Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and a love of all things tech. And a while back,
Speaker 1: it did a few episodes about General Motors, and I
Speaker 1: talked about how William Durant and Alfred Sloan had a
Speaker 1: fundamentally different approach from that of Henry Ford. Ford was
Speaker 1: all about creating a vehicle that could be mass produced
Speaker 1: and sold at a relatively low cost year over year.
Speaker 1: GM would focus more on developing different makes of cars
Speaker 1: aimed at different markets, or in other words, they wanted
Speaker 1: to sell a range of vehicles at a range of
Speaker 1: prices and with a range of features. But I realized,
Speaker 1: I've never actually done an episode about Henry Ford or
Speaker 1: the fame modeled T. So we're going to do that now.
Speaker 1: And this won't be a comprehensive series on the Ford
Speaker 1: Motor Company that will require their own episodes, but more
Speaker 1: about the the early history of Henry Ford leading up
Speaker 1: to the design and uh and release and an eventual
Speaker 1: retirement of the Model T. So William and Mary Ford
Speaker 1: of Dearborn Michigan raised a pretty large family. They had
Speaker 1: eight children, including Henry Ford, who was born on July
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three. That's when the Civil War was gripping
Speaker 1: the United States, which was in danger of splitting apart.
Speaker 1: The world Henry was born into was a very different
Speaker 1: world from the one of today. Back then, only twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of Americans lived in cities, so the vast
Speaker 1: majority lived in rural communities. Today, nearly a d three
Speaker 1: of American citizens live in a city. Ford was born
Speaker 1: in America that was pre industrialization in many ways. He
Speaker 1: would make lots of contributions that would change that dramatically.
Speaker 1: William Ford was a farmer, and Henry would work on
Speaker 1: the farm and attend a small school and dearborn. Apparently
Speaker 1: it was a school that only had a single room
Speaker 1: in it, that kind of little schoolhouse, and between the
Speaker 1: ages of twelve and fifteen, Ford spent a lot of
Speaker 1: his time in a little machine shop, learning about engineering
Speaker 1: with hands on experience. When he was sixteen, he made
Speaker 1: his way to Detroit, Michigan, on foot. It was about
Speaker 1: an eight mile walk from his hometown and became a
Speaker 1: machinist's apprentice at a machine shop in Detroit before moving
Speaker 1: on to work at a couple of other factories. He
Speaker 1: worked in such places for about three years, and at
Speaker 1: some point he encountered his first internal combustion engine. I
Speaker 1: covered how these engines work in the GM episodes, and
Speaker 1: since those were fairly recent, I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: through that whole thing again because a lot of you
Speaker 1: have already heard it. If you haven't heard it, then
Speaker 1: you know, go listen to the GM episodes. They're good. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Ford recognized the value of an engine driven piece of
Speaker 1: machinery to do work on a much larger scale, and
Speaker 1: at around age nineteen, he came back to his family
Speaker 1: farm and took up work with the Westinghouse Engine Company.
Speaker 1: Mainly he was helping repair steam powered farm equipment, so
Speaker 1: not internal combustion engine powered equipment, but steam engines. And
Speaker 1: I realized that this is an episode about Ford, not Westinghouse.
Speaker 1: But it would behoove me to talk just for a
Speaker 1: second about George Westinghouse. He was born back in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty six. He was an engineer and inventor, and he
Speaker 1: worked on steam engines, locomotives, and railway air brakes. Early
Speaker 1: in his career, he invented a road ree steam engine
Speaker 1: before he was twenty, and he would later go on
Speaker 1: to play a fundamental role in the Electric Current Wars
Speaker 1: the A C D C Wars. Westinghouse would champion alternating
Speaker 1: current A C in other words, while Thomas Edison would
Speaker 1: oppose him, favoring direct current. And I'll have to do
Speaker 1: a full episode about Westinghouse in the future, but I
Speaker 1: have done episodes about the Current Wars, so you can
Speaker 1: search the archives for that. They are dramatic and intense,
Speaker 1: you might say shocking. Anyway, Henry Ford sort of followed
Speaker 1: the opposite path of Tesla. You know Nicola Tesla, the
Speaker 1: iconic engineer whom the Internet would have you believe invented
Speaker 1: electricity itself. Um, he didn't. Tesla did a lot of
Speaker 1: great things. He was a brilliant man, but I would
Speaker 1: say that some of the things he's credited for on
Speaker 1: the Internet are not act here it anyway, Tesla had
Speaker 1: first worked for Edison and then famously later on he
Speaker 1: worked for Westinghouse. Ford would do the opposite. He was
Speaker 1: starting off repairing farm equipment for Westinghouse and then later
Speaker 1: on he found employment at the Edison Illuminating Company. Of Detroit.
