. So he comes back and he keeps experimenting. He started a company called Ford Motor Company. He designed a series of cars. His Model N became the best-selling car in the country, so by that time he had a good sense of what the public actually wanted to buy and could buy. He had some failures behind him. He had two failed car companies before Ford Motor Company. He learned from his mistakes. He also viewed the work that he was doing as play, and he surrounded himself with people who were of like mind. He had a very magnetic personality. People who worked with him, remembering him several years later, said he was able to somehow attract people to work with him and then to buy into his vision. A lot of manufacturers were thinking, you know, let's just build an expensive car. We'll make a lot of profit on each car we sell, and we'll target the rich. That's our market. Henry Ford moved this idea forward to create something that was not just a luxury automobile. A Cadillac by this time is $1,700, really a car for the wealthy. Something he always tried to do throughout his life and something that he thought was important for the Model T was to improve the life of the farmer. He grew up on that farm. He understood that it was a very lonely, isolated life. Your nearest neighbor might be two miles away, which again was an incredible distance before the automobile. Ford realized, no, we've got this massive untapped market. There's no reason that middle class, lower class people wouldn't want a car. They would want all of these advantages as well. You've got to build a quality automobile, but one that is affordable enough for everyone to own. He knew that those farmers would buy such a car if he could make it. And in 1907, Henry Ford told a couple of his people, I want you to go up to the third floor. I want you to wall off an area. Put double doors in so we can get a car chassis in and out. Put a good lock on it. We're going to go in there. We're going to design a new model. With the secret experimental room being constructed in 1907, he would have been in there quite a bit working on the design of the car that put the world on wheels, the Model T. At the time the Model T was being designed, I think this was Henry Ford at his best. Henry Ford could be a difficult guy to work for. He was demanding. But at that point, he was still open-minded, and he would listen to other people's ideas, which is what you need in a creative process like that. These guys were on the cutting edge, and it was exciting to be in that room designing this thing with the ideas flying. A gentleman named Joseph Gallum is one of the about a dozen or less people that were allowed in the experimental room. He said that for about 10 months they would work from 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning until 8 or 9 o'clock at night continuously on the design of the car. They wanted to build a car that was going to be evolutionary, but it ended up being revolutionary. The Model T provided not only an inexpensive car, but also a vehicle that was a very well-built and, frankly, state-of-the-art car when it was introduced in the fall of 1908. The Model T is a beautiful example of a bunch of different ideas coming together. They did a completely new engine. This was the first single-block, 4-cylinder engine, 20 horsepower, very, very peppy. It had a separable cylinder head. So much easier to work on. Every Model T was delivered with a set of tools, and you were expected to learn how to repair your own car. You could undo the bolts, take the cylinder head off. There were the valves. There was the head. You could do the maintenance, put them back together, and go on your way. That's the way every internal combustion is now. In 1907, hardly anybody was doing that. It was really difficult to do. They managed to pull it off, so it was a big selling point. You had this flywheel magneto, which was all enclosed, running in oil, so you carried your electric generator along with you. The flywheel magneto is really one of the singular characteristics of the Model T engine. The Model T was actually driven and shifted with your feet. Ford used what we call a planetary transmission. The planetary transmission was, even by 1907, regarded by many automakers as kind of behind the times. They were going to sliding gear transmissions, which were very hard to shift. The planetary transmission was easy to learn to drive. So it opened up this whole set of potential customers who'd never driven a car before. Seems like everyone's on the move. But we've got to do something about those roads. At the beginning of the century, we had probably the worst roads in the industrialized world. So any car that was going to drive on these roads had to be able to take a lot of punishment. One way to do that is to make the car big and strong and heavy. That also meant expensive. There's another approach. Make the car really flexible. Don't fight the bumps. Go with them. There's one car that takes you anywhere you want to go. The Model T. Strong, sturdy, with a will of its own. The Model T frame is so flexible that if two people get at the opposite end by hand, they can twist it. A real key to the Model T was lightweight. Henry Ford made use of an alloy known as vanadium steel. Very light, but incredibly strong and flexible. So things like the chassis and the crankshaft could be thinner and therefore lighter, but still be strong. There's no end to what you can do when you own a car. When the Model T came out, he had to tell his dealers that year to stop taking orders that they couldn't keep up. That's how popular it was from the very, very beginning. It changed America almost overnight. The Model T was the most successful car of all time. Henry Ford, by 1924, is listed as one of the three richest men in the world at over a billion dollars. By the 1920s, everybody who wants a car basically has one. This is the first car that many Americans own. It was becoming the universal vehicle. The Model T absolutely built its way into the popular culture, not just of its time, but thereafter. There are a lot of great songs that were written about the Model T at the time. It's still the Model T's in popular