Henry Ford and the Model T

fundamentally different approach from that of Henry Ford. Ford was all about creating a vehicle that could be mass produced and sold at a relatively low cost year over year. GM would focus more on developing different makes of cars aimed at different markets, or in other words, they wanted to sell a range of vehicles at a range of prices and with a range of features. But I realized, I've never actually done an episode about Henry Ford or the fame modeled T. So we're going to do that now.

And this won't be a comprehensive series on the Ford Motor Company that will require their own episodes, but more about the the early history of Henry Ford leading up to the design and uh and release and an eventual retirement of the Model T. So William and Mary Ford of Dearborn Michigan raised a pretty large family. They had eight children, including Henry Ford, who was born on July

eighteen sixty three. That's when the Civil War was gripping the United States, which was in danger of splitting apart. The world Henry was born into was a very different world from the one of today. Back then, only twenty five percent of Americans lived in cities, so the vast majority lived in rural communities. Today, nearly a d three of American citizens live in a city. Ford was born

in America that was pre industrialization in many ways. He would make lots of contributions that would change that dramatically. William Ford was a farmer, and Henry would work on the farm and attend a small school and dearborn. Apparently it was a school that only had a single room in it, that kind of little schoolhouse, and between the ages of twelve and fifteen, Ford spent a lot of his time in a little machine shop, learning about engineering

with hands on experience. When he was sixteen, he made his way to Detroit, Michigan, on foot. It was about an eight mile walk from his hometown and became a machinist's apprentice at a machine shop in Detroit before moving on to work at a couple of other factories. He worked in such places for about three years, and at

some point he encountered his first internal combustion engine. I covered how these engines work in the GM episodes, and since those were fairly recent, I'm not going to go through that whole thing again because a lot of you have already heard it. If you haven't heard it, then

you know, go listen to the GM episodes. They're good. Anyway, Ford recognized the value of an engine driven piece of machinery to do work on a much larger scale, and at around age nineteen, he came back to his family farm and took up work with the Westinghouse Engine Company. Mainly he was helping repair steam powered farm equipment, so not internal combustion engine powered equipment, but steam engines. And I realized that this is an episode about Ford, not Westinghouse.

But it would behoove me to talk just for a second about George Westinghouse. He was born back in eighteen forty six. He was an engineer and inventor, and he worked on steam engines, locomotives, and railway air brakes. Early in his career, he invented a road ree steam engine before he was twenty, and he would later go on to play a fundamental role in the Electric Current Wars the A C D C Wars. Westinghouse would champion alternating current A C in other words, while Thomas Edison would

oppose him, favoring direct current. And I'll have to do a full episode about Westinghouse in the future, but I have done episodes about the Current Wars, so you can search the archives for that. They are dramatic and intense, you might say shocking. Anyway, Henry Ford sort of followed the opposite path of Tesla. You know Nicola Tesla, the iconic engineer whom the Internet would have you believe invented electricity itself. Um, he didn't. Tesla did a lot of

great things. He was a brilliant man, but I would say that some of the things he's credited for on the Internet are not act here it anyway, Tesla had first worked for Edison and then famously later on he worked for Westinghouse. Ford would do the opposite. He was starting off repairing farm equipment for Westinghouse and then later on he found employment at the Edison Illuminating Company. Of Detroit. He became an engineer there in eighteen ninety one and

rose through the ranks rather quickly. He became the chief engineer by eighteen nine three. It was in the winter of that year when Ford was said to have built his own first internal combustion engine. It used gasoline for fuel, it had a single cylinder, and it was more of an R and D project for Ford himself. Ford began to think of ways to put an internal combustion engine

to work, specifically by powering a vehicle. He wasn't the first person to think about this, not by a long shot, but it was around this time, towards the close of the nineteenth century, we saw a lot of early experiments with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. To put things in perspective, at the time, Ford was still working for Edison,