Speaker 1: He became an engineer there in eighteen ninety one and
Speaker 1: rose through the ranks rather quickly. He became the chief
Speaker 1: engineer by eighteen nine three. It was in the winter
Speaker 1: of that year when Ford was said to have built
Speaker 1: his own first internal combustion engine. It used gasoline for fuel,
Speaker 1: it had a single cylinder, and it was more of
Speaker 1: an R and D project for Ford himself. Ford began
Speaker 1: to think of ways to put an internal combustion engine
Speaker 1: to work, specifically by powering a vehicle. He wasn't the
Speaker 1: first person to think about this, not by a long shot,
Speaker 1: but it was around this time, towards the close of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, we saw a lot of early experiments
Speaker 1: with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. To put things
Speaker 1: in perspective, at the time, Ford was still working for Edison,
Speaker 1: and his job required him to be on call. Essentially,
Speaker 1: he had to be ready to jump into action should
Speaker 1: the plants that were supplying Detroit with electricity have any
Speaker 1: sort of problem. But that also meant he didn't actually
Speaker 1: have to keep specific hours over at Edison. He just
Speaker 1: had to be constantly available, and so he used his
Speaker 1: own hours outside of his work to tinker on a
Speaker 1: powered vehicle. Ford's first experimental vehicle was the quadricycle in
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties six, and as the name implies, this vehicle
Speaker 1: was more like a four wheeled motorized bicycle than a
Speaker 1: modern car. He used an old buggy seat as the
Speaker 1: seat for the driver on the vehicle, and the quadricycle
Speaker 1: had a chain drive, meaning you had a loop of
Speaker 1: chain that provided the method to ends for the motion
Speaker 1: generated by the engine to the quadricycle's bicycle wheels. It
Speaker 1: did not have a steering wheel. Instead, it had a handle,
Speaker 1: essentially a tiller that you could swing left or right
Speaker 1: to steer the vehicle. The tiller connected to the front
Speaker 1: wheels and allowed them to turn. The earliest mention I
Speaker 1: could find about steering wheels actually dates to eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: four in France, but it would take a little while
Speaker 1: for that method to replace the good old tiller. And
Speaker 1: tiller has worked okay on vehicles that you know, especially
Speaker 1: if the vehicle had three wheels with one wheel in front.
Speaker 1: They were pretty easy to use. Then it was a
Speaker 1: little trickier to use on a four wheeled vehicle. They
Speaker 1: also were not terribly safe. If a vehicle were able
Speaker 1: to get up to a decent speed, though that wasn't
Speaker 1: really so much of a danger with the quadricycle. It
Speaker 1: did not have a super high top speed. It had
Speaker 1: a humble to cylinder four horsepower engine, so it really
Speaker 1: didn't have the oath necessary to tear down the track,
Speaker 1: particularly in a world where roads were frequently muddy. It
Speaker 1: had to driving speeds. The slower speed was ten miles
Speaker 1: per hour. The fastest was twenty miles per hour. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess you could say that that's a pretty darn
Speaker 1: good clips, So maybe I'm being a little unkind in
Speaker 1: my earlier assessment, but it's not like screaming fast. The
Speaker 1: vehicle had no reverse It also had no brakes. It did, however,
Speaker 1: have a doorbell, which served as a kind of horn
Speaker 1: for the car to let people know that they were
Speaker 1: about to get run down by Henry Ford. Originally, Ford
Speaker 1: intended for his motor to be air cooled, but it
Speaker 1: turned out that the motor just heated up too much
Speaker 1: and the air wasn't dissipating the heat fast enough, so
Speaker 1: he added some water jackets around the cylinders on the
Speaker 1: engine in order to keep them from getting so hot
Speaker 1: that they would you know, break down. Ford first gave
Speaker 1: the quadricycle a test drive on June and around four
Speaker 1: a m. And he might have even started earlier than that,
Speaker 1: but he found he made one key mistake while building
Speaker 1: his contraption. Turned out it was too wide to fit
Speaker 1: through the door of the shed that he had built
Speaker 1: it in, so he built a car too big to
Speaker 1: fit through the door of the shed so that shed
Speaker 1: had brick walls and delayed. But undeterred, Ford decided to
Speaker 1: take up an axe that was in the shed and
Speaker 1: then just start hacking at the wall with it, breaking
Speaker 1: off bits of brick until he had made a gap
Speaker 1: wide enough for the quadricycle to fit through the wall.
Speaker 1: Wasn't gonna stop Henry Ford from making history. His chief assistant,
Speaker 1: James Bishop, helped him out and even rode ahead on
Speaker 1: a bicycle to help make certain that Henry had a
Speaker 1: clear path and wasn't gonna, you know, kill anybody. Since
Speaker 1: there were no brakes on the quadricycle, that was really
Speaker 1: important because Ford would either have to run into someone
Speaker 1: or veer off and potentially crash into a building, and
Speaker 1: neither option really seemed to appeal to Ford. The test
Speaker 1: drive was a success, despite the fact that at one
Speaker 1: point there was a spring on the vehicle that broke
Speaker 1: and that necessitated a quick repair job. Having made his
Speaker 1: first vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, Ford was
Speaker 1: eager to get to work on the second one and
Speaker 1: to improve upon what he built, So he started doing
Speaker 1: something that would become a theme in his early career.
Speaker 1: He sold the quadricycle. Sold it for two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: in late eighteen ninety six. If we had just for inflation,
Speaker 1: that's close to around six thousand, three hundred dollars today.
Speaker 1: Now today you would probably call that quadricycle priceless. So
Speaker 1: it was a steal for six large plus some change.
Speaker 1: But here's the really crazy thing. In h four, Henry
Speaker 1: Ford actually bought that quadricycle back for the princely sum
Speaker 1: of sixty five dollars. Pretty good deal, right. Ford received
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison's encouragement in his pursuits, and I assume that
Speaker 1: Edison's words helped Ford make the decision to strike out
Speaker 1: on his own and found his own company. He resigned
Speaker 1: his position with Edison on August five and co founded
Speaker 1: a company called the Detroit Automobile Company. He received funding
Speaker 1: from a dozen investors, including William Maybury, who was the
Speaker 1: mayor of Detroit at the time. They raised fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for the business, which would be equal to about
Speaker 1: four hundred seventy three thousand dollars today, which is a
Speaker 1: good chunk of change, but probably less than what you
Speaker 1: would expect for a startup company that was going to
Speaker 1: be building cars. Henry salary was established at one fifty
Speaker 1: dollars per month, which would be around four thousand, seven
Speaker 1: hundred thirty bucks these days, or fifty six thousand dollars
Speaker 1: per year, or so just about fifty seven thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: so Ford wasn't quite rolling in cash yet that he
Speaker 1: was making a decent living. Of course, in those days,
Speaker 1: cars were built hand by small groups of engineers, and
Speaker 1: they were mostly the playthings of the wealthy. They were
Speaker 1: a curiosity, something that made headlines, but was still a
Speaker 1: very rare sight on the streets. A lot of people
Speaker 1: had never seen one. The first vehicle Ford got to
Speaker 1: work on at the Detroit Automotive Company was a delivery truck.
