Ford Model T is First Produced

The Ford Model T (colloquially known as the Tin Lizzie and Flivver) is an automobile that was produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from 1908 through 1927. The Model T set 1908 as the historic year that the automobile came into popular usage. It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that "put America on wheels"; some of this was because of Ford's innovations, including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting, as well as the concept of paying the workers a wage proportionate to the cost of the car, so they would provide a ready made market. The first production Model T was built on September 27, 1908, at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan. The Model T was the first automobile mass produced on assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class.

There were several cars produced or prototyped by Henry Ford from the founding of the company in 1903 until the Model T came along. Although he started with the Model A, there were not 19 production models (A through T); some were only prototypes. The production model immediately before the Model T was the Model S, an upgraded version of the company's largest success to that point, the Model N. The follow-up was the Ford Model A and not the Model U. Company publicity said this was because the new car was such a departure from the old that Henry wanted to start all over again with the letter A. As it happens, the first Plymouth car (1928), built by competitor Chrysler Corporation, was named the Model U.
The Ford Model T was named the world's most influential car of the twentieth century in an international poll. Henry Ford said of the vehicle:
"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will ...

Ford is often quoted as saying "I will build a motorcar for the great multitude". At the time it was a revolutionary business model to lower a product's cost and the company's profit margin in exchange for increased sales volume. Up until this point in time the automobile had been a status symbol and cars were painstakingly built by hand for the wealthy. By the end of 1913 Ford's application of the moving assembly line had improved the speed of chassis assembly from 12 hours and eight minutes to one hour and 33 minutes. In 1914 Ford produced 308,162 cars, which was more than all 299 other auto manufacturers combined. By the time the last Model T was built in 1927, the company was producing an automobile every 24 seconds.

The first production Model T Ford (1909 model year) was assembled at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit on October 1, 1908. Over the next 19 years relatively few fundamental changes were made to the basic design. By 1926 the design was so antiquated that the Model T could not compete with more modern offerings from competitors like Chevrolet. 1927 was the last year for Henry's lady, the "Universal Car".

In 1906, Ford secretly set up a place to build his cars in a building on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. Ford spent nearly two years designing the Model T, building on knowledge gained from the production of earlier cars, like his Ford Model N.

While Henry Ford and his team were planning for his new car, he attended a race in Florida where he examined the wreckage of a French race car. He observed that it was made of a different kind of steel and the car parts were lighter than those he had been previously seen. He learned that this new steel was a vanadium alloy and that it had almost three times the tensile strength of the alloys used by his contemporary American auto makers. No one in America knew how to make vanadium steel so Ford financed and set up a steel mill. As a result, the only cars in the world to utilize vanadium steel over ...

It was on October 1,1908, just about a month before William Howard Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan for the Presidency of the United States, that the Ford Motor Company unveiled the little machine that many historians think of as the most significant automobile of all time -- the 1908-1927 Ford Model T.

Henry Ford called it the Model T-hardly surprising since Henry had already run through the alphabet from A to S, though a lot of letters were skipped along the way. It was built only as a touring car at first, but within a few months a number of other body styles would be added to the line. Strictly a utilitarian vehicle, the Ford took no beauty prizes, and it won no speed contests.

Still, its 22-horsepower, four-cylinder engine could propel the 1,200-pound car to a top speed of between 35 and 40 miles an hour, adequate for the mostly unpaved roads of the era. Cooling was by the primitive thermo-siphon method, lubrication via a splash system. The gas tank nestled beneath the front seat, its fuel being fed to the engine by the force of gravity. Meanwhile, the driver shifted the two-speed planetary transmission with foot pedals. The car didn't even have demountable rims at first, though in 1919 they became available for an extra $25.

Widely known as the "Tin Lizzie," the little Ford became the butt of a thousand jokes. But it was this machine, more than all the others combined, that was responsible for putting America -- and ultimately the world -- on wheels. On the strength of the Model T, Ford's yearly production would increase from 10,000 cars in 1908 to nearly two million 15 years later. As early as 1913, in fact, Ford was literally outproducing all the rest of the nation's automakers put together!
On the next page, you will learn about the creation of the Ford Model T.