The Ford Model T

When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, the automobile was a luxury toy for the rich. Ford's ambition was the opposite: a sturdy, simple, affordable car for the ordinary American. The Model T — the "Tin Lizzie" — delivered exactly that, and over the next nineteen years Ford sold more than fifteen million of them, a production record that stood for nearly half a century. It was less a single product than the vehicle that made the United States a nation of drivers.

The car's real revolution happened on the factory floor. In 1913 Ford installed the first moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant in Michigan, breaking car-building into small repeated tasks performed by workers as the chassis moved past them. The time to assemble a Model T fell from more than twelve hours to about ninety minutes, and the price dropped accordingly — from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by the mid-1920s, within reach of the very workers who built it.

Ford paired the line with a startling labor policy. In 1914 he doubled wages to five dollars a day, partly to curb the brutal turnover the monotonous work produced and partly on the theory that well-paid workers could buy the cars they made. The move made Ford famous as a champion of mass prosperity, though his factories were also sites of harsh discipline and, later, fierce resistance to unions.

The Model T and the assembly line together defined twentieth-century industry. Mass production spread from cars to nearly every consumer good, reshaping work, wages, and daily life. The automobile remade the American landscape itself — suburbs, highways, gas stations, and motels all followed from the simple fact that, after the Model T, the average family could go almost anywhere.