Speaker 1: It was a a small vehicle for a truck, but
Speaker 1: showed that Ford was thinking about practical uses for automobiles
Speaker 1: because we weren't yet at a point where the average
Speaker 1: person was going to own one. But you know, you
Speaker 1: could make delivery trucks, make something that's really useful for
Speaker 1: purposes like hauling stuff around, and businesses could buy them.
Speaker 1: But Ford and his backers started to have some problems.
Speaker 1: Ford was focused on improving his designs and making his
Speaker 1: vehicles more reliable and easier to handle and etcetera. But
Speaker 1: his backers were more interested in, you know, selling cars.
Speaker 1: And it is hard to make money if the guy
Speaker 1: in charge of manufacturing your product is spending all the
Speaker 1: time on improving that product, not selling it. The Detroit
Speaker 1: Automobile Company lasted only a year and a half before
Speaker 1: Ford's investors exasperated through in the towel and dissolved the company.
Speaker 1: Ford meanwhile kept his hand in by designing and building
Speaker 1: cars to compete in various races. In nineteen o one,
Speaker 1: a car he built competed in a ten mile race
Speaker 1: in Gross Point, Michigan, and the driver won the race.
Speaker 1: That driver was Henry Ford himself. Ford then designed a
Speaker 1: better race car called the n Ford also sought out
Speaker 1: new investors to give that whole company thing another go.
Speaker 1: The remains of the Detroit Automobile Company would serve as
Speaker 1: the foundation for a new company called the Henry Ford Company.
Speaker 1: Ford was able to convince more investors to jump on
Speaker 1: after this successful races. He had built up a lot
Speaker 1: of positive pr and the company took shape in November
Speaker 1: nineteen o one. But these new investors soon encountered the
Speaker 1: same issues as their predecessors. They watched as Henry kept
Speaker 1: changing designs and attempting to improve vehicles and claiming they
Speaker 1: weren't yet ready to be sold to the public. And
Speaker 1: he was probably right, But keeping a business afloat is expensive,
Speaker 1: and if there's little to no money coming in from sales,
Speaker 1: then that means the investors have to shoulder that load.
Speaker 1: Tensions between Ford and those investors reached a boiling point,
Speaker 1: and ultimately Ford decided to leave in a huff, or
Speaker 1: maybe a minute and a huff. Anyway, he decided to leave.
Speaker 1: And it had been less than half a year. Yikes. Now,
Speaker 1: if you listened to my episodes about General Motors, you
Speaker 1: know it was this company, the Henry Ford Company, that
Speaker 1: would transform into the Cadillac Company. After a guy named
Speaker 1: Henry Leland was brought in to assess the company assets. Now,
Speaker 1: the original plan was that the investors were going to
Speaker 1: liquidate everything and just you know, call the loss. But
Speaker 1: Leland convinced them to stick with it, and the Cadillac
Speaker 1: was born, which would later get scooped up as part
Speaker 1: of GM. When Ford left, one of the few things
Speaker 1: he got to take with him was his name. I
Speaker 1: mean it was his name after all. He also took
Speaker 1: his determination to stick with the whole car thing third
Speaker 1: times the charm right. And so he sets out to
Speaker 1: get a new group of investors to help him create
Speaker 1: an automobile company. And sure enough, this one would be
Speaker 1: the real success. It would be the Ford Motor Company.
Speaker 1: When we come back, i'll talk about the early days
Speaker 1: of that company and the birth of the Model T.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. It was three
Speaker 1: and Henry Ford was now thirty nine years old. The
Speaker 1: first two companies he found it fizzled out as investors
Speaker 1: backed away from Ford. The automobile was still in its
Speaker 1: infancy and Ford wanted to play a part in its
Speaker 1: early development. He had new investors, including the Dodge Brothers,
Speaker 1: whom I also mentioned in the GM episode. It's a
Speaker 1: very incestuous group automakers. Collectively, his investors raised more money
Speaker 1: than went into either the Detroit Automotive Company or the
Speaker 1: Henry Ford Company twenty eight thousand dollars in fact, and
Speaker 1: the Ford Motor Company was born. Like the other companies
Speaker 1: it called Detroit Home. Ford himself was heavily invested in
Speaker 1: the company. He owned slightly more than twenty five of
Speaker 1: the company's stuck upon its formation. For the first few
Speaker 1: years he shared control of the company with fellow investors,
Speaker 1: but by nineteen o six he assumed the position of
Speaker 1: president and controlled the company pretty effectively. And skipping ahead
Speaker 1: a bit, and will touch back on this late in
Speaker 1: the episode, in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, he and
Speaker 1: his wife Clara and their son Edsel would hold a
Speaker 1: buy back of all outstanding stock. That's putting lightly. We'll
Speaker 1: get to it. It's actually a little more amusing than that,
Speaker 1: but anyway, they spent more than a hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: to essentially buy up all the stock, or at least
Speaker 1: enough for them to have controlling interest, and became effectively
Speaker 1: the soul owners of the company. Now. The first car
Speaker 1: produced by the Ford Motor Company became known as the
Speaker 1: Model A Ford. Now clearly this was not the Model
Speaker 1: A that the Ford Company would produce in nineteen twenty seven. No,
Speaker 1: this was the nineteen oh three Model A, and it
Speaker 1: was a different beast altogether. The Model A was a
Speaker 1: style of car called a runabout. It was an open vehicle,
Speaker 1: meaning there was no top to the car. There's no roof,
Speaker 1: there's no windshield, there are no doors. In fact, you
Speaker 1: would just step up onto the car and then into
Speaker 1: it and sit on a bench style seat similar to
Speaker 1: a horse drawn buggy. In fact, it looked a lot
Speaker 1: like a buggy, just you know, without the horse. This
Speaker 1: vehicle measure four ft nine inches tall or about one
Speaker 1: point four meters. It was five ft five inches or
Speaker 1: one point six five ms wide, and it was about
Speaker 1: eight and a half feet long or two point six meters.
