The revolutionary Model T changed America and the world. Then it almost ruined Ford.
Mark PhelanIn a high-security room on the third floor of a factory in Detroit’s bustling Milwaukee Junction industrial neighborhood in 1907, six men and a 14-year-old boy changed the world.
In less than a year — Oct. 1, 1908 — the first Ford Model T would roll out of the plant on Piquette Avenue. The factory turns 120 years old in 2024.
The Model T wasn’t just a new vehicle. It was the fulfillment of Henry Ford’s lifelong quest to produce affordable, reliable vehicles, thus transforming the automobile from a rich man’s toy — and cars were nearly exclusively for men in 1908, despite Henry's wife Clara Ford’s penchant for driving her personal electric car around Detroit — to transportation for the masses.
Ford’s creation “put automobile ownership within reach of people of average means and as a result accelerated America’s transition from a rural to an urban society,” the late Tony Swan, a longtime automotive journalist, wrote in Car and Driver magazine in 2017. There were more than 1,000 automakers in the U.S. when the Model T debuted to acclaim for its advanced technology and $850 price, which Ford would work to reduce.
A car for everyone
Within a decade, Ford would be the U.S. sales leader and more than half the cars in the world would be Model Ts.
“Henry Ford’s vision all along was a car for the masses. All Ford’s competitors built cars for rich people. Henry’s early years in (the) industry were evolutionary steps to make a car that was better, stronger and more affordable,” said Steve Shotwell, a trustee of the Piquette Avenue Plant Museum, which has restored the factory from near ruin, re-creating everything from Henry’s office to the “secret experimental room” where the Model T was developed.
“Henry Ford did what can only be done once,” said Matt Anderson, transportation curator of the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn. “He turned the automobile from a plaything for the rich into everyday transportation for the masses.”
The Motor City’s origin story
It is hard to imagine Detroit before it became the Motor City.
The city, now synonymous worldwide with cars and the auto industry, was a hotbed of industry and invention at the dawn of the 20th Century.
Proximity to raw materials — iron and copper mining in northern Michigan; steelmaking; seemingly endless hardwood forests throughout a state that's only significant white settlements in the early 1800s were in Detroit and Mackinac City — and major transportation routes — initially the Great Lakes and Erie Canal, later, rail lines knitting the whole country together — made Detroit the center of manufacturing.
The city was a hub for American stove making, horse-drawn wagons, ships, bicycles and rail cars in the 19th century, said William Pringle IV, Detroit Historical Museum curator. It is hard to estimate numbers of units built before the departments of Commerce and Labor were created, but manufacturing grew gradually over the course of a the 19th century, culminating in the explosion of auto industry jobs in first half of the 20th century.
The 3.5 square miles of Milwaukee Junction contained 14 auto assembly plants — including brands like Cadillac, Hupmobile, Detroit Electric and Dodge Bros. — and 25 auto parts plants. A "beltline railway" existed to carry parts from one factory to another.
By the dawn of the 20th century, Detroit was a magnet for tinkerers and entrepreneurs.
“People here were thinking about the process of how to do work more efficiently,” Pringle said. “It’s a mindset. You go from being a blacksmith to a machinist. It’s the industrial thought process of the collective.
“They were working to make more devices, faster and better. It was a hive of invention”
Henry Ford’s A Team and their secret room
Henry Ford, born to an Irish immigrant and his wife in 1863 in Michigan's Wayne County (the same county that is today home to Ford headquarters in Dearborn), and five young minds developed the Model T in the 700-square-foot “secret experimental room” in a corner of the Piquette Avenue Plant:
- Charles “Cast iron Charlie” Sorensen, 26, known as the foundry wizard for the Model T’s unique engine block.
- C.J. “Smitty” Smith, early 20s, machinist and driver.
- Edward “Spider” Huff, 28, self-taught electrical engineer, inventor of the flywheel magneto. As steam-punk as that component sounds, it was a breakthrough in vehicle reliability.
- Joe Galamb, 26, draftsman.
- C.H. Wills, 29, metallurgist and design engineer.
They built every part of the vehicle by hand, pioneering new technologies that made the T more durable, reliable and affordable than anything before it.
