Ford Model T: The Tin Lizzie That Put the World on Wheels

A Car for the Many

At the start of the twentieth century, the automobile was a rich person's toy. Cars were built slowly by skilled craftsmen, often one at a time, and each model needed careful hand-fitting of its parts. They broke down easily, they were expensive to repair and they cost far more than an ordinary worker earned in a year. Most people still travelled on foot, by horse, by bicycle or by train.

Henry Ford wanted to change that. His company, the Ford Motor Company, had been founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1903, and it had already sold several models named with letters of the alphabet, such as the Model A, Model N and Model S. Ford's dream was a car that was strong, simple and cheap enough for a farmer or a factory worker to buy and keep running. The result was the Model T, which the company produced from October 1, 1908, to May 26, 1927. It is generally regarded as the first automobile that the middle class could truly afford, and it changed how people in the United States, and soon in many other countries, lived, worked and travelled.

Designing the Model T

The Model T was not the work of Henry Ford alone. It was mainly designed by three engineers: Joseph A. Galamb, Eugene Farkas and Childe Harold Wills. Galamb and Farkas were both immigrants from Hungary. The team worked in a small experimental room at Ford's Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, the factory where the first Model Ts were built.

Their goal was not speed or luxury but toughness and ease of repair. Many American roads at the time were unpaved, rutted and muddy, especially in the countryside. So the Model T was built high off the ground, which let it pass over bumps and through deep mud. Its frame was light, and it rode on flexible springs that allowed the wheels to follow uneven ground.

Stronger Steel

One of the clever choices was the use of vanadium steel, an alloy that was stronger and lighter than the ordinary steels most carmakers were using. Ford had become interested in vanadium steel after seeing parts made from it on a European race car. Using it allowed key parts of the Model T to be lighter without becoming weaker, which helped the car survive years of hard use.

Under the Hood

The Model T had a four-cylinder petrol engine that produced about 20 horsepower. That is tiny by modern standards, but it was enough to carry a family at a top speed of roughly 40 to 45 miles per hour (about 64 to 72 kilometres per hour). Many parts were simple enough that owners could fix them at home with basic tools, and replacement parts were cheap and easy to find because so many cars used the same ones.

How to Drive a Tin Lizzie

Driving a Model T was very different from driving a modern car, and learning it took practice. There was no gas pedal on the floor. Instead, the driver controlled the engine's speed with a hand lever on the steering column, and a second lever adjusted the timing of the spark that ignited the fuel.

On the floor were three pedals. The left pedal worked the two forward gears: pressed down, it put the car in low gear; released, it put the car in high gear. The middle pedal engaged reverse, and the right pedal was the brake. A tall lever beside the driver acted as a parking brake and also helped select neutral or high gear. The gearbox itself was a two-speed planetary transmission, a design in which gears stay constantly meshed, which made shifting easier for beginners than the clashing gearboxes of many other cars of the time.

Early Model Ts had no electric starter. The driver had to turn a hand crank at the front of the car to start the engine, which required care, because a crank that kicked back could hurt the driver's arm. An electric starter became available on the Model T only in its later years, starting in 1919.

The fuel tank of most Model Ts sat under the front seat, and fuel flowed to the engine by gravity rather than with a pump. On a very steep hill, with the tank low, fuel could stop reaching the engine. Some drivers solved this problem in a surprising way: they turned around and drove up the hill backwards, since reverse was also a powerful low gear.

The Moving Assembly Line

The Model T is famous not only as a car but as the product that transformed manufacturing. At first it was built in a fairly traditional way, with workers bringing parts to a car that stayed in one place. Demand was so high that Ford needed a much faster method.

In 1910 the company opened a huge new factory in Highland Park, Michigan. There, Ford's managers and engineers experimented with breaking the work into small, simple steps. They borrowed ideas from other industries, including the overhead conveyors that moved carcasses through meatpacking plants. In 1913 they introduced a moving assembly line: the car's frame was pulled along past a series of workers, and each worker performed one task, such as fitting a part or tightening certain bolts, again and again.

The results were astonishing. Building a chassis, the frame with its engine and running gear, had taken more than twelve hours of work. On the moving line it took about an hour and a half. The key ideas behind this success were:

• Interchangeable parts: every part was made precisely enough to fit any car without hand-filing or adjusting.
• Division of labour: complex work was split into many short, repeated tasks.
• Continuous flow: the work moved to the worker instead of the worker moving to the work.
• Standardisation: the Model T changed little from year to year, so tools and machines did not need constant redesign.

