Exactly

by Simon Winchester

  The year after the nonstop running experiment had been successfully conducted, and when all the fuss and bother of its achievement was dying down, Charles Rolls purred his explanation for the car’s success. Why, he was asked, did his factory, so fully equipped and manned as it was, not simply produce thousands of cars? Why just two, when it was possible to produce two hundred, or two thousand?

  In the first place the class of man who would be quite acceptable in ordinary engineering works would be quite unsuitable for us and for our standard of work … To produce the most perfect cars you must have the most perfect workmen, and having got these workmen, it is then our aim to educate them so that each man in these works can do his particular work better than anyone else in the world … We have always believed that the construction of a motor car which, while possessing every degree of necessary rigidity and strength, was of less weight than other similar cars, is largely a metal question. We consider that the success of the Rolls-Royce and its extraordinary durability and low cost of upkeep, as exemplified in the 15,000 miles trial of last year, is entirely due to scientific design, to the original research work and close study of metals which has been made by Mr. Royce and his assistants in the Physical Laboratory of this Company. We regard this as perhaps the most important department in the works.

  Despite a production run of fewer than these eight thousand Ghosts, Rolls-Royce had arrived, and to stay. It had become so famous, so quickly. It was now part of the canon, the lexicon. It represented motoring’s acme, its exemplar, the sine qua non, the ne plus ultra, the industry’s apotheosis. The OED records the car’s eponymous progress through the vocabulary. In 1916, an airplane was described as the “Rolls-Royce of the air.” In 1923, there was a reference in the press to a baby carriage being the “Rolls-Royce of the pramworld.” Rugs from Isfahan were so described in 1974, pianos by Steinway in 1977, and in 2006, a De’Longhi four-slice, cool-walled, crumb-drawered kitchen device was said to be the “Rolls-Royce of electric toasters.” For more than a century now, the agreed-upon name that Sir Charles and Sir Henry chose has become a universal denominator of excellence, its dominance unchallenged, its reputation sealed—and all based on a renown for accuracy, exactitude, and mechanical perfection machined down to the finest and most unforgiving of tolerances.

  AT ABOUT THE same time as the Ghost’s birth, but four thousand miles away, at a factory in Detroit, Michigan, quite another kind of car was just establishing itself, though it was as different from the handmade paragons of Cooke Street and Derby as it was possible to be. It was the Ford Model T, and it appeared on the roadways of America in October 1908, shortly after the first Silver Ghosts began their wanderings through England and Scotland.

  Henry Royce had offered up precision for the few. Henry Ford wanted precision to be available to the many. “I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he declared in 1907. “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

  It would be idle to suggest that Henry Ford’s early motives were entirely altruistic. He was a Michigan farmer’s son who developed an early interest in engineering—and to that extent, the arc of his youth was remarkably similar to that of Henry Royce. Machinery of all kinds quite besotted him. As a teenager, he had become unusually adept, for instance, at repairing his neighbors’ pocket watches. His appetite whetted, he then sought and won an apprenticeship—not at a great railway workshop, where Henry Royce was interning at almost the same moment, but at a nearby firm that made very much more mundane objects, such as water valves, steam whistles, fire hydrants, and gongs, and that used an abundance of lathes and drill presses to do so.

  He was enraptured by the vision of the majestic steam-powered Westinghouse threshing engines that were occasionally brought in to help his father and other nearby farmers with their harvest, most particularly those that had been designed to propel themselves—the thresher drive belt was removed and looped to power the travel wheels instead. It is a central part of the Ford origin story that young Henry became especially adept at running and repairing a neighbor’s portable Westinghouse steam engine, and that, in the summer of 1882, he took a three-dollar-a-day wage to drive this doughty little engine from farm to farm, threshing corn and clover, sawing wood, grinding feed. He fed the engine’s fire with old fence posts and corn husks and occasional chunks of coal. Though he found the work backbreakingly hard, Ford claimed never to have been as happy as when he was wandering the dusty Michigan back roads with the Westinghouse, employing simple motive power to help bring farmers some brief contentment, and his teenage self an accumulating wad of paper money.*

  More than sixteen million Model T Fords—“Tin Lizzies” in the vernacular—were sold between 1908 and 1927, with the price going down from $850 to $260 thanks to the evolution of ever-more-efficient manufacturing techniques.

  Henry Ford—like Henry Royce, born into modest circumstances in 1863—went on to popularize motoring and to build the first automotive assembly line in Detroit.

  Before long, he became the demonstrator and repairman for the local Westinghouse steam engine distributor. Yet, soon thereafter, realizing the one limitation of his beloved threshing engines—no electricity!—he left the world of steam behind to become a mechanical engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, where there was electricity aplenty. It was a precipitate move, but one that, unknown to both, led his life to mimic that of Henry Royce, who was simultaneously learning across the ocean in Manchester what Ford was now learning here in Detroit—the joint and associated worlds of mechanical and electrical engineering having been brought together since the 1870s in what had been called the internal combustion engine, to produce sustained and efficient motive power.

