by Vaclav Smil
Four years later, Michelin tires were on Jenatzy s vehicle when it broke the 100 km/h barrier—and a year before that, the company adopted Bibendum, the tire-bulging Michelin Man, as its symbol. Once the early cars shed their carriage form and began to reach higher speeds, the detachable tire had a new huge market. The company s notable pre-WWI innovations included the dual wheel for buses and trucks that allowed heavier loads (in 1908), and the removable steel wheel that made it possible to use a ready-to-ride spare in 1913. That same year, Michelin released the first detailed map of France that was specifically designed with motorists in mind (today their maps cover all continents). Safer rides were made possible by replacing band brakes with drum brakes that were introduced by Renault in 1902. In December of the same year Frederick William Lanchester (1868–1946) patented disk brakes, whose clamps hold onto both sides of a disk that is attached to the wheel hub. But as these brakes required more pedal pressure to operate, they became common only with the power-assisted braking that became standard on many American cars during the 1960s.
Yet another important improvement to increase the safety of motoring arrived in 1913 with William Burton’s (1865–1914) introduction of thermal cracking of crude oil, initially at the Standard Oil of Indiana’s Whiting refinery (Sung 1945). This procedure was aimed at increasing the yield of gasoline in refining in order to meet the rapidly rising demand brought by mass-produced cars. Its product was the fuel that contained only about 40% volatile compounds, in contrast to almost purely volatile natural gasolines that were used since the beginning of the automotive era and that were a frequent cause of accidental flare-ups during hot summer months, particularly in early engines that relied on hot-tube ignition. Still, the less volatile fuel alone was not good enough to eliminate violent knocking that came with higher compression. That is why all pre-WWI engines worked with compression ratios no higher than 4.3:1 and why the ratio began to rise to modern levels (between 8 and 10) only after the introduction of leaded gasoline.
Perhaps no single achievement conveys more impressively the early advances in automotive design than the improvements in the key engine parameter, its mass/power ratio. I already noted that when Daimler and Maybach set out to develop a new engine, one of their key goals was to make it considerably lighter than Otto s four-stroke gas-fueled machine that weighed about 270 g/W. By 1890, the best DMG engine was down to about 40 g/W; in 1901, Maybach’s famous first Mercedes weighed 8.5 g/W and Ford’s Model T engine needed eventually less than 5 g/W (figure 3.14). As shown in figure 3.14, the mass/power ratio continued to decline after WWI before it stabilized around 1 g/W for typical passenger cars, which means that about 98% of the entire 1880–1960 decrease took place before 1913.
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the car was in many ways a rapidly maturing machine. Looking back, Flower and Jones (1981) noted that the performance of faster cars available by 1911 was comparable not just to that of a 1931 model but even to a typical car built immediately after WWII. There is a perfectly analogical case of tungsten-filament incandescent light bulbs, whose design has remained remarkably conserved ever since 1913. Being a much more complex artifact, a car engine had seen more improvements than a tungsten filament, but they all took place without any radical change to its basic design and to its mode of operation. But there had to be a fairly radical cut in price if car ownership were to diffuse among average urban and rural families.
In this respect one car will always have a very special place in the annals of automotive history: Ford’s Model T deserves this position because of its low price, remarkably sturdy construction, and reliable service, the combination that had a profound socioeconomic impact. And the latter effect refers not only to the ways the car was promoted, marketed, and used but also to the novel way it was made. Ford’s Model T was a key catalyst for the development of modern auto industry, and below I examine not only its technical parameters but also its wider impacts.
FIGURE 3.14. Rapid decline of mass/power ratios of automotive engines during the first three decades of their development was followed by a slower rate of improvement after WWI. Plotted from a wide variety of engine specifications.
Ford’s Model
The infatuation with machines that led Otto from grocery sales to four-stroke engines was also the beginning of Henry Ford’s (1863–1947) remarkable achievement as the world’s unrivaled producer of passenger cars (figure 3.15). Ford saw his first self-propelled vehicle, a wheeled steam engine moving to a new worksite, in 1876, and subsequently he admired the newly introduced Otto machines and experimented with small engines. While working at the Edison Illuminating Co. in Detroit, where he was the chief engineer, he build his first motorized vehicle, a small quadricycle, in 1896 (Ford 1922). But his entrepreneurial beginnings were not particularly auspicious. In 1898 he became the chief engineer and manager of Detroit Automobile Co., which was, after he left it, reconstituted in 1902 as Cadillac. His second, short-lived company did not produce any cars.
FIGURE 3.15. Henry Ford’s portrait taken in 1934. Library of Congress photograph (LC-USZ62-78374).
Third time lucky, Ford Motor Co. (FMC) was set up in 1903, with Alexander Malcolmson, a Detroit coal dealer, as the principal investor (Brinkley 2003). The company was at first quite successful with its models A and B, but its later upscale models—including Model K, Gentleman s Roadster, able to go 112 km/h but retailing for $2,800 (FMC 1908)—were not selling well. Model N introduced in 1906 was the first car aimed at a mass market, a goal that was finally achieved with Model T, which was launched on October 1, 1908. This was an unabashedly programmatic car, a vehicle that was intended, in Ford’s own words, for the great multitude, but one that was built of good-quality materials and sold at a price affordable for anybody with a good salary. Unlike so many previous, and too many subsequent, advertising claims produced by the car industry, these statements were quite accurate. And unlike many new cars of the 20th century s first decade, this was a resolutely down-market vehicle designed to fill a large waiting market niche.