and his job required him to be on call. Essentially, he had to be ready to jump into action should the plants that were supplying Detroit with electricity have any sort of problem. But that also meant he didn't actually have to keep specific hours over at Edison. He just had to be constantly available, and so he used his own hours outside of his work to tinker on a

powered vehicle. Ford's first experimental vehicle was the quadricycle in eighteen nineties six, and as the name implies, this vehicle was more like a four wheeled motorized bicycle than a modern car. He used an old buggy seat as the seat for the driver on the vehicle, and the quadricycle had a chain drive, meaning you had a loop of chain that provided the method to ends for the motion generated by the engine to the quadricycle's bicycle wheels. It

did not have a steering wheel. Instead, it had a handle, essentially a tiller that you could swing left or right to steer the vehicle. The tiller connected to the front wheels and allowed them to turn. The earliest mention I could find about steering wheels actually dates to eighteen ninety four in France, but it would take a little while

for that method to replace the good old tiller. And tiller has worked okay on vehicles that you know, especially if the vehicle had three wheels with one wheel in front. They were pretty easy to use. Then it was a little trickier to use on a four wheeled vehicle. They also were not terribly safe. If a vehicle were able to get up to a decent speed, though that wasn't really so much of a danger with the quadricycle. It

did not have a super high top speed. It had a humble to cylinder four horsepower engine, so it really didn't have the oath necessary to tear down the track, particularly in a world where roads were frequently muddy. It had to driving speeds. The slower speed was ten miles per hour. The fastest was twenty miles per hour. Now, I guess you could say that that's a pretty darn good clips, So maybe I'm being a little unkind in my earlier assessment, but it's not like screaming fast. The

vehicle had no reverse It also had no brakes. It did, however, have a doorbell, which served as a kind of horn for the car to let people know that they were about to get run down by Henry Ford. Originally, Ford intended for his motor to be air cooled, but it turned out that the motor just heated up too much and the air wasn't dissipating the heat fast enough, so he added some water jackets around the cylinders on the engine in order to keep them from getting so hot

that they would you know, break down. Ford first gave the quadricycle a test drive on June and around four a m. And he might have even started earlier than that, but he found he made one key mistake while building his contraption. Turned out it was too wide to fit through the door of the shed that he had built it in, so he built a car too big to fit through the door of the shed so that shed

had brick walls and delayed. But undeterred, Ford decided to take up an axe that was in the shed and then just start hacking at the wall with it, breaking off bits of brick until he had made a gap wide enough for the quadricycle to fit through the wall. Wasn't gonna stop Henry Ford from making history. His chief assistant, James Bishop, helped him out and even rode ahead on a bicycle to help make certain that Henry had a

clear path and wasn't gonna, you know, kill anybody. Since there were no brakes on the quadricycle, that was really important because Ford would either have to run into someone or veer off and potentially crash into a building, and neither option really seemed to appeal to Ford. The test drive was a success, despite the fact that at one point there was a spring on the vehicle that broke

and that necessitated a quick repair job. Having made his first vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, Ford was eager to get to work on the second one and to improve upon what he built, So he started doing something that would become a theme in his early career. He sold the quadricycle. Sold it for two hundred dollars in late eighteen ninety six. If we had just for inflation, that's close to around six thousand, three hundred dollars today.

Now today you would probably call that quadricycle priceless. So it was a steal for six large plus some change. But here's the really crazy thing. In h four, Henry Ford actually bought that quadricycle back for the princely sum of sixty five dollars. Pretty good deal, right. Ford received Thomas Edison's encouragement in his pursuits, and I assume that Edison's words helped Ford make the decision to strike out

on his own and found his own company. He resigned his position with Edison on August five and co founded a company called the Detroit Automobile Company. He received funding from a dozen investors, including William Maybury, who was the

mayor of Detroit at the time. They raised fifteen thousand dollars for the business, which would be equal to about four hundred seventy three thousand dollars today, which is a good chunk of change, but probably less than what you would expect for a startup company that was going to