culture. Shall we cruise? Oh, thank you, dear. I'd love to. No, no, no. Lizzie! People don't realize the impact that the automobile had on our dating and courtship rituals. Prior to the car, if a young couple wanted to see each other, typically the young man would come to the young lady's house and they would sit there in her parlor. If they were lucky, perhaps the parents would go to another room or they might be able to go sit out on the front porch. But they now had a way to leave the home and basically have a private space. Parking at the drive-in or out at Inspiration Point, we take that for granted today. But, of course, that didn't exist before the automobile. If you're going to try to tell people what the Model T did, you know, in a nutshell, the quick way to do it is to say, you know, this is the car that put the world on wheels. But what does that mean? We had ways to get around before the automobile. Horses generally don't move much faster than a person can walk. That's about four miles an hour. If you have a vehicle that can travel 15 miles an hour, all of a sudden you've vastly increased the area that people can travel. You've opened up the possibility of even pleasure travel. That started to connect people where you could go see relatives, you know, maybe three, four times a year. You could probably celebrate birthdays where you couldn't do that before. They could go visit friends, just socialize. They could go into town, not once a week or once every two weeks, but once every other day or once every day if they needed to get supplies. I think, too, of the great Broadway musical, The Music Man, where the salesmen talk about the trouble with their trade in 1912, and they specifically call out the Ford Model T as changing the ways consumers are buying things. They now go into town to buy things rather than waiting for the traveling salesman to come. I want to buy a Model T Ford. May the trouble, may the people want to go, want to get, want to get, want to get up and go. Now I don't have to go at the train schedule. I can get in my car and I can go on my schedule. That in itself, that would be enough if that's all it did. The rest of it was unanticipated. The age of the automobile changes nearly every aspect of American life. When it first came out in late 1908, it cost $850, which was not cheap. It was kind of maybe a little lower middle price, but it was the best value on the market. Then Ford Motor Company set out on a relentless drive to lower the price. They kept improving the production methods. They kept changing the parts on the car to make them cheaper to produce. Henry Ford said that every time he dropped the price by a dollar, he gained 1,000 customers. So, for instance, the brass headlights went away by 14. The brass radiator went away in the middle of the model year of 1916. And the price continued to come down. At one point, you could buy a Model T for $295. Of course, in Ford's desire to drive the price of the Model T down, that eventually led them to stumble onto the whole assembly line. Moving assembly lines had been around for a long time. And again, this was a case where Ford was looking at other industries. Oddly enough, he was looking at the meatpacking industry, where they would bring in animal carcasses and they would move them on a line. Workers would take parts off of those animals. And then by the end of the line, you have meat in cans. Ford said, what if we turn that around and add parts to the vehicles that move through the plant? So, he did not invent that. He did not invent interchangeable parts. They had been around for more than 100 years. What Ford did was really perfect the assembly line for making something that was highly complicated. And the Model T had something like 5,000 parts. And it was a major accomplishment. Each man on the line became a specialist. He did one thing, and he did it perfectly, and passed the work along to the next man. After they moved to the Highland Park plant, by the beginning of 1914, the final moving assembly line reduced the time it took to assemble a Model T from 12 and a half hours down to 93 minutes. It is said by 1924, they were down to 12 minutes. The way the Model T was built with the moving assembly line affected all forms of production in the United States over time. Consumer goods become more available at a lower price because of the assembly line that spawned by the Model T. Assembly line work, Henry Ford found to his chagrin, was work that most people didn't want to do. It was relentless, and it was even more relentless in the early days. You had these craftsmen who were assembling the entire car, now standing in one place on the line, doing the same operation monotonously for 9 or 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. And they were quitting in droves. So Ford announced on January 5, 1914, that a week later, on January 12, wages would be raised from $2.34 a day for a production worker to $5 a day, making his workers the first in the world that could afford the cars they were building. Nobody made that much money. So many people wanted to get that, they crowded the Highland Park plant, and the regular workers could not get in. They had to bring out the fire hoses, squirt them all to get them away. There were always workers at Ford who were skilled workers who were making more than $5 a day. The people who were eligible for that elevation to $5 a day were really the unskilled workers. And that's what made it so amazing, is you could be unskilled and have the possibility of making this kind of money. Other industrialists called him a communist, socialist. He was going to bankrupt the company and destroy the U.S. economy. The news of the $5 a day spread across the world. And Ford had a huge influx of immigrants from all over Europe, most of them not speaking English. Ford set up an English school, taught them English. You also actually had to qualify for that by your behavior. So he created what they call the sociological department that literally came and inspected your house to see if you were worthy of this $5 a day. There was a huge dollop of paternalism here that no one would accept today. Ford really was trying to