The Model T and the Masses — The Revolution of Mass Production

For a while after the car that ran on gasoline was born, the automobile was still something from a distant world. Assembled one by one by the hands of craftsmen, cars were terribly expensive, and only a very small handful of the wealthy are said to have been able to own one. The main figures of the road were still horses and carriages, and the car was a symbol of wealth, a toy for enthusiasts. The man who repainted this scene from the roots up was in America. Henry Ford. His question was just one—how could a car be made that ordinary working people could buy? That answer went on to change the very shape of twentieth-century society.

Ending the Age of Building One at a Time

At the start of the twentieth century, countless automobile makers were crowded together in America. Yet most of them were in the business of selling a small number of cars at a high price. With a way of building where craftsmen fitted, polished, and assembled each part one by one, both the time and the cost per car were great, and the price stayed stubbornly high. The car was, after all, a luxury.

Henry Ford turned his back on this common sense. What he envisioned was not a single car for the special rich, but a car that a person working on a farm or sweating in a factory could obtain. For that, the car had to be made ‘sturdy,’ ‘easy to understand,’ and ‘cheap.’ The Model T, announced in 1908, was a car that gave form to exactly this idea. Stripped of complex ornament, given a sturdiness that endured rough roads, and easy to repair—it was a car that chose practicality over flash, so it is said.

The Model T sold well from the moment it was announced, yet even so its price was in the world of several hundred dollars, still not something just anyone could buy with ease. What truly let Ford change the world was not the design of the car itself alone, but that he remade the very mechanism of the factory—the matter of ‘how to make it.‘

The Moving Assembly Line — The Car Comes to the Person

In the factories until then, a half-built car was set in one place, and the craftsmen moved around it, attaching parts. With this method, the time spent walking here and there, and the trouble of searching for parts, inevitably piled up. What Ford’s factory devised was to turn that idea on its head. The half-built car itself was moved slowly along a belt, while the person stayed at their own station, repeating only the task they were in charge of—the so-called moving assembly line.

In 1913, when this mechanism was fully introduced at the Highland Park plant, the speed of production is said to have changed dramatically. The long time once needed to assemble a single car was, through the introduction and refinement of the line, said to have been greatly shortened. In the same span of time, far more cars could now be made. As the speed of making rose, the cost per car fell. And the cost that fell was reflected directly into the price.

After the line was introduced, the price of the Model T kept falling. What had been in the several-hundred-dollar range at first was lowered year after year, until at last it is said to have reached a price within reach. When it grew cheaper, more people bought it. When it sold in great numbers, it could be made in still greater quantity, and made cheaper still—Ford invented the very mechanism that turned this virtuous circle.

The Five-Dollar Day, and the Worker Who Rode a Car

Ford’s revolution reached beyond the factory as well. In 1914, Ford is said to have declared that he would pay the people working in his factory a five-dollar day. This was a level said to be about double the going wage of the time, and it greatly astonished the world. Why pay such a high wage on purpose—there are various views on his aim.

For one, it is said there was the purpose of preventing people from quickly quitting the monotonous, grueling line work, and of holding skilled workers to the factory. If turnover fell, the trouble of teaching new people was spared, and as a result production grew stable. And another, often spoken of, is the view that the workers who earned a good wage would themselves in time become the customers who bought the cars they made. Whether it was truly intended that far is a matter of debate, but it is certain that the rise of wages and the spread of the car advanced hand in hand in the same age.

And so the Model T, by the time production ended, is said to have been built in some fifteen million units, becoming a monument among mass-produced cars. The automobile was no longer the toy of a portion of the wealthy, but turned into a tool that working people held as a matter of course. Roads were paved, gas stations lined up, and people’s movement was rebuilt around the car—here was the very first push of the great wave later called motorization. Yet to Ford’s way, which swept everything aside with cheapness, a challenger raising an entirely different idea would in time appear. The car would change into something that could not be spoken of by price alone.