be building cars. Henry salary was established at one fifty dollars per month, which would be around four thousand, seven hundred thirty bucks these days, or fifty six thousand dollars per year, or so just about fifty seven thousand dollars, so Ford wasn't quite rolling in cash yet that he was making a decent living. Of course, in those days, cars were built hand by small groups of engineers, and

they were mostly the playthings of the wealthy. They were a curiosity, something that made headlines, but was still a very rare sight on the streets. A lot of people had never seen one. The first vehicle Ford got to work on at the Detroit Automotive Company was a delivery truck. It was a a small vehicle for a truck, but showed that Ford was thinking about practical uses for automobiles because we weren't yet at a point where the average

person was going to own one. But you know, you could make delivery trucks, make something that's really useful for purposes like hauling stuff around, and businesses could buy them. But Ford and his backers started to have some problems. Ford was focused on improving his designs and making his vehicles more reliable and easier to handle and etcetera. But his backers were more interested in, you know, selling cars.

And it is hard to make money if the guy in charge of manufacturing your product is spending all the time on improving that product, not selling it. The Detroit Automobile Company lasted only a year and a half before Ford's investors exasperated through in the towel and dissolved the company. Ford meanwhile kept his hand in by designing and building

cars to compete in various races. In nineteen o one, a car he built competed in a ten mile race in Gross Point, Michigan, and the driver won the race. That driver was Henry Ford himself. Ford then designed a better race car called the n Ford also sought out new investors to give that whole company thing another go. The remains of the Detroit Automobile Company would serve as the foundation for a new company called the Henry Ford Company. Ford was able to convince more investors to jump on

after this successful races. He had built up a lot of positive pr and the company took shape in November nineteen o one. But these new investors soon encountered the same issues as their predecessors. They watched as Henry kept changing designs and attempting to improve vehicles and claiming they

weren't yet ready to be sold to the public. And he was probably right, But keeping a business afloat is expensive, and if there's little to no money coming in from sales, then that means the investors have to shoulder that load. Tensions between Ford and those investors reached a boiling point, and ultimately Ford decided to leave in a huff, or maybe a minute and a huff. Anyway, he decided to leave.

And it had been less than half a year. Yikes. Now, if you listened to my episodes about General Motors, you know it was this company, the Henry Ford Company, that would transform into the Cadillac Company. After a guy named Henry Leland was brought in to assess the company assets. Now, the original plan was that the investors were going to

liquidate everything and just you know, call the loss. But Leland convinced them to stick with it, and the Cadillac was born, which would later get scooped up as part of GM. When Ford left, one of the few things he got to take with him was his name. I mean it was his name after all. He also took his determination to stick with the whole car thing third times the charm right. And so he sets out to get a new group of investors to help him create

an automobile company. And sure enough, this one would be the real success. It would be the Ford Motor Company. When we come back, i'll talk about the early days of that company and the birth of the Model T. But first let's take a quick break. It was three and Henry Ford was now thirty nine years old. The first two companies he found it fizzled out as investors backed away from Ford. The automobile was still in its infancy and Ford wanted to play a part in its

early development. He had new investors, including the Dodge Brothers, whom I also mentioned in the GM episode. It's a very incestuous group automakers. Collectively, his investors raised more money than went into either the Detroit Automotive Company or the Henry Ford Company twenty eight thousand dollars in fact, and the Ford Motor Company was born. Like the other companies it called Detroit Home. Ford himself was heavily invested in the company. He owned slightly more than twenty five of

the company's stuck upon its formation. For the first few years he shared control of the company with fellow investors, but by nineteen o six he assumed the position of president and controlled the company pretty effectively. And skipping ahead a bit, and will touch back on this late in the episode, in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, he and his wife Clara and their son Edsel would hold a buy back of all outstanding stock. That's putting lightly. We'll

get to it. It's actually a little more amusing than that, but anyway, they spent more than a hundred million dollars to essentially buy up all the stock, or at least enough for them to have controlling interest, and became effectively the soul owners of the company. Now. The first car produced by the Ford Motor Company became known as the Model A Ford. Now clearly this was not the Model