  The parallels continued to be uncanny: for while Royce had bought and tinkered with a De Dion–powered quadricycle as his first-ever vehicle, Henry Ford, who had learned well at his posts with Westinghouse and Edison, made a quadricycle in his spare time, and a two-cylinder petrol engine to power it. It had its first run on June 4, 1896—they had to ax down the workshop door to allow the vehicle out onto the street, as Ford had forgotten how wide he had made its frame—and it soon broke down. Its quickly solved mechanical problem attracted a merry crowd of gawkers, even though the test run was staged after midnight.

  And just as with Henry Royce and his progress from De Dion to Decauville and then to his own creations, so Henry Ford progressed swiftly to making his own machines also. There were experiments of one kind and another; there were crude racing cars assembled, engines of two and three and four cylinders; there were successes and failures, setbacks and small victories, quarrels and stutterings, and commercial misery—two early Ford firms failed in less than two years, one of them after making just twenty cars. But by 1903, some sense of stability had settled on the young farmer’s son. He had weathered the various crises and was still standing; he knew a great deal about how not to make cars; he now had sufficient confidence in his abilities, sufficient money, sufficient talent, and a sufficient number of friends and admirers to form (because he was able to wrest the name “Ford” from an earlier debacle) the Ford Motor Company, there to begin work on bringing precision engineering to the general public on a prodigious scale.

  Yet, while Henry Royce over in Manchester had been captivated by perfection, Henry Ford in Dearborn was consumed by production. Their two fledgling companies, so similar in so many ways, each wedded to the idea of making the best and most suitable machine it could, began to diverge in both purpose and practice from the moment of their respective foundings.

  Where Henry Royce began with the Royce Ten, Henry Ford began with the Model A. Like all the early cars Ford would mak
e, the Model A (which was available only in red) was advertised as being “made of few parts, and every part does something.” There was no padding, no luxury, no fuss. For additional money, a customer could add features (a rear door, a rubber roof, lamps, a horn, brass trim), but for $750 plus tax, he would get a tiny—the wheelbase was a mere six feet—and inelegantly simple two-seater runabout with an eight-horsepower two-cylinder engine with a semiautomatic transmission that had two forward gears and one reverse, and brakes on the rear wheels only. The little red machine could chug along, reliably unreliable, at a little under thirty miles per hour. Buyers were solemnly warned that a patent infringement case might interrupt their liberating enjoyment of the machine—it never did, and the case, involving a man named Selden, was settled out of court. A Chicago dentist bought the first Model A, and about 1,700 customers followed: Ford was down to its last $223 in working capital by the time the first car sold, so its relative commercial success over the twelve months of its production helped keep the firm afloat, and served as a placeholder for the making of all the subsequent cars that would culminate in Ford’s first true success, the phenomenal, society-altering production of the Model T.

  Given that the letter T is the twentieth letter, one might assume there were eighteen models made after the A; in fact, there were just five: the B (powerful, upscale, costly, with the engine at the front); the C (a fancier A, and like the A, with the engine beneath the seat); the F (a luxury A, sold only in green); the K (a luxury B, but with a six-cylinder engine, also under the hood); and finally, the N (cheap and light, using, for the first time, steel with added vanadium, an alloy that Henry Ford discovered in the wreckage of a crashed French racing car, and which he ordered used as extensively as possible in his future machines, as it gave the chassis added tensile strength and at a markedly lower weight). The Ford Model N cost $500 and had a four-cylinder engine; seven thousand were sold. It was available only in maroon. It was almost the perfect car, thought Henry Ford—except, not quite.

  Improvements could still be made, and they were. The Model T was the result. With what came to be known affectionately as the Tin Lizzie, Ford hit the jackpot. The car was officially born on October 1, 1908, and was eventually produced in vast numbers—16,500,000 were sold during the nearly nineteen years of this most stunningly successful model, before the very last Model T rolled off the production line in May 1927.

  “Production line” is the key phrase here. All Henry Ford’s earlier model cars, just like the Royce Tens and the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts across the Atlantic (and later, briefly, in Massachusetts), had been made in the same essential way: pieces, components, parts of the car were all brought to one location on a factory floor, and a jostling gang of men welded and hammered and soldered and bolted and snapped and levered and turned screws and filed, always they would file to achieve the proper fit, until all the parts came together and—presto!—a new car was shakily and haphazardly born and driven snortingly out into the world.

  Then, with the Model T, Henry Ford changed everything. From the start, he was insistent that no filing ever be done in his motor-making factories, because all the parts, components, and pieces he used for the machine would come to him already precisely finished, and to tolerances of cruelly exacting standards such that each would fit exactly without the need for even the most delicate of further adjustment. Once that aspect of his manufacturing system was firmly established, he created a whole new means of assembling the bits and pieces into cars. He demanded a standard of precision for his components that had seldom been either known or achieved before, and he now married this standard to a new system of manufacture seldom tried before. In doing so, he quite transformed industries—his own, but also industries well beyond the making of motorcars—and then, in time, he transformed the world to which industry belonged, for just about everywhere and everybody, and for just about evermore. Though there are other, smaller-scale contenders for the title,* it can fairly be said that in the making of the Model T, Henry Ford created the full-scale and presently recognizable industrial production line.