Falling Prices and the Five-Dollar Day

Mass production lowered the cost of each car, and Ford passed much of the savings on to buyers. The price of a Model T dropped from $780 in 1910 to just $290 in 1924. Each price cut brought in more customers, and more customers allowed even bigger production runs and further savings.

The assembly line had a downside, though. The work was fast, tiring and monotonous, and many employees quit after short periods. In January 1914 Ford responded with a headline-making offer: the Five-Dollar Day, which roughly doubled the usual daily pay for factory workers and came with a shorter, eight-hour working day. Thousands of people lined up for jobs. Higher pay helped Ford keep experienced workers, and it also meant that many of the people building Model Ts could eventually afford to buy one themselves. Part of the extra money, however, came with conditions, and a company department visited workers' homes to check how they lived, a practice that was criticised as intrusive.

Any Colour, as Long as It's Black

The Model T is linked to one of the most famous lines in business history. In his 1922 memoir, Henry Ford wrote that customers could have a car painted any colour they wanted, so long as it was black. The remark sums up his approach: offering one standard product made it possible to build it faster and sell it cheaper.

In fact, the Model T was not always black. In its first years it was sold in colours such as grey, green, blue and red. From around 1914, however, black became the only choice for most of the car's production run, largely because the black paint used at the time dried quickly, which suited the speed of the assembly line. Colours returned only near the end of the car's life, when competition had become stronger.

The Model T Around the World

Sales grew at a pace no car had seen before. By the time production ended, more than 15 million Model Ts had been made, a record for a single model that lasted for decades. By 1918, about half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts.

The car was also built outside the United States. Ford of Canada produced it for Canada and for markets across the British Empire, and Model Ts were assembled in Britain at Trafford Park near Manchester from 1911, as well as in other countries. For many people around the world, the Model T was the first car they ever saw or rode in.

Owners used it in all sorts of ways. Besides the familiar open touring car, the Model T came in versions such as the two-seat runabout, the closed coupe and the sedan. In 1917 Ford introduced the Model TT, a stronger truck version. Farmers adapted Model Ts to pump water, saw wood and pull loads, and companies sold kits to turn them into small tractors or snowmobiles. Its popular nicknames, the Tin Lizzie and the flivver, became part of everyday American English.

Changing Society

The impact of the Model T reached far beyond the factory. Before cheap cars, farm families could be isolated for long stretches, especially when roads were bad. With a Model T they could get to town, sell their crops, visit doctors and send their children to larger schools. City workers could live farther from their jobs, which helped suburbs grow.

As millions of cars took to the roads, Americans demanded better ones. Governments began building paved highways, and petrol stations, repair garages, roadside restaurants and motels spread across the country. Tourism by car became possible for ordinary families. The car also changed courtship, leisure and the shape of towns, which increasingly were planned around streets for motor traffic.

The way the Model T was made had an even wider influence. Mass production on moving assembly lines spread to other carmakers and then to the manufacture of radios, refrigerators, washing machines and countless other products. The term Fordism came to describe this whole system of standardised products, mass production and relatively high wages that allow workers to become customers.

The End of an Era

By the mid-1920s the Model T was showing its age. Rivals, especially Chevrolet, part of General Motors, offered cars with more comfort, more power, a choice of colours and new styling every year. They also made it easier to buy a car on credit. Many buyers who could now afford a car wanted something more modern than Ford's simple, unchanging design, and Model T sales began to fall.

Henry Ford finally agreed to replace it. On May 26, 1927, the fifteen millionth Model T left the assembly line, and production soon stopped while Ford's factories were retooled for a new car, which reused an old name: the Model A.

Lesser-Known Facts About the Model T

• The steering wheel was on the left side. Because the Model T was so widespread, it helped make left-hand steering the standard in the United States, where traffic drives on the right.
• The engine's ignition used a magneto built into the flywheel, which produced electricity as the engine turned.
• Ford sold the Model T through a large network of dealers, so owners in small towns could find parts and help nearby.
• Because so much was standard, owners shared tips and repair tricks, and countless jokes about the Tin Lizzie appeared in newspapers and songs of the period.
• In 1999 an international jury of motoring journalists and experts named the Model T the Car of the Century.

Today, thousands of Model Ts still survive. Enthusiasts' clubs keep them running, and people can see them in museums such as The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. More than a century after it first appeared, the Model T remains a symbol of how one well-designed product, built in a new way, can reshape everyday life.