A that the Ford Company would produce in nineteen twenty seven. No, this was the nineteen oh three Model A, and it was a different beast altogether. The Model A was a style of car called a runabout. It was an open vehicle, meaning there was no top to the car. There's no roof, there's no windshield, there are no doors. In fact, you would just step up onto the car and then into it and sit on a bench style seat similar to a horse drawn buggy. In fact, it looked a lot

like a buggy, just you know, without the horse. This vehicle measure four ft nine inches tall or about one point four meters. It was five ft five inches or one point six five ms wide, and it was about eight and a half feet long or two point six meters. It had a two speed manual transmission, had eight horsepower, and thankfully it did have a steering wheel and brakes. The sales price was eight hundred fifty dollars or about twenty four thousand, eight hundred bucks if we had just

for today's you know, inflation rates. The average salary in America at that time was just four hundred eighty nine dollars, So that meant it would take nearly two years of savings for the average person to be able to purchase a Model A. That's assuming that, you know, it didn't spend money on anything else. The Forward company was ready to take orders in the summer of nineteen o three, and the company was on borrowed time. In mid July three,

Ford received three orders for Model A cars. One was payment in full and the other two were large deposits. At the time, the company had a bank balance of just two dollars sixty cents. In other words, the Ford Motor Company was in danger of running out of cash and not even having enough to cover the company payroll. But those orders brought in another one thousand, twenty bucks, which kept the lights on, so to speak. Oh and that wasn't the only existential crisis that the company faced

early on. While the orders made sure that the company had enough money to keep going, a consortium called the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers or a l a M threatened to shut things down. The group, formed in an effort to get total control over the blossoming automobile industry in the United States, controlled by a board of five members, who had to reach a unanimous decision when it came

to granting licenses. And if you'll forgive me, I think we need to go down a little tangent here because this story is fascinating. At the heart of the matter was a patent that originally belonged to George B. Selden. He was an engineer at heart, but a patent lawyer by trade, and he filed for a patent for an internal combustion engine specifically intended for the use in vehicles

way back in eighteen seventy nine. However, he didn't receive the patent until eight In the meantime, other folks had started making cars that relied on internal combustion engines and did not, you know, rely specifically on Seldon's patent. Selden, however, held that patent, which meant he could pursue those rights and demand a fee from companies that were making cars that were running on internal combustion engines, and he helped co found the Electric Vehicle Company and worked to get

royalty fees from various car manufacturers. The A L. A M. Group essentially formed to help fight back against this practice of what, in their point of view, amounted to extortion, and you could say this was sort of an early example of someone acting like a control Ultimately, the companies represented by A L. A M. We're able to secure a better deal with E V M, the holder of the patent, and now the A L a M. Was acting kind of like a gatekeeper for the car manufacturing

business in America. It seems like most folks in the industry viewed that the patent at the center of all this was somewhat weak, but no one was really up to the task of testing it out because it would mean a lengthy and expensive court battle. Ford had attempted to secure a license from the A L a M.

But he had been denied. Now, one reason for that denial may have been that a member of the board worked for the Olds Company, the company that made the Oldsmobile and would later be part of GM, and Ford's cars were the chief competitor to the Oldsmobile in Detroit, So there's the possibility that there was some anti competitive

practices going on here. But the official reason was that Ford's previous two companies had fizzled out less than two years after they had launched, and that meant that Ford had no proven track record that he could deliver upon

his desire to make cars. However, Ford went ahead with making cars without a license from the A L a M. That led to a lawsuit against the company filed by the A L a M. The trial would stretch on for several years, with one judge finding in favor of A L. A M. In nineteen o nine, but then the Court of Appeals overturned that decision in favor of Ford in nineteen eleven, at which point the A L

a M decided to just let it be. Part of the winning strategy was that Ford's lawyers argued that the design of the car engines weren't based off of Selden's design at all, but rather one that had been earlier created by Nicholas Otto way back in the mid nineteenth century. Also just to kind of drive home how absurd things like this can be when you take the long view.