Speaker 1: It had a two speed manual transmission, had eight horsepower,
Speaker 1: and thankfully it did have a steering wheel and brakes.
Speaker 1: The sales price was eight hundred fifty dollars or about
Speaker 1: twenty four thousand, eight hundred bucks if we had just
Speaker 1: for today's you know, inflation rates. The average salary in
Speaker 1: America at that time was just four hundred eighty nine dollars,
Speaker 1: So that meant it would take nearly two years of
Speaker 1: savings for the average person to be able to purchase
Speaker 1: a Model A. That's assuming that, you know, it didn't
Speaker 1: spend money on anything else. The Forward company was ready
Speaker 1: to take orders in the summer of nineteen o three,
Speaker 1: and the company was on borrowed time. In mid July three,
Speaker 1: Ford received three orders for Model A cars. One was
Speaker 1: payment in full and the other two were large deposits.
Speaker 1: At the time, the company had a bank balance of
Speaker 1: just two dollars sixty cents. In other words, the Ford
Speaker 1: Motor Company was in danger of running out of cash
Speaker 1: and not even having enough to cover the company payroll.
Speaker 1: But those orders brought in another one thousand, twenty bucks,
Speaker 1: which kept the lights on, so to speak. Oh and
Speaker 1: that wasn't the only existential crisis that the company faced
Speaker 1: early on. While the orders made sure that the company
Speaker 1: had enough money to keep going, a consortium called the
Speaker 1: Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers or a l a M
Speaker 1: threatened to shut things down. The group, formed in an
Speaker 1: effort to get total control over the blossoming automobile industry
Speaker 1: in the United States, controlled by a board of five members,
Speaker 1: who had to reach a unanimous decision when it came
Speaker 1: to granting licenses. And if you'll forgive me, I think
Speaker 1: we need to go down a little tangent here because
Speaker 1: this story is fascinating. At the heart of the matter
Speaker 1: was a patent that originally belonged to George B. Selden.
Speaker 1: He was an engineer at heart, but a patent lawyer
Speaker 1: by trade, and he filed for a patent for an
Speaker 1: internal combustion engine specifically intended for the use in vehicles
Speaker 1: way back in eighteen seventy nine. However, he didn't receive
Speaker 1: the patent until eight In the meantime, other folks had
Speaker 1: started making cars that relied on internal combustion engines and
Speaker 1: did not, you know, rely specifically on Seldon's patent. Selden, however,
Speaker 1: held that patent, which meant he could pursue those rights
Speaker 1: and demand a fee from companies that were making cars
Speaker 1: that were running on internal combustion engines, and he helped
Speaker 1: co found the Electric Vehicle Company and worked to get
Speaker 1: royalty fees from various car manufacturers. The A L. A M.
Speaker 1: Group essentially formed to help fight back against this practice
Speaker 1: of what, in their point of view, amounted to extortion,
Speaker 1: and you could say this was sort of an early
Speaker 1: example of someone acting like a control Ultimately, the companies
Speaker 1: represented by A L. A M. We're able to secure
Speaker 1: a better deal with E V M, the holder of
Speaker 1: the patent, and now the A L a M. Was
Speaker 1: acting kind of like a gatekeeper for the car manufacturing
Speaker 1: business in America. It seems like most folks in the
Speaker 1: industry viewed that the patent at the center of all
Speaker 1: this was somewhat weak, but no one was really up
Speaker 1: to the task of testing it out because it would
Speaker 1: mean a lengthy and expensive court battle. Ford had attempted
Speaker 1: to secure a license from the A L a M.
Speaker 1: But he had been denied. Now, one reason for that
Speaker 1: denial may have been that a member of the board
Speaker 1: worked for the Olds Company, the company that made the
Speaker 1: Oldsmobile and would later be part of GM, and Ford's
Speaker 1: cars were the chief competitor to the Oldsmobile in Detroit,
Speaker 1: So there's the possibility that there was some anti competitive
Speaker 1: practices going on here. But the official reason was that
Speaker 1: Ford's previous two companies had fizzled out less than two
Speaker 1: years after they had launched, and that meant that Ford
Speaker 1: had no proven track record that he could deliver upon
Speaker 1: his desire to make cars. However, Ford went ahead with
Speaker 1: making cars without a license from the A L a M.
Speaker 1: That led to a lawsuit against the company filed by
Speaker 1: the A L a M. The trial would stretch on
Speaker 1: for several years, with one judge finding in favor of
Speaker 1: A L. A M. In nineteen o nine, but then
Speaker 1: the Court of Appeals overturned that decision in favor of
Speaker 1: Ford in nineteen eleven, at which point the A L
Speaker 1: a M decided to just let it be. Part of
Speaker 1: the winning strategy was that Ford's lawyers argued that the
Speaker 1: design of the car engines weren't based off of Selden's
Speaker 1: design at all, but rather one that had been earlier
Speaker 1: created by Nicholas Otto way back in the mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Also just to kind of drive home how absurd things
Speaker 1: like this can be when you take the long view.