A still westward-moving America needed a car not just for urban residents but for settlers on vast expanses of newly cropped land, which is why Ford, himself a former farmer and the man with life-long interests in land, saw it as a farmer s car. Hence, he gave it a generous clearance to make it go not just along muddy roads (at that time fewer than 10% of all U.S. roads were surfaced) but if need be also across a ploughed field, and the combination of the simplest design (so any machine-minded farmer could fix it) and the best materials. Although the wide-tracked wheels, high seats, and small, initially wooden body (the combination that led to nicknaming the car a spider) conveyed a sense of overall fragility, this impression was false.
Heat-treated vanadium steel gave the car ruggedness that is amply attested by contemporaneous photographs of Model Ts carrying and pulling some heavy loads and running all kinds of attachments. Ford stressed this quality in his advertisements, claiming that “the Model T is built entirely of the best materials obtainable … inaxles, shafts, springs, gears, in fact a vanadium steel car is one evidence of superiority” (FMC 1909). The first water-cooled, four-cylinder engines installed in Model Ts had capacity of 2,760 cm3, ran at 1,600 rpm, rated about 15 kW, and (including the transmission) weighed about 12 g/W. The touring version of the car weighed 545 kg and could reach speeds up to 65 km/h.
Of the five versions introduced during the first model year, the touring car for five passengers was, and subsequently remained, by far the most popular, while the coupe, looking much like a top hat, continued to be produced in only small numbers (figure 3.16). Ts were the first Fords with the left-hand drive (a logical feature for easy passing), and none of the early models had any battery: headlamps were lit by carbide gas, running and rear lights by oil, a magneto produced electricity for the four spark plugs, and starting was by a hand crank. Interestingly, the company s catalog reserved the greatest praise for springs that “no conceivable accident could possibly affec
t” and that made it “one of the easiest riding cars ever built” (FMC 1909).
FIGURE 3.16. Four Model Ts (clockwise starting from the upper left corner) as they appeared in the company s catalog (FMC 1909): touring car, by far the most popular version of the vehicle; roadster with a vertical windshield; a town car; and a coupe that looks much like a top hat.
Mass production was the company s strategy from the very beginning. The very first Model T catalog boasted that Ford had already worked the “quantity production system” that allowed it to build “a hundred cars a day, a system whereby overhead expense is reduced to minimum … We know how to build a lot of cars at a minimum cost without sacrificing quality” (FMC 1909). But that was just a prelude. A much more efficient system, introduced for the first time at Highland Park factory in 1913, has been described, analyzed, praised, and condemned many times (Flink 1988; Ling 1990; Batchelor 1994; Brinkley 2003). Whatever the verdict, the system was widely copied, fine-tuned, and adjusted, and it remained the dominant means of large-scale automobile production until the combination of widespread robotization of many basic tasks and changes on assembly lines that were pioneered by Japanese automakers began its transformation during the 1970s (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990).
The leading goal of Ford s assembly system was to do away with the artisanal mode of car manufacturing that most manufacturers relied on even after 1905. That arrangement saw small groups of workers assembling entire vehicles from parts they brought themselves (or which were carted or trucked to them) from assorted stores and whose fit they had to often adjust. As Ford expanded his production, this form of operation eventually required more than 100 chassis stations that were placed in two rows stretching over nearly 200 m, an arrangement that created logistic problems and floor congestion. The other option, whereby fitters and mechanics were walking around the assembly hall in order to perform their specialized tasks on each vehicle, was no more effective. As a result, productivity was low, with most European manufacturers requiring 1.5–2 workers to make one car per year, but Ford was able to make nearly 13 cars a year per worker already in 1904.
Ford’s quest for high labor productivity relied on the use of identical parts to be used in identical ways in assembling identical-looking vehicles by performing repetitive identical tasks—and eventually doing so along endless moving belts whose speed could be adjusted to the point where rapid assembly did not compromise the desired quality of construction. This manufacturing process actually began at EMF Co. in 1911 when two of Ford s former employees, W. E. Flanders and Max Wollering, installed a mechanized assembly line to speed up chassis production. Chassis were first pushed, and then pulled, by cables actuated by electric motors, and Ford’s first moving line, installed at Highland Park in 1913, was hardly more impressive: just 45 m long, with some 140 assemblers working on five or six chassis (Lewchuk 1989).
There was only a marginal increase in labor productivity at Ford during the early part of 1913, but then the idea of putting labor along a moving line began to bring the expected profit. The rope-drawn chassis assembly line cut the time from 12 hours and 30 minutes in October to 2 hours and 40 minutes in December (Flink 1988). The next year, the introduction of chain-driven conveyor cut the assembly time to just 90 minutes. The system was actually used for the first to assemble magnetos, where the time was cut from 20 to 5 minutes. By 1914 the new plant was producing thousand automobiles a day and
the work has been analyzed to the minutest detail with a view to economizing time. Men are given tasks that are very simple in themselves, and, by dint of repetition day in and day out, acquire a knack that may cut the time of the operation in two. A man may become a specialist in so insignificant an operation, for instance, as putting in a certain bolt in the assembling of the machine (Bond 1914:8).