By the time I'm this case had finally concluded in the courts, the patent only had one more year of protection for Selden because patents expire, and once they do so, the invention enters the public domain. Anyway, the entire time this lawsuit was going on, Ford was still making vehicles, and after the battle, the automotive industry as a whole changed. For around a year and a half, the company made Model A cars. In fact, it made around seventeen hundred

of them. While assembly lines were a thing in which people would be in charge of specific tasks and the assembly process which sped things up a bit, we weren't at real mass production yet. We weren't at mechanized electrified assembly lines where stuff was brought specifically to assemble workers, so it wasn't as efficient as it was going to be.

The Model A was successful enough to give Forward the cash to work on the next car, which is really kind of how Ford had been operating since the eighteen nineties. What followed were eight other cars, the Model B, the A, C, the C, the F, the K, the N, the R, and the S. The B was a touring car and the first Affords vehicles to have the engine placed in front of the driver. The previous ones had the engine

mounted behind the driver's seat. It was much more expensive than the Model A. It was kind of a luxury vehicle for the time. The Model C looked a lot like the Model A, but had a more powerful motor. Than a slightly revised appearance. The A C, as you might imagine, was a Model A body powered by a Model C engine. But let's skip ahead to the Model N, which was sort of a breakout star of these early

years at the Ford Motor Company. It was the replacement to the Model A and the Model C, and it was designed to be an entry level vehicle for customers. Like the B, the N had an engine in front of the driver. It also had an engine that ran on four cylinders which provided fifteen horsepower. It was a two seater runabout, so still didn't have any doors on the sides, although you could get a version of the model and had a canopy to provide some shade and

some limited protection from the elements. I say limited because with no doors and still no windshield, rain would hit you if you were driving through rain. H The Model IN had a four cylinder engine and actually used a shaft drive rather than a chain drive. The combination of the engine and the drive made the Model IN a pretty handy vehicle when they could reach higher speeds than earlier models. The Model ENDS price tag was a pretty

big selling point. It was priced at five hundred dollars at a time when the average Americans wage had hit around five three dollars per year. Now we're still talking about an expensive possession, obviously, but one that the average American might be able to afford with some savings or paying in installments. The success of the Model IN fed into the next big project, the Model T. This would

be the car synonymous with Ford. Heck, you could argue that the Model T was almost synonymous with the word automobile, at least in America in the early days. Not that Ford was the only car manufacturing company at that time. In fact, far from it. There were numerous other companies and brands that were active Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Buick, tons of other ones that the average person today may not have ever heard of because those companies no longer exist. But

the Model T s popularity was undeniable. It was the most popular type of car on the roads for more than a decade, and a lot of histories dumped the success of the Model T squarely in the lap of Henry Ford. But we should always remember that these sorts of things are the products of lots of people working together. It's very rare that we can point to a single person and say they are the sole person responsible for

such and such. Whether that person is building on the work of another or they are collaborating actively with a group of other people, the real story is usually a little more complicated, and that is how it is with the Model T. For example, there is child Harold Wills or C. H. Wills if you prefer. Wills was a machinist who offered to work for Ford way back in Grattis.

That is, he worked for Ford for free. He had a steady day job, but he wanted to learn more about automobiles, and he figured he could learn quickly by doing, and he soon became indispensable to Henry Ford. Wills was a draftsman and would draw up plans for his creations, and he played an important role in the design and engineering of a lot of Ford's early vehicles, including that race car the I mentioned earlier, as well as the Model A. Wills was the one to design the Ford emblem.