Speaker 1: By the time I'm this case had finally concluded in
Speaker 1: the courts, the patent only had one more year of
Speaker 1: protection for Selden because patents expire, and once they do so,
Speaker 1: the invention enters the public domain. Anyway, the entire time
Speaker 1: this lawsuit was going on, Ford was still making vehicles,
Speaker 1: and after the battle, the automotive industry as a whole changed.
Speaker 1: For around a year and a half, the company made
Speaker 1: Model A cars. In fact, it made around seventeen hundred
Speaker 1: of them. While assembly lines were a thing in which
Speaker 1: people would be in charge of specific tasks and the
Speaker 1: assembly process which sped things up a bit, we weren't
Speaker 1: at real mass production yet. We weren't at mechanized electrified
Speaker 1: assembly lines where stuff was brought specifically to assemble workers,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't as efficient as it was going to be.
Speaker 1: The Model A was successful enough to give Forward the
Speaker 1: cash to work on the next car, which is really
Speaker 1: kind of how Ford had been operating since the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1: What followed were eight other cars, the Model B, the A, C,
Speaker 1: the C, the F, the K, the N, the R,
Speaker 1: and the S. The B was a touring car and
Speaker 1: the first Affords vehicles to have the engine placed in
Speaker 1: front of the driver. The previous ones had the engine
Speaker 1: mounted behind the driver's seat. It was much more expensive
Speaker 1: than the Model A. It was kind of a luxury
Speaker 1: vehicle for the time. The Model C looked a lot
Speaker 1: like the Model A, but had a more powerful motor.
Speaker 1: Than a slightly revised appearance. The A C, as you
Speaker 1: might imagine, was a Model A body powered by a
Speaker 1: Model C engine. But let's skip ahead to the Model N,
Speaker 1: which was sort of a breakout star of these early
Speaker 1: years at the Ford Motor Company. It was the replacement
Speaker 1: to the Model A and the Model C, and it
Speaker 1: was designed to be an entry level vehicle for customers.
Speaker 1: Like the B, the N had an engine in front
Speaker 1: of the driver. It also had an engine that ran
Speaker 1: on four cylinders which provided fifteen horsepower. It was a
Speaker 1: two seater runabout, so still didn't have any doors on
Speaker 1: the sides, although you could get a version of the
Speaker 1: model and had a canopy to provide some shade and
Speaker 1: some limited protection from the elements. I say limited because
Speaker 1: with no doors and still no windshield, rain would hit
Speaker 1: you if you were driving through rain. H The Model
Speaker 1: IN had a four cylinder engine and actually used a
Speaker 1: shaft drive rather than a chain drive. The combination of
Speaker 1: the engine and the drive made the Model IN a
Speaker 1: pretty handy vehicle when they could reach higher speeds than
Speaker 1: earlier models. The Model ENDS price tag was a pretty
Speaker 1: big selling point. It was priced at five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: at a time when the average Americans wage had hit
Speaker 1: around five three dollars per year. Now we're still talking
Speaker 1: about an expensive possession, obviously, but one that the average
Speaker 1: American might be able to afford with some savings or
Speaker 1: paying in installments. The success of the Model IN fed
Speaker 1: into the next big project, the Model T. This would
Speaker 1: be the car synonymous with Ford. Heck, you could argue
Speaker 1: that the Model T was almost synonymous with the word automobile,
Speaker 1: at least in America in the early days. Not that
Speaker 1: Ford was the only car manufacturing company at that time.
Speaker 1: In fact, far from it. There were numerous other companies
Speaker 1: and brands that were active Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Buick, tons of
Speaker 1: other ones that the average person today may not have
Speaker 1: ever heard of because those companies no longer exist. But
Speaker 1: the Model T s popularity was undeniable. It was the
Speaker 1: most popular type of car on the roads for more
Speaker 1: than a decade, and a lot of histories dumped the
Speaker 1: success of the Model T squarely in the lap of
Speaker 1: Henry Ford. But we should always remember that these sorts
Speaker 1: of things are the products of lots of people working together.
Speaker 1: It's very rare that we can point to a single
Speaker 1: person and say they are the sole person responsible for
Speaker 1: such and such. Whether that person is building on the
Speaker 1: work of another or they are collaborating actively with a
Speaker 1: group of other people, the real story is usually a
Speaker 1: little more complicated, and that is how it is with
Speaker 1: the Model T. For example, there is child Harold Wills
Speaker 1: or C. H. Wills if you prefer. Wills was a
Speaker 1: machinist who offered to work for Ford way back in Grattis.
Speaker 1: That is, he worked for Ford for free. He had
Speaker 1: a steady day job, but he wanted to learn more
Speaker 1: about automobiles, and he figured he could learn quickly by doing,
Speaker 1: and he soon became indispensable to Henry Ford. Wills was
Speaker 1: a draftsman and would draw up plans for his creations,
Speaker 1: and he played an important role in the design and
Speaker 1: engineering of a lot of Ford's early vehicles, including that
Speaker 1: race car the I mentioned earlier, as well as the
Speaker 1: Model A. Wills was the one to design the Ford emblem.