Security was almost literally air tight: The room’s wood walls were fitted together in tongue-and-groove construction to ensure there were no gaps for prying eyes to see the engineering revolution taking shape within.
According to Shotwell, the trustee of the Piquette Avenue Plant Museum, only seven people were allowed into the room and there were only two ways to get in: "A large, double garage door and another regular entry door" that went into the smaller drafting area.
"Henry defined that the double door needed to be wide and tall enough for a car (a Model N at that time) to go through," Shotwell said in an email. "He also stated to put a large lock on the door."
Fellow trustee Mike Skinner said rather than quoting a particular number of people who would have been allowed into the secret room, he chooses to say entry was "very limited."
"I do not use the number seven since there is some evidence that James Couzens (an early investor and future mayor and congressman) visited the room," Skinner said in an email. "With 11% of the company stock he certainly would have been allowed to enter and see the progress on the 'universal' car. I am sure that Paul Gray, board member and owner of 10.5% of the shares through his late father, John Simpson Gray (first company president who died on July 6, 1906) would be another person who would have been allowed to enter the room."
Charles Hyde, a retired Wayne State professor, said in an email about the room that he was "very deeply involved in the planning efforts to 'reproduce'" it at the Piquette Avenue Plant Museum.
"Because everything about what happened there was considered 'top secret,' we don't know a great deal about how the secret room operated," Hyde said. "I know that other than Henry Ford, only a handful of Henry's closest associates ... had access, along with a couple of draftsmen and a few machinists to make prototype parts within the room. The room was definitely locked and I suspect Henry Ford had the only key and he was always there when any work was being done."
One for-sure entrant was Henry’s 14-year-old son Edsel, who joined the adults after school, learning the family trade and gaining insights that would serve him years later, when Henry grew erratic and Edsel stepped in as president of the company from 1919-1943 to help modernize Ford and make the company a cornerstone of what then President Franklin D. Roosevelt would call “the Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II.
Built in 1904, the Piquette Avenue plant produced 8,729 cars in 1906. Henry used a letter for every model he thought up and though most did not get built, several different models were produced leading up to the Model T, production of which would lead to the development of a sprawling complex that became a model for modern manufacturing.
The Piquette Avenue plant is now a museum, home to 65 cars and detailed recreations of Henry’s office and the secret experimental room. A conjoined building, which housed a Studebaker plant for decades, is being remodeled into luxury residences as the neighborhood undergoes a reinvigoration with fresh investment.
What made the Model T a hit?
The Model T bristled with features that made it superior to other vehicles being built at the time:
- Light weight: At just 1,200 pounds, it weighed hundreds of pounds less than the competition, allowing it to navigate ruts and deep mud before paved roads became common. The weight also enabled the T’s efficient manufacturing process.
- Vanadium steel: The advanced alloy made key parts lighter, stronger and more durable.
- One-piece engine block: This design breakthrough, still in use today, made engines more durable. Its removable cylinder head also made cars easier to service.
- Flexible frame: Reduced breakage by insulating the engine’s moving parts from the impact of rocks, and rough unpaved roads.
- Magneto flywheel: That elegant design that generated electricity (to four engine coils, one for each cylinder) more reliably and consistently.
- Planetary transmission: It made the car easier to drive. The planetary transmission gets its name from the fact that it had two small gears — one for first, the other for second gear — inside a larger gear that drove the wheels.
In addition, Ford moved the steering wheel from the vehicle’s right to left with the Model T, a recognition of the fact that Americans drove on the right side of the road, at a time when most cars were developed in Europe, where driving on the left side was still common. The relocated wheel moved passenger entry and exit away from traffic and to the sidewalk.
Henry was so confident of that feature that early Model Ts didn’t have a door on the driver side: The driver slid across to the steering wheel and other controls.
Ford built right-hand-drive Model Ts for countries that required them, making it the first ambidextrous car.
A Model T for every purpose
The Model T’s driving controls were unique, different from anything before or after. That was neither a positive nor negative at the time, since almost nobody knew how to drive. Learning adds a level of challenge and fun to driving a Model T today, however.