In fact, he's the one who created that particular styleised design for Ford. Wills was responsible for taking many of Ford's ideas about what the Model T should be and making them a reality, and he was not the only major contributor to the design of the car. Another was

a mechanical engineer named Joseph Galam. Originally from Austria, Hungary, he moved to American nineteen o three and found work with the Ford Motor Company in nineteen o five as a designer, and he had become the lead designer and contributed to the development of the Model T. Another person who designed parts for the Model T was Eugene Farcas, who was born in Hungary but who moved to the

United States in nineteen o six. Farcas worked for Ford a couple of different times, and it was during his second stint at the company when he did his design work on the Model T. He would end up working for a lot of other car companies, including GM, and would even work for Ford again a few years later. There were other people on the team too, of course, there was Peter Martin, C. J. Smith, Gus Denyer and

Henry Love. They all made contributions to the design of the Model T, so the Model T was a true collaborative effort. Henry Ford created the project goal, which was a car that would be reliable and affordable, one that would be relatively easy to assemble. The assembly line approach at the time was still not yet dependent upon electric motors and conveyor belts. It was, however, dependent on unskilled or semi skilled laborers who would specialize in a particular

task and focus on that. This made assembly more efficient, though it would be another decade before mass production really became a possibility, a fact of life in manufacturing that would change the world, and Ford would lead the way. When we come back, i'll talk more about the Model T, how it shaped the automotive industry and beyond. But first let's take another quick break. In The first Model T s, or the ten Lizzies as they were also known, were

assembled by hand using tried and true methods. It was reliable, but it was also slow. Ford introduced the Model T on October one, and by November one, the assembly plant at Piquette Avenue had only put together eleven of the cars. Even with the best assembly practices of the time, this was slow work, demand was high, and supply was low due to the limitations of the assembly plant. The Model

T had a twenty horsepower four cylinder engine. Like the most recent forward vehicles of the time, the engine was at the front end of the car and the engine could run on gasoline, ethanol, or according to one source I read kerosene, it used a radiator to cool the engine, which means I get to explain how idiator's work, which

is actually pretty simple. All right. So, internal combustion engines generate a lot of heat because you've got combustion going on there, effectively explosions happening within cylinders multiple times a minute. So to cool the engine, Ford's designers built water passages where water could flow past the engine essentially in tubes or pipes really and help carry heat away from the engine. So coolant, essentially water in the early days, would flow

through these passages. It would pick up heat from the engine block, carry that heat away from the engine so that it doesn't overheat, and then that heated water would transfer heat to thin fins of thermally conductive metal. That phrase, by the way, is way easier to write than it is to say. Anyway, that heat would then radiate out

into the environment through these thin fins. Two DA and early Model T the first so even had water pumps to physically push the water through the system from you know, essentially a reservoir through the water passages past the engine block, transfer the heat to the fins and then back into

the reservoir. But after those first Model T s Ford's team came up with a Thermo siphon approach, which really just relied on physics because as the water would heat up, it would expand become less dense, and naturally move up through the system. It essentially used gravity and and heat to do all the work, so you didn't have to

have a mechanical pump. The cars fuel system was also gravity fed, meaning that the fuel tank was just built in a higher position than the engine and the weight of the fuel would push gas or kerosene or whatever to the engine. This worked okay if you were driving on level ground or downhill, but on really steep climbs

that could become an issue. Even so, for demonstrate the Model TS capabilities with some pretty notable stunts, like driving up Pike's Peak, starting a Model T engine required attaching a crank handle to the front of the vehicle and giving it a good crank or two to get the engine to turn over. I covered that process in the recent GM episodes, so if you want to learn more about it and how it could be really super dangerous,

you should check out those episodes. The Model T also had three gears, two were for forward drive and one was for a reverse and the steering wheel had a couple of controls that would seem strange to us. The throttle the accelerator was actually a lever that attached to the steering wheel, so you didn't have an accelerator pedal the way we do with modern cars. Likewise, the steering