encourage families to spend it wisely, spend it on the family, spend it responsibly, be a responsible citizen. That's what he wanted. You've also created a relatively high wage for these people who can turn around and buy lots of stuff with it. Tens of thousands of men on one single payroll have money for themselves and for their families to spend. Much of the rise of the middle class in the 20th century is the fruits of this relationship between the assembly line and pay. The Model T begins to make suburbs possible beyond the limits of a fixed rail line. When you leave 1915 and you go into the 1920s, people are building on the outskirts of towns, not only in towns, and then suburbia in the future and then post-war America. Boom! It created opportunities for people to live in areas where they wanted to live and then drive to work where they wanted to work. So Ford is actually changing the world as he knows it by creating this new middle class. It's important to remember Ford had no concept of these ultimate consequences. What Henry Ford was also creating, and he didn't realize it, he was creating large numbers of relatively unskilled people in the same industry. If they decided that it was in their interest to get together and organize and maybe withhold their labor, they could bring any one of those industries to their knees. As long as the wages were being paid and everything was going along, they didn't do that. But comes the Great Depression, and companies can no longer pay these wages. The workers then began to organize. And then, ultimately, these unions have enormous power. And so the development of this humble automobile unwittingly created the conditions that gave rise to industrial unions, and even Henry Ford, who hated labor unions, ultimately had to sign a contract with the United Auto Workers. The Model T had an enormous effect on the world at large. It was the perfect car at the perfect time. It just hit sort of all the points that people wanted, and bingo, over time they sold 15 million of them. The Model T was in production for nearly 20 years, introduced in 1908, built right up through May of 1927. A lot of Ford's executives and his engineers realized, even by 1922-23, that the car was a dinosaur. It was time to be replaced. By 1927, it really was obsolete. One reason he stuck with the Model T is that he didn't like the idea of people buying all these luxuries that he didn't think were really necessary. He thought the Model T was all the car you ever really needed. The world had changed. It's the roaring 20s, and people now are buying cars that reflect their personality, their lifestyle. And so they were looking elsewhere. So Ford finally and reluctantly was convinced it was time to let the car go. And within Ford Motor Company, there was a realization that this is a special event. This is the passing of an era. They'd already done commemorations of the 5 millionth, the 10 millionth Ford. They were out now up to 15 million. Something more than 15 million were made. But symbolically, this was the end of the Model T. May 26, 1927, the 15 millionth Model T rolls off the assembly line at Highland Park. All of the executives and the VIPs came out. Henry Ford and Edsel Ford were there to watch this car come off the line. If we had to describe the changeover, that last day when the 15 millionth Model T was built, in one word, I think that word would probably be bittersweet. Edsel Ford, Henry's son, who was officially the president of the company, was driving the car off the line. Henry was sitting in the passenger seat. There's a wonderful picture of Henry and Edsel. Edsel looks happy. He's finally glad to see this car laid to rest. He's finally convinced his father they're going to lose leadership in the automobile industry if they don't replace the Model T. Henry, on the other hand, has got this pensive look on his face because he doesn't really know what the future brings. He spent much of his life to come to this point where he's created this car and this company and this production system, and now it's all going to have to change. Henry Ford has given in and is probably very melancholy, very upset about his baby, the Model T, going away. They drive it from there to the Ford Engineering Laboratory in Dearborn, where it's displayed with one of the first 1909 Model Ts and Henry Ford's first car, the Quadricycle. This is it. This is where we started. This is where we are now, and we're ready to move on to the next thing. The day previous the engine was made, some of the original workers were there to strike the $15 million onto the engine. Each one had an opportunity to hit one of those digits. I would describe this car as a window into 1927. This is a preserved example of the vehicle just as it came off the Ford assembly line. Granted, it was a special vehicle and that was the last one, but it's not as though they did anything different in the production techniques. It was still built the same way as any of those other cars at that time. It's hard to find original examples of these vehicles, but this is one. So this car becomes kind of the textbook or the reference source for people who want to find out how did they do that all those years ago. The chassis, the engine, the transmission, the flywheel magneto, it's all virtually the same as the first Model Ts that were produced in 1908. This car really never lived life out in the wild. It was always held back by Ford, realizing it was a special piece that needed to be preserved. What's brought over here to Greenfield Village is on display at the Mack Avenue Clinic, and it's been out here and been at the village since 1927. Greenfield Village is a must-see open-air museum. There you'll get to ride in an authentic Model T. People will get in sometimes and say, oh, this is a nice replica, or this is a pretty well-built copy. No, those are real cars. The 15th Millionth Model T is significant because in that era, making 15 million cars was a paradigm change. It literally changed our lives. It is an object that brings people together. So the purpose of that 15th Millionth Model T is a question of what is the next Model T in the world? What is that next paradigm change?