Speaker 1: In fact, he's the one who created that particular styleised
Speaker 1: design for Ford. Wills was responsible for taking many of
Speaker 1: Ford's ideas about what the Model T should be and
Speaker 1: making them a reality, and he was not the only
Speaker 1: major contributor to the design of the car. Another was
Speaker 1: a mechanical engineer named Joseph Galam. Originally from Austria, Hungary,
Speaker 1: he moved to American nineteen o three and found work
Speaker 1: with the Ford Motor Company in nineteen o five as
Speaker 1: a designer, and he had become the lead designer and
Speaker 1: contributed to the development of the Model T. Another person
Speaker 1: who designed parts for the Model T was Eugene Farcas,
Speaker 1: who was born in Hungary but who moved to the
Speaker 1: United States in nineteen o six. Farcas worked for Ford
Speaker 1: a couple of different times, and it was during his
Speaker 1: second stint at the company when he did his design
Speaker 1: work on the Model T. He would end up working
Speaker 1: for a lot of other car companies, including GM, and
Speaker 1: would even work for Ford again a few years later.
Speaker 1: There were other people on the team too, of course,
Speaker 1: there was Peter Martin, C. J. Smith, Gus Denyer and
Speaker 1: Henry Love. They all made contributions to the design of
Speaker 1: the Model T, so the Model T was a true
Speaker 1: collaborative effort. Henry Ford created the project goal, which was
Speaker 1: a car that would be reliable and affordable, one that
Speaker 1: would be relatively easy to assemble. The assembly line approach
Speaker 1: at the time was still not yet dependent upon electric
Speaker 1: motors and conveyor belts. It was, however, dependent on unskilled
Speaker 1: or semi skilled laborers who would specialize in a particular
Speaker 1: task and focus on that. This made assembly more efficient,
Speaker 1: though it would be another decade before mass production really
Speaker 1: became a possibility, a fact of life in manufacturing that
Speaker 1: would change the world, and Ford would lead the way.
Speaker 1: When we come back, i'll talk more about the Model T,
Speaker 1: how it shaped the automotive industry and beyond. But first
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. In The first Model T s,
Speaker 1: or the ten Lizzies as they were also known, were
Speaker 1: assembled by hand using tried and true methods. It was reliable,
Speaker 1: but it was also slow. Ford introduced the Model T
Speaker 1: on October one, and by November one, the assembly plant
Speaker 1: at Piquette Avenue had only put together eleven of the cars.
Speaker 1: Even with the best assembly practices of the time, this
Speaker 1: was slow work, demand was high, and supply was low
Speaker 1: due to the limitations of the assembly plant. The Model
Speaker 1: T had a twenty horsepower four cylinder engine. Like the
Speaker 1: most recent forward vehicles of the time, the engine was
Speaker 1: at the front end of the car and the engine
Speaker 1: could run on gasoline, ethanol, or according to one source
Speaker 1: I read kerosene, it used a radiator to cool the engine,
Speaker 1: which means I get to explain how idiator's work, which
Speaker 1: is actually pretty simple. All right. So, internal combustion engines
Speaker 1: generate a lot of heat because you've got combustion going
Speaker 1: on there, effectively explosions happening within cylinders multiple times a minute.
Speaker 1: So to cool the engine, Ford's designers built water passages
Speaker 1: where water could flow past the engine essentially in tubes
Speaker 1: or pipes really and help carry heat away from the engine.
Speaker 1: So coolant, essentially water in the early days, would flow
Speaker 1: through these passages. It would pick up heat from the
Speaker 1: engine block, carry that heat away from the engine so
Speaker 1: that it doesn't overheat, and then that heated water would
Speaker 1: transfer heat to thin fins of thermally conductive metal. That phrase,
Speaker 1: by the way, is way easier to write than it
Speaker 1: is to say. Anyway, that heat would then radiate out
Speaker 1: into the environment through these thin fins. Two DA and
Speaker 1: early Model T the first so even had water pumps
Speaker 1: to physically push the water through the system from you know,
Speaker 1: essentially a reservoir through the water passages past the engine block,
Speaker 1: transfer the heat to the fins and then back into
Speaker 1: the reservoir. But after those first Model T s Ford's
Speaker 1: team came up with a Thermo siphon approach, which really
Speaker 1: just relied on physics because as the water would heat up,
Speaker 1: it would expand become less dense, and naturally move up
Speaker 1: through the system. It essentially used gravity and and heat
Speaker 1: to do all the work, so you didn't have to
Speaker 1: have a mechanical pump. The cars fuel system was also
Speaker 1: gravity fed, meaning that the fuel tank was just built
Speaker 1: in a higher position than the engine and the weight
Speaker 1: of the fuel would push gas or kerosene or whatever
Speaker 1: to the engine. This worked okay if you were driving
Speaker 1: on level ground or downhill, but on really steep climbs
Speaker 1: that could become an issue. Even so, for demonstrate the
Speaker 1: Model TS capabilities with some pretty notable stunts, like driving
Speaker 1: up Pike's Peak, starting a Model T engine required attaching
Speaker 1: a crank handle to the front of the vehicle and
Speaker 1: giving it a good crank or two to get the
Speaker 1: engine to turn over. I covered that process in the
Speaker 1: recent GM episodes, so if you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about it and how it could be really super dangerous,
Speaker 1: you should check out those episodes. The Model T also
Speaker 1: had three gears, two were for forward drive and one
Speaker 1: was for a reverse and the steering wheel had a
Speaker 1: couple of controls that would seem strange to us. The
Speaker 1: throttle the accelerator was actually a lever that attached to
Speaker 1: the steering wheel, so you didn't have an accelerator pedal
Speaker 1: the way we do with modern cars. Likewise, the steering
Speaker 1: wheel also had a spark advancer lever on it. Now
Speaker 1: again I kind of covered this in the GM episode,
Speaker 1: but essentially this control adjusted the frequency at which the
Speaker 1: spar plugs that are part of the engine's cylinders would
Speaker 1: actually spark to light those uh mixtures of gas and
Speaker 1: air and cause combustion. And finding the right frequency so
Speaker 1: that you were lining up the sparks precisely with the
Speaker 1: right part of the the four stroke process meant that
Speaker 1: you would change the Model T from a herky jerky
Speaker 1: engine car to a nice and smooth engine experience. Ish.