wheel also had a spark advancer lever on it. Now again I kind of covered this in the GM episode, but essentially this control adjusted the frequency at which the spar plugs that are part of the engine's cylinders would actually spark to light those uh mixtures of gas and air and cause combustion. And finding the right frequency so that you were lining up the sparks precisely with the right part of the the four stroke process meant that you would change the Model T from a herky jerky

engine car to a nice and smooth engine experience. Ish. The early Model T s had a transmission brake, but not wheel brakes, so there are no brakes attached to the wheels in early Model T s. Those would actually follow later in the production life of the Model T. In fact, there were some aftermarket wheel brakes made for the Model T, which convinced Forward to finally include them on the actual Model T models that were rolling off the assembly line. I guess that that would be somewhat concerning.

I mean, the top speed for the Model T was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty hour or around seventy kilometers per hour. That's not, you know, screaming fast by modern standards, but when you consider you don't have wheel breaks, it's a darn good clip. As one source I saw said, Model TS were designed to go, they weren't designed to stop. Originally, the headlights on Model TS were not electric. They were

Ascettlene headlamps. They also had oil side lamps, but the Model T stuck around long enough so that later versions would get electric lights. The steering wheel on the Model T was located on the left side of the vehicle rather than on the center or on the right, which was a big change and ended up becoming a standard in the automotive industry for American cars. Much of the car was made out of vanadium steel, which is a

relatively lightweight and strong steel alloy. There are actually several different versions of the Model T all based on the same fundamental design, but with slightly different features. You had the coupe, which had a tall, narrow look to it and could seat to passengers. You had a touring car, which was a bit more of a luxury car, and it had models that included convertibles. There was a roadster model, there was a runabout, and then at the high end

there was the town car. Also. At the time, Ford made these vehicles in a few different colors, but that would change after just a few years. The initial price tag for the Model T was eight hundred fifty dollars, which was significantly more than the average wage at the time. Ford's goal was to make an affordable automobile that he could sell to a lot of people, and he figured that the market was there if the price were right.

But it also meant having to find ways to bring costs down, and that was something that would require a few big leaps. In nineteen ten, the company opened up a new production plant called the Highland Park Complex. This was where the production line really started to take shape, where Ford really began to rely more heavily on unskilled laborers, with each person focusing on a specific task and then

repeating that over and over on car after car. The assembly process became just a set of tasks that could be assigned out to specific workers along the assembly line, and as a result, the time to build a full model t went from twelve and a half hours for one car to ninety three minutes by nineteen fourteen. But the company had also encountered a big problem. The repetitive

work was exhausting. Shifts were typically nine hours, and while the tasks didn't require skilled workers, it really did take a lot of time to onboard new employees and teach them how to do their specific sets of tasks. The daily take home pay at that time was just two dollars twenty five cents. Adjusting for inflation, that's about sixty bucks a day in today's money. But Ford was seeing incredible turnover. The tasks took time to learn, so it

could be frustrating. They might not be terribly difficult tasks, but they were repetitive, and work was also plentiful in Detroit at the time, so Ford saw a lot of people just kind of walk off the line and quit, and that would bring production to a halt. Because each person was important. Each person had a job in putting the cards together, and one person leaving would kind of muck everything up. So to stabilize the workforce, Ford more

than doubled salaries. He offered five dollars per day, and this was more than competitive with other employers in the area, and it helped create a more reliable workforce. So this was a practicality. This was not altruism at work. The process was efficient, but only as long as there were people to actually do the work in the process. So

he needed to have that reliability. Losing someone meant you're going to have to replace that person and train a new person, and it would mean wasted time and money. So in the long run, it just made more economic sense to offer more money and keep people at that job. Um, it was not an effort to make sure that employees would make enough money where they could buy the cars that were rolling off the assembly line. That often ends

up being part of the mythology around Ford. It was really more that the company needed to have a stable workforce. From nineteen fourteen to nineteen five, Ford would only offer the Model T in black, which led to the joke off Ford saying that customers could get a Model T in any color, provided it was black. It made things simpler if you were just churning out car after car,

and all the parts are interchangeable. He would also say that there was never any use in overtaking a Model TEA and passing it on the road, because there would always be another one right up ahead, and that was not much of an exaggeration. By the time Ford would stop making the Model T in the late nineteen twenties, the company had sold more than fifteen million of the things.

