Auto's - Automotive History: Ford Model T

Automotive History: Ford Model T

*The major myth that persists about Henry Ford's Model T is that it represents the "invention" of the automobile. It doesn't. Nor is it true that Ford invented the moving assembly line. The credit goes to William C. "Pa" Klann who got the idea from watching operations at a slaughter house in Chicago in 1913. The Model T is, however, the car that put America on wheels and the product that perfected the use of the moving assembly line to an art form.

*October 1, 2008 marked the 100th anniversary of the first Model T rolling out of Ford's Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. That first year Ford produced more than 10,000 vehicles, each hand assembled. When he installed the moving assembly line, the time needed to put together one Model T went from 12 hours and eight minutes to just 1 hour 33 minutes. In 1914 Ford produced 308,162 cars, more than all of the other automakers in the Unites States combined - all 299 of them. By 1927, the last year the Model T was produced, the company completed one vehicle every 24 seconds.

 

*The Model T boasts the longest production run of any model except the Volkswagen Beetle. For $850, buyers drove away a mechanical innovation equipped with a four-cylinder, four-cycle, 20 horsepower engine. The advance 1908 catalog described the wheels as "artillery wood type" with extra long hubs. The wheel base was 100 inches with 56 inch tread (60 inch available for drivers on "southern roads.")

*To anyone taking the wheel of a Model T today, the controls are baffling. The original models were hand cranked, although an electric starter was added after 1919. If crank handle wasn't appropriately cupped in the palm, a twisted wrist or broken thumb usually resulted if the engine kicked back. A wire to operate the choke came out of the bottom of the radiator. The operator used it with the left hand while cranking with the right.

*The Model T has three pedals with two levers on the steering column and another on the floor to the driver's left. The feats of memory required for their operation is beyond many modern drivers. If the floor lever is upright, the Model T is in neutral. If the lever is pushed forward and the outside left pedal is up, you're in second. (If the pedal is depressed, you're in first.) Take that same lever all the way back and it becomes the emergency brake.

*The middle pedal activates reverse, while the one on the far right is the brake. The gas is the right lever on the column with the remaining lever being the spark advance. And, with a kind of manic genius, in moments of confusion, stomp all three pedals down and the vehicle stops because the transmission bands lock the drive train. The brakes are considerably less than responsive and a Model T accelerates sluggishly. They were built for rutted dirt roads and that's still where the famous "Tin Lizzy" delivers its best performance.

*By the end of the production run Ford made approximately 15 million Model Ts in multiple configurations - roadster, touring, coupe, sport coupe, sedan, pickup, roadster pickup, and flatbed. The use of lightweight vanadium steel with three times the tensile strength of the conventional steel of the day gave the Model T a degree of durability that has carried it through almost a century of life. While it was replaced by the Model A in 1927, the Model T never fully disappeared from the American roadways. Somewhere, every day in the United States, someone takes a beloved old Model T for a drive. They remain well-loved and cranky, magnificently eccentric, and epic in their historic impact.