By Roger Alexander
Henry Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly line, but recast each to dominate a new era. Indeed, no other individual of the last century so completely transformed the way people go from Point A to Point B.
By improving the assembly line so that the Model T could be produced ever more inexpensively, Ford placed the power of the internal combustion engine within reach of the average citizen. He transformed the automobile itself from a luxury to a necessity.
The Advent of the Model T seemed to renew a sense of independence among Americans who had lost their pioneer spirit to industrialization. Yet the methods that Henry Ford devised for producing his car so efficiently advanced that very industrialization.
Like its inventor, the Model T represented both high ideals and hard practicalities.
In the 1890s, any mechanic with tools, a workbench, and a healthy imagination was a potential titan in the infant industry. Even while continuing his career at Edison, Ford devoted himself to making a working automobile.
By rights, Henry Ford probably should have been a farmer. He was born in 1863 in Dearborn, Michigan, on the farm operated by his father, an Irishman, and his mother, who was from Dutch stock.
Even as a boy, young Henry had an aptitude for inventing and used it to make machines that reduced the drudgery of farm chores. At the age of thirteen, he saw a coal-fired steam engine lumbering along a long rural road, a sight that galvanized his fascination with machines.
At sixteen, against the wishes of his father, he left the farm for Detroit, where he found work as a mechanic’s apprentice. Over the next dozen years he advanced steadily, and became chief engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company.
At twenty-four, Ford married Clara Bryant, a friend of his sister’s; he called her ‘The Believer’ because she encouraged his plans to build a horseless carriage from their earliest days together.
In 1891, he presented his wife Clara with a design for an internal combustion engine, drawn on the back of a piece of sheet music. Bringing the design to reality was another matter, but on Christmas Eve1893 he made a successful test of one of his engines, in the kitchen sink.
The engine was merely the heart of the new machine that Ford hoped to build. On weekends and most nights, he could be found in a shed in the back of the family home, building the rest of the car.
So great was his obsession that the neighbours called him Crazy Henry. However, at 2:00 a.m. on June 4, 1896, Crazy Henry punched a large hole in the wall of his shed, and emerged at the wheel of an automobile - his automobile. In the weeks that followed, Ford was often seen driving around the streets of Detroit.
In 1901, Henry Ford poured his expertise into a pair of big race cars, one of which he entered in a ten-mile match race against a car built by Alexander Winton, a leading automaker from Ohio. The race took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and Ford’s car won.
Because of the victory, the coal merchant Alexander Malcomson agreed to back Ford in a new business venture. In 1903, they formed the Ford Motor Company, in association with about a dozen other investors.
In 1903, Ford’s 125 workers made 1,700 cars in three different models. The cars were comparatively expensive, and their high profit margins pleased the stockholders.
Insisting that high prices ultimately slowed market expansion, Ford decided in 1906 to introduce a new, cheaper model with a lower profit margin: the Model N. Many of his backers disagreed. While the N was only a tepid success, Ford nonetheless pressed forward with the design of the car he really wanted to build. The car that would be the Model T.
“I will build a motorcar for the great multitude,” he proclaimed. Such a notion was revolutionary. Until then the automobile had been a status symbol painstakingly manufactured by craftsmen.
However, Ford set out to make the car a commodity. “Just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from the match factory,” he said.
In the winter of 1906, Ford had secretly partitioned a twelve-by fifteen-foot room in his plant, on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. With a few colleagues, he devoted two years to the design and planning of the Model T.
Early on, they made an extensive study of materials, the most valuable aspect of which began in an offhand way. During a car race in Florida, Ford examined the wreckage of a French car and noticed that many of its parts were of lighter-than-ordinary steel.
The team on Piquette Avenue ascertained that the French steel was a vanadium alloy, but that no one in America knew how to make it. The finest steel alloys then used in American automaking provided 60,000 pounds of tensile strength. Ford learned that vanadium steel, which was much lighter, provided 170,000 pounds of tensile strength.
As part of the pre-production for the new model, Ford imported a metallurgist and bankrolled a steel mill. As a result, the only cars in the world to utilize vanadium steel in the next five years would be French luxury cars and the Ford Model T. A Model T might break down every so often, but it would not break.
The car that finally emerged from Ford’s secret design section at the factory would change America forever. For $825, a Model T customer could take home a car that was light, at about 1,200 pounds; relatively powerful, with a four-cylinder, twenty horsepower engine, and fairly easy to drive, with a two-speed, foot-controlled ‘planetary’ transmission.
Simple, sturdy, and versatile, the little car would excite the public imagination. It certainly fired up its inventor. When Henry Ford brought the prototype out of the factory for its first test drive, he was too excited to drive. An assistant had to take the wheel.
“Well, I guess we’ve got started,” Ford observed at the time. The car went to the first customers on October 1, 1908. In its first year, over ten thousand were sold, a new record for an automobile model.
In 1909, mining magnate Robert Guggenheim sponsored an auto race from New York to Seattle in which the only survivors were two Model T Fords. “I believe Mr Ford has the solution of the popular automobile,” Guggenheim concluded.
On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the fifteen millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan. Since his “universal car” was the industrial success story of its age, the ceremony should have been a happy occasion.
Yet Ford was probably wistful that day, too, knowing as he did that the long production life of the Model T was about to come to an end. He climbed into the car, a shiny black coupe, with his son, Edsel, the president of the Ford Motor Company.
Together, they drove to the Dearborn Engineering Laboratory, fourteen miles away, and parked the T next to two other historic vehicles: the first automobile that Henry Ford built in 1896, and the 1908 prototype for the Model T.
Henry himself took each vehicle for a short spin: the nation’s richest man driving the humble car that had made him the embodiment of the American dream.
Alexander's Quest Doesn't End Here!
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