What helped was that as the company found more efficient ways to build cars, the cost of manufacturing came way down, and Ford would then pass that on to the customer. He started pricing the Model T lower and lower, so by nineteen sixteen, the car that had originally cost eight hundred fifty dollars was now priced at three hundred sixty. By nine four the price was down to two hundred

sixty dollars. At the end of nineteen eighteen, with a little warning, Henry Ford resigned as president of the Ford Motor Company. His son, Edsel, five years old at the time, was elected to the role of president a Ford Henry was still essentially calling all the shots, but he had stepped back after he had made some moves to clear out land for a new production facility, but he didn't get full shareholder approval first, and so he was facing

some opposition among large stakeholders in Ford. Then Henry Ford said he would start up a new car company and produce a vehicle similar to the Model T, but sell it for less money, which would undercut Ford. This turned out to be a ploy, but it's scared investors into selling off their stakes, and the Ford family was quietly

purchasing it through various lawyers. And that is how the Ford family became majority owners of the Ford Company and no longer beholden to cranky stockholders who objected to such things as building factories without you know, getting approval first. It was also around this time when Ford began to publish anti Semitic articles in the journal The Dearborn Independent, and it was some ugly, ugly stuff. Late in his life he would sort of renounce what he had done.

It was not good stuff. Henry Ford was also clearly still pulling strings at the Ford Motor Company, was still running the show, even though his son was ostensibly in charge. He refused to listen to people who were telling him that the Model T had run its course and the company really needed to update their their line with a new model of car. Henry Ford held out against those critics year after year until when it was clear that

they were right. Other companies, notably GM, we're seeing great success with their approach to planned obsolescence, in which they would introduce new versions of car models every year. They would update the style, they would create a new type of demand by kind of making cars of stylish status symbol. Whereas Ford, while it would incorporate improvements in new versions of the Model T, really wasn't changing the Model T

very much year over year. You know, a late Model T looks pretty similar to an early Model T. The Forward Company stopped production on the Model T in nineteen twenty seven, shutting down the Highland Park facility for half a year in order to change the assembly line process over to making a new car, which was confusingly called the Model A. I guess most folks didn't know about or remember the old nineteen o three Model A. It's

not a big surprise. I mean, the company did make fewer than two thousand of them, but the Model T had by then changed the world in nineteen eighteen, the Model T represented nearly fifty of all cars on the road in America. So, in other words, about half the cars in America were Model T s, and the other half of the cars were spread across all the other car companies that were scrabbling for that fifty percent. The Model T helped push the urbanization of America. Cities grew,

people began to move to cities. You started to see the ad ants of streets, and much later the highway system. The mass production methods that Ford would adopt would end up being used for everything from manufacturing airplanes to putting together Hamburgers. It really was a transformational company, not just in the auto industry but beyond, and a great deal of credit does need to go to Henry Ford and UH and the team that he put up around him.

It took him a few times to get it right, and of course he still made some very um regrettable decisions and and express some truly horrific viewpoints at different times in his life. So he is by no means someone we should hold up as an unimpeachable hero. But he really was an important person in the world of technology in general and the automotive industry in particular, world would be very different head Henry Ford not gone into

the automotive business, and that concludes this story. Obviously, I could do lots of episodes about the Ford Motor Company and talk about it's transformation and change. I can talk about how Henry Ford would come back to head up the Ford Motor Company after his son passed away suddenly, and talk about how his grandson would take up the mantle later on. But those are topics we should tackle and maybe a future episode of tech Stuff, And for the time being, I'm ready to close the door on

the model t all right. Well, if you guys have any suggestions for topics that I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. The best way is to reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.