Speaker 1: The early Model T s had a transmission brake, but
Speaker 1: not wheel brakes, so there are no brakes attached to
Speaker 1: the wheels in early Model T s. Those would actually
Speaker 1: follow later in the production life of the Model T.
Speaker 1: In fact, there were some aftermarket wheel brakes made for
Speaker 1: the Model T, which convinced Forward to finally include them
Speaker 1: on the actual Model T models that were rolling off
Speaker 1: the assembly line. I guess that that would be somewhat concerning.
Speaker 1: I mean, the top speed for the Model T was
Speaker 1: somewhere in the neighborhood of forty hour or around seventy
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour. That's not, you know, screaming fast by
Speaker 1: modern standards, but when you consider you don't have wheel breaks,
Speaker 1: it's a darn good clip. As one source I saw said,
Speaker 1: Model TS were designed to go, they weren't designed to stop. Originally,
Speaker 1: the headlights on Model TS were not electric. They were
Speaker 1: Ascettlene headlamps. They also had oil side lamps, but the
Speaker 1: Model T stuck around long enough so that later versions
Speaker 1: would get electric lights. The steering wheel on the Model
Speaker 1: T was located on the left side of the vehicle
Speaker 1: rather than on the center or on the right, which
Speaker 1: was a big change and ended up becoming a standard
Speaker 1: in the automotive industry for American cars. Much of the
Speaker 1: car was made out of vanadium steel, which is a
Speaker 1: relatively lightweight and strong steel alloy. There are actually several
Speaker 1: different versions of the Model T all based on the
Speaker 1: same fundamental design, but with slightly different features. You had
Speaker 1: the coupe, which had a tall, narrow look to it
Speaker 1: and could seat to passengers. You had a touring car,
Speaker 1: which was a bit more of a luxury car, and
Speaker 1: it had models that included convertibles. There was a roadster model,
Speaker 1: there was a runabout, and then at the high end
Speaker 1: there was the town car. Also. At the time, Ford
Speaker 1: made these vehicles in a few different colors, but that
Speaker 1: would change after just a few years. The initial price
Speaker 1: tag for the Model T was eight hundred fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: which was significantly more than the average wage at the time.
Speaker 1: Ford's goal was to make an affordable automobile that he
Speaker 1: could sell to a lot of people, and he figured
Speaker 1: that the market was there if the price were right.
Speaker 1: But it also meant having to find ways to bring
Speaker 1: costs down, and that was something that would require a
Speaker 1: few big leaps. In nineteen ten, the company opened up
Speaker 1: a new production plant called the Highland Park Complex. This
Speaker 1: was where the production line really started to take shape,
Speaker 1: where Ford really began to rely more heavily on unskilled laborers,
Speaker 1: with each person focusing on a specific task and then
Speaker 1: repeating that over and over on car after car. The
Speaker 1: assembly process became just a set of tasks that could
Speaker 1: be assigned out to specific workers along the assembly line,
Speaker 1: and as a result, the time to build a full
Speaker 1: model t went from twelve and a half hours for
Speaker 1: one car to ninety three minutes by nineteen fourteen. But
Speaker 1: the company had also encountered a big problem. The repetitive
Speaker 1: work was exhausting. Shifts were typically nine hours, and while
Speaker 1: the tasks didn't require skilled workers, it really did take
Speaker 1: a lot of time to onboard new employees and teach
Speaker 1: them how to do their specific sets of tasks. The
Speaker 1: daily take home pay at that time was just two
Speaker 1: dollars twenty five cents. Adjusting for inflation, that's about sixty
Speaker 1: bucks a day in today's money. But Ford was seeing
Speaker 1: incredible turnover. The tasks took time to learn, so it
Speaker 1: could be frustrating. They might not be terribly difficult tasks,
Speaker 1: but they were repetitive, and work was also plentiful in
Speaker 1: Detroit at the time, so Ford saw a lot of
Speaker 1: people just kind of walk off the line and quit,
Speaker 1: and that would bring production to a halt. Because each
Speaker 1: person was important. Each person had a job in putting
Speaker 1: the cards together, and one person leaving would kind of
Speaker 1: muck everything up. So to stabilize the workforce, Ford more
Speaker 1: than doubled salaries. He offered five dollars per day, and
Speaker 1: this was more than competitive with other employers in the area,
Speaker 1: and it helped create a more reliable workforce. So this
Speaker 1: was a practicality. This was not altruism at work. The
Speaker 1: process was efficient, but only as long as there were
Speaker 1: people to actually do the work in the process. So
Speaker 1: he needed to have that reliability. Losing someone meant you're
Speaker 1: going to have to replace that person and train a
Speaker 1: new person, and it would mean wasted time and money.
Speaker 1: So in the long run, it just made more economic
Speaker 1: sense to offer more money and keep people at that job. Um,
Speaker 1: it was not an effort to make sure that employees
Speaker 1: would make enough money where they could buy the cars
Speaker 1: that were rolling off the assembly line. That often ends
Speaker 1: up being part of the mythology around Ford. It was
Speaker 1: really more that the company needed to have a stable workforce.
Speaker 1: From nineteen fourteen to nineteen five, Ford would only offer
Speaker 1: the Model T in black, which led to the joke
Speaker 1: off Ford saying that customers could get a Model T
Speaker 1: in any color, provided it was black. It made things
Speaker 1: simpler if you were just churning out car after car,
Speaker 1: and all the parts are interchangeable. He would also say
Speaker 1: that there was never any use in overtaking a Model
Speaker 1: TEA and passing it on the road, because there would
Speaker 1: always be another one right up ahead, and that was
Speaker 1: not much of an exaggeration. By the time Ford would
Speaker 1: stop making the Model T in the late nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: the company had sold more than fifteen million of the things.