Early Model Ts had a canvas roof, but the lineup quickly expanded to include America’s first pickup, snowmobile modifications for the Post Office, delivery vans and more. The Model T was ubiquitous in popular culture, regularly featured with — and comically destroyed by — favorites from the Keystone Cops to Laurel and Hardy.
Creative owners used Model Ts to power everything from logging equipment to sheep-shearing machines, connecting the cars' wheels to belts that powered their tools.
Contrary to legend, Model Ts came in colors other than black. Ford initially built them in red, green and blue. Black joined the palette a couple of years into production. It became the only color available from 1914 until 1926 or ’27, late in the Model T’s run when demand was waning.
The original 'Gigafactory'
The Model T’s success required a new factory, and a new kind of manufacturing.
Henry didn’t want to pay Detroit taxes, so he bought farmland four miles north of the Piquette Avenue plant, in Highland Park, a rustic enclave of Detroit.
“Henry couldn’t have built the Highland Park plant in Milwaukee Junction if he wanted to,” said Detroit History Museum automotive and industrial curator Dave Marchioni. “The whole neighborhood wasn’t big enough.” They needed more space to build more cars.
The bigger factory opened in 1910, producing 34,858 Model Ts that year — an 82% increase from Piquette’s output. The car’s base price fell from $525 in 1913 to $440 in 1914, $390 in 1915 and $345 in 1916, thanks to the moving assembly line and other improvements in efficiency.
More cars, better pay
Henry believed he’d perfected the car, but the production process was ripe for improvement. He and his young guns turned their attention to creating the moving assembly line, which revolutionized factory work by carrying the vehicle past work stations, each of which had a carefully defined task. Parts came by conveyor belts overhead.
"Beginning in August 1913, Ford production managers experimented with various methods for moving vehicles along the assembly line," Anderson said. "They tried pulling chassis along with a rope, they tried pushing them on the car’s own wheels, and they tried a chain-driven system. These experiments overlapped, so different systems might be in use on different lines. Ford settled on the chain-driven system in early 1914."
The time to build a Model T dropped from 12 ½ hours to 90 minutes. Production leapt 50% to 328,933 cars when the moving assembly line was installed in 1914. Highland Park’s output peaked at 2,090,338 in 1923.
Ford raised pay to an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914. The company did it to stop other factories from stealing its best workers, but the move was a step toward creating the middle class: Workers who could afford to own the products they built. Despite those innovations, Henry Ford fought to keep unions out of his factories for years. He didn't accept the United Auto Workers until June 1941, when — under legal pressure and at at then-grown Edsel's urging — he made peace, beginning a relationship most recently evidenced in the latest contract negotiated last fall.
Better pay sparked a massive migration from rural areas of the country to Detroit’s vaunted factory jobs in the 1920s. A boom in residential hotels followed, with workers sometimes renting bed in shifts timed to complement their factory schedules.
It was a boomtown atmosphere that saw Detroit’s population triple from under 500,000 in 1910 to 1.5 million in 1930.
Henry’s blunder
The Model T made Henry Ford one of the wealthiest people in the world, though it is hard to get actual estimates of his wealth. But his conviction that it was the ultimate car nearly destroyed Ford Motor. While other automakers learned from Ford and created new technologies of their own, Henry kept the T in production through 1927, adding features like an electric starter only reluctantly.
Continuing to make the same vehicle in the face of competitors' ceaseless innovation was an inconceivable miscalculation by modern standards. Imagine if Steve Jobs had walked off the stage after unveiling the iPhone 1 in 2007: “That’s it. My work here is done.”
After 19 years in production and 15 million sales, Ford finally replaced the Model T with a new car from a new factory, the River Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, 12 miles from Highland Park. It began building the Model A in 1928, incorporating nearly 20 years of advances in engineering and automaking.
The Highland Park plant produced tractors for decades, with a break for military materiel, including 1,690 M4A3 Sherman tanks in World War II. The sprawling complex is in private hands today.
Ford’s River Rouge plant remains in operation, today building pickups including the F-150 and the electric F-150 Lightning. Ford built 296,730 trucks there in 2022. The automaker employs 173,000 worldwide.