April 7, 2021 • 46 mins
The Ford Motor Company and the Model T transformed America and the world. From 1908 to 1927, Ford would produce and sell more than 15 million Model T automobiles. This is the story of the Model T, Henry Ford and the birth of modern manufacturing.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. And a while back,
it did a few episodes about General Motors, and I
(00:25):
talked about how William Durant and Alfred Sloan had a
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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.
(02:14):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:22):
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.
(03:43):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:32):
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,
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:39):
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
(07:01):
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
(07:22):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:04):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:47):
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
(09:09):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:54):
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
(10:16):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:02):
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
(11:25):
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
(11:49):
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
(12:10):
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
(12:32):
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.
(12:54):
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
(13:15):
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.
(13:40):
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
(14:01):
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.
(14:24):
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
(14:45):
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
(15:07):
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
(15:28):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:17):
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,
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:29):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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,
(20:55):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:20):
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
(22:42):
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
(23:02):
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
(23:24):
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,
(23:47):
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,
(24:08):
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.
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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
(25:59):
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
(26:21):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:03):
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.
(27:27):
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
(27:49):
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
(28:09):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:17):
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,
(29:38):
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,
(30:08):
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.
(30:29):
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
(30:50):
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.
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:43):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:28):
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
(33:48):
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
(34:13):
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
(34:34):
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.
(34:59):
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,
(35:20):
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
(35:42):
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
(36:05):
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
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
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
(37:13):
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
(37:33):
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
(37:55):
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
(38:17):
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
(38:40):
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
(39:01):
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
(39:21):
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
(39:41):
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
(40:02):
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.
(40:22):
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
(40:44):
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
(41:05):
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
(41:27):
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,
(41:50):
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
(42:11):
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
(42:34):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:17):
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
(43:38):
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
(43:59):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:43):
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
(45:04):
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,
(45:25):
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
(45:48):
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
(46:09):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. And a while back,
it did a few episodes about General Motors, and I
(00:25):
talked about how William Durant and Alfred Sloan had a
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:51):
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.
(02:14):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:22):
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.
(03:43):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:32):
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,
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:39):
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
(07:01):
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
(07:22):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:04):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:47):
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
(09:09):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:54):
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
(10:16):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:02):
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
(11:25):
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
(11:49):
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
(12:10):
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
(12:32):
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.
(12:54):
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
(13:15):
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.
(13:40):
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
(14:01):
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.
(14:24):
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
(14:45):
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
(15:07):
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
(15:28):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:17):
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,
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:29):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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,
(20:55):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:20):
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
(22:42):
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
(23:02):
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
(23:24):
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,
(23:47):
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,
(24:08):
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.
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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
(25:59):
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
(26:21):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:03):
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.
(27:27):
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
(27:49):
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
(28:09):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:17):
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,
(29:38):
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,
(30:08):
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.
(30:29):
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
(30:50):
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.
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:43):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:28):
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
(33:48):
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
(34:13):
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
(34:34):
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.
(34:59):
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,
(35:20):
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
(35:42):
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
(36:05):
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
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
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
(37:13):
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
(37:33):
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
(37:55):
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
(38:17):
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
(38:40):
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
(39:01):
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
(39:21):
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
(39:41):
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
(40:02):
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.
(40:22):
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
(40:44):
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
(41:05):
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
(41:27):
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,
(41:50):
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
(42:11):
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
(42:34):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:17):
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
(43:38):
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
(43:59):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:43):
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
(45:04):
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,
(45:25):
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
(45:48):
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
(46:09):
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.