This method of production was undoubtedly exploitative, stressful, and, perhaps the strongest charge leveled against it, dehumanizing—and there is no simple explanation for why it was accepted by so many for so long. Opportunity for unskilled workers was an obvious draw, and relatively high wages had clearly an important effect. In 1914—in what The Economist called “the most dramatic event in the history of wages”—Ford more than doubled the assembly-line pay to $5/hour and cut the working day from nine to eight hours. This reduced high turnover and delayed the unionization of labor (Lewis 1986). The innovation opened the way toward dramatic rises in labor productivity, and Ford passed most of the savings achieved by his streamlined assembly to consumers. This decision initiated a period of impressive positive feedbacks as lower prices led to increasing sales, which led to higher production at lower costs.
Consequently, Ford’s approach was not one of marketing but of true economies of scale: he did not start by offering the lowest priced car in order to generate subsequently large production volumes, but he kept increasing the volume of production and converting the higher productivity into lower prices. The introductory price (for red or gray vehicles) was $850 to $875, but by 1913 mass production of more than 200,000 vehicles (with bodies of sheet steel) lowered it by 35% to $550. A year later it was down to $440, and after WWI the car retailed for as little as $265 for the runabout model and $295 for the touring car (MTFCA 2003). Ford’s great down-market move paid off. In 1903 his struggling company made about 15% of the country’s 11,200 new cars. During the first fiscal year of Model T production (1908–1909), it shipped nearly 18,000 vehicles, about 15% of the U.S. passenger vehicles, but by 1914 Ford s share was about 44%, and three years later it rose to 48%.
Midnight blue became famous standard black by 1915, and no other colors were produced until 1925: the choice was dictated simply by the cost and durability of black varnishes, which had little resemblance to modern spray finishes (Boggess 2000). By the time the model was discontinued in 1927, the company s official data sheet shows that 14,689,520 Model Ts were made (Houston 1927), but other sources quote the total of just over 15 million. Durability of these vehicles and hardships of the deepest economic crisis of the 20th century combined to keep a few million of Model Ts on American roads throughout the 1930s. Nearly a century after their introduction, there are still many (rebuilt and reconditioned) Model Ts in perfect running order (MTFCA 2003).
The First Two Decades
Early car industry was much beholden to bicycle making. This is hardly surprising given the history of that simple machine (Whitt and Wilson 1982). Incredibly, the modern bicycle, an assembly that consists of nothing more than a two equally sized wheels, a sturdy frame, and a chain-driven back wheel, emerged only during the 1880s, a century after Watt’s improved steam engines, half a century after the introduction of locomotives, and years after the first electric lights! Previous bicycles were not just clumsy but often very dangerous contrivances whose riding required either unusual dexterity and physical stamina or at least a great deal of foolhardiness. As such, they had no chance to be adopted as common means of personal transport (figure 3.17).
FIGURE 3.17. Evolution of bicycles from a dangerous vertical fork of 1879 and Starley’s 1880 Rover (wheels are still of unequal size) to modern-looking “safety” models of 1890s with diamond frame of tubular steel and pneumatic tires. Images reproduced from Scientific American, April 19, 1892, and July 25, 1896.
Only after John Kemp Starley and William Sutton introduced bicycles with equal-sized wheels, direct steering, and diamond frame of tubular steel—their Rover series progressed to direct steering and acquired a frame resembling standard diamond by 1886 (figure 3.17)—did the popularity of bicycles take off (Whitt and Wilson 1982). And they became soon even easier to ride with the addition of pneumatic tires and backpedal brake (U.S. Patent 418,142), both introduced in 1889. As with so many other techniques of the astonishing 1880s, the fundamental features of those designs have been closely followed by nearly all subsequent machines for most of the 20th century. Only since the late 1970s we have seen a number of high-tech designs that introduced expensive alloys, composite materials, and such unorthodox
designs as upturned handlebars.
Early bicycle makers, building new metal-frame, metal-wheeled, rubber-tired machines destined for road trips, found the task of assembling small cars a naturally kindred enterprise. The bicycle contributed to the birth of the automotive era because it provided ordinary people with their first experience of individualized, long-distance transportation initiated at one’s will and because these new speedy machines created demand for paved roads, road signs, traffic rules and controls, and service shops (Rae 1971; Flink 1975). Early cars benefited from these developments in terms of both innovative construction (steel-spoked wheels, welded tubes for bodies, rubber tires) and convenient roadside service, and the experience of free, unscheduled travel created new expectations and a huge pent-up demand for mass car ownership. But too many former bicycle mechanics switched to car building. Only some, including Opel, Peugeot, Morris, and Willys, prospered; most could not by producing either unique items or very small series of expensive yet often unreliable vehicles. That is why Ford’s Model T was such a fundamental breakthrough.