Speaker 1: What helped was that as the company found more efficient
Speaker 1: ways to build cars, the cost of manufacturing came way down,
Speaker 1: and Ford would then pass that on to the customer.
Speaker 1: He started pricing the Model T lower and lower, so
Speaker 1: by nineteen sixteen, the car that had originally cost eight
Speaker 1: hundred fifty dollars was now priced at three hundred sixty.
Speaker 1: By nine four the price was down to two hundred
Speaker 1: sixty dollars. At the end of nineteen eighteen, with a
Speaker 1: little warning, Henry Ford resigned as president of the Ford
Speaker 1: Motor Company. His son, Edsel, five years old at the time,
Speaker 1: was elected to the role of president a Ford Henry
Speaker 1: was still essentially calling all the shots, but he had
Speaker 1: stepped back after he had made some moves to clear
Speaker 1: out land for a new production facility, but he didn't
Speaker 1: get full shareholder approval first, and so he was facing
Speaker 1: some opposition among large stakeholders in Ford. Then Henry Ford
Speaker 1: said he would start up a new car company and
Speaker 1: produce a vehicle similar to the Model T, but sell
Speaker 1: it for less money, which would undercut Ford. This turned
Speaker 1: out to be a ploy, but it's scared investors into
Speaker 1: selling off their stakes, and the Ford family was quietly
Speaker 1: purchasing it through various lawyers. And that is how the
Speaker 1: Ford family became majority owners of the Ford Company and
Speaker 1: no longer beholden to cranky stockholders who objected to such
Speaker 1: things as building factories without you know, getting approval first.
Speaker 1: It was also around this time when Ford began to
Speaker 1: publish anti Semitic articles in the journal The Dearborn Independent,
Speaker 1: and it was some ugly, ugly stuff. Late in his
Speaker 1: life he would sort of renounce what he had done.
Speaker 1: It was not good stuff. Henry Ford was also clearly
Speaker 1: still pulling strings at the Ford Motor Company, was still
Speaker 1: running the show, even though his son was ostensibly in charge.
Speaker 1: He refused to listen to people who were telling him
Speaker 1: that the Model T had run its course and the
Speaker 1: company really needed to update their their line with a
Speaker 1: new model of car. Henry Ford held out against those
Speaker 1: critics year after year until when it was clear that
Speaker 1: they were right. Other companies, notably GM, we're seeing great
Speaker 1: success with their approach to planned obsolescence, in which they
Speaker 1: would introduce new versions of car models every year. They
Speaker 1: would update the style, they would create a new type
Speaker 1: of demand by kind of making cars of stylish status symbol.
Speaker 1: Whereas Ford, while it would incorporate improvements in new versions
Speaker 1: of the Model T, really wasn't changing the Model T
Speaker 1: very much year over year. You know, a late Model
Speaker 1: T looks pretty similar to an early Model T. The
Speaker 1: Forward Company stopped production on the Model T in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven, shutting down the Highland Park facility for half
Speaker 1: a year in order to change the assembly line process
Speaker 1: over to making a new car, which was confusingly called
Speaker 1: the Model A. I guess most folks didn't know about
Speaker 1: or remember the old nineteen o three Model A. It's
Speaker 1: not a big surprise. I mean, the company did make
Speaker 1: fewer than two thousand of them, but the Model T
Speaker 1: had by then changed the world in nineteen eighteen, the
Speaker 1: Model T represented nearly fifty of all cars on the
Speaker 1: road in America. So, in other words, about half the
Speaker 1: cars in America were Model T s, and the other
Speaker 1: half of the cars were spread across all the other
Speaker 1: car companies that were scrabbling for that fifty percent. The
Speaker 1: Model T helped push the urbanization of America. Cities grew,
Speaker 1: people began to move to cities. You started to see
Speaker 1: the ad ants of streets, and much later the highway system.
Speaker 1: The mass production methods that Ford would adopt would end
Speaker 1: up being used for everything from manufacturing airplanes to putting
Speaker 1: together Hamburgers. It really was a transformational company, not just
Speaker 1: in the auto industry but beyond, and a great deal
Speaker 1: of credit does need to go to Henry Ford and
Speaker 1: UH and the team that he put up around him.
Speaker 1: It took him a few times to get it right,
Speaker 1: and of course he still made some very um regrettable
Speaker 1: decisions and and express some truly horrific viewpoints at different
Speaker 1: times in his life. So he is by no means
Speaker 1: someone we should hold up as an unimpeachable hero. But
Speaker 1: he really was an important person in the world of
Speaker 1: technology in general and the automotive industry in particular, world
Speaker 1: would be very different head Henry Ford not gone into
Speaker 1: the automotive business, and that concludes this story. Obviously, I
Speaker 1: could do lots of episodes about the Ford Motor Company
Speaker 1: and talk about it's transformation and change. I can talk
Speaker 1: about how Henry Ford would come back to head up
Speaker 1: the Ford Motor Company after his son passed away suddenly,
Speaker 1: and talk about how his grandson would take up the
Speaker 1: mantle later on. But those are topics we should tackle
Speaker 1: and maybe a future episode of tech Stuff, And for
Speaker 1: the time being, I'm ready to close the door on
Speaker 1: the model t all right. Well, if you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for topics that I should cover in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. The best way
Speaker 1: is to reach out on Twitter. The handle for the
Speaker 1: show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.