  An assembly line, like this at Ford’s main plant in Dearborn, Michigan, demands absolute precision in all its components—of which there were fewer than one hundred, compared to some thirty thousand in a modern car. If a single part did not fit, the line would risk being halted—while among the hand-makers at Rolls-Royce, a fit could be achieved with a file.

  The Model T had fewer than one hundred different parts (a modern car has more than thirty thousand). How they, no more complex than a modern washing machine, would be assembled into a working automobile was to be Henry Ford’s abiding challenge during the first two decades of the twentieth century. For his earlier models, he had experimented with a variety of manufacturing techniques. He had workers in teams of fifteen or so, for example, all bent on building a single car. He then ordered one man to build a car entirely on his own, as from a kit, with other workers bringing all parts and tools to him right as he needed them, like nurses to a surgeon, so that he need never move from his assigned workstation. If there were fifteen such one-man assembly stations on the factory floor, and if the right parts, all precisely made, got to each on time, together with the tools necessary to fit them together, fifteen cars could be made simultaneously in a day.

  Then again, in a further experiment, men were assigned a single task for each car-in-the-making, and once having performed that task (bolting on the hood, for example, or fitting the rear bumper), each man would walk to the next car in line and do precisely the same thing again. Parts (hoods, bumpers, cylinder blocks, lights) were made by much the same means, on an upper floor of the three-story plant, and were stored upstairs and sent down chutes to the assembly floor, meaning that there were never any Himalayas of parts to impede the workers’ progress on the floor, and yet there were always freshly made components available on tap, as it were.

  Each of these systems had its advantages; each represented another accretion of manufacturing knowledge and wisdom—until 1913, when there came at last the Caramba! moment—the discovery that the workpiece could be moved along in front of the workers, who would each perform a single very ordinary and undemanding task on it as it presented itself, and would then do the same for the next, and the next, and the next as each passed briefly before them, while other workers performed very different other tasks again and again and again as the workpiece presented itself before each of them, until a whole new piece was made, a whole new assembly was fashioned, and out of these various assemblies and assemblages, a whole new car was manufactured, by the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of one-task-at-a-time performances as the car-to-be moved along what would be, in effect, the entire length of its automotive birth canal.

  Henry Ford said he first got the idea for the assembly line from watching pig carcasses being solemnly and meticulously disassembled in a local pork butchery: one had merely to reverse the process of slicing and boning and draining and rendering and deconstructing, and instead, weld and bolt and bronze and construct and then spray with paint (quick-drying black, the only choice). And where, on the one hand, you had chops and hams and chitlins and grease, here at the new Ford plant, you fashioned out of metal and glass and rubber parts a brand-new car, to be sold for eight hundred dollars and change.

  And the speed of the new way! The revolutionary productivity! The first device to be made in this assembly-line manner was the Model T’s magneto, the simple magnet-and-two-coils device that would produce the spark for the ignition of the fuel in the engine. At the factory, Ford made a long, straight line at waist level with a conveyor belt, and on it, at first, just the already-made simple steel wheel that would be turned by the car’s crank handle. The first person in the line, sitting before the conveyor belt and so being confronted with the wheel moving steadily across his or her field of vision, would bolt to it a small electric coil that had been prewound with maybe two hundred turns of copper wire. The next person sitting in line would bolt on a smal
ler wheel, but this time a wheel wound with perhaps two thousand turns of a much finer copper wire. The third person would attach to the wheel a case with a U-shaped magnet attached to its inside, and then a fourth person would bolt the cases together and send the finished magneto for inspection.

  Someone, a tester, would spin the coils through the magnetic field: a weak electric current would be induced in the two-hundred-turn coil, then a very much larger voltage would be created in the two-thousand-turn coil, and if all was working and the parts were made as precisely as specified and fitted together as they should, a mighty spark would flash between the terminals at the magneto’s business end—which, had this been mounted on an engine and not on the assembly line for a test, would have flashed at the top of the cylinder just at the moment when it was filling with a highly flammable mixture of vaporized gasoline and air, and there would be an explosion that would thrust the piston downward and set the Ford’s powerful little motor off and running.

  Before the advent of the assembly line, it would take a worker twenty minutes to assemble a magneto from scratch. With the assembly line running and its gang of workers each performing a single mind-numbing task, it would take just five minutes to make a complete magneto—and each magneto would be identical, none subject to a worker’s whim or a bout of Friday laziness, and all would fit in their assigned location inside the Ford’s engine, and would sit comfortably on location without a scintilla of doubt.

  Axles were the next car parts to be assembled on a line, an axle line being put into operation sometime in 1915. It used to take two and a half hours to put one axle together; on the new line, twenty-six minutes. Another production line then cut by exactly half the time needed to put together a transmission, with its three forward and one reverse gears arranged in Ford’s curious planetary system of belts and slipping wheels. Where once it had taken workers ten hours to construct an entire engine, now it took just four—helped by a brand-new Ford design for a cylinder block, with its top and bottom shaved off to accommodate the valves and plugs above and the crankshaft and lubricant sumps below, and with the cylinders themselves now easily accessible to the machine tools that would bore the holes of such infinitely exact depth and diameter. In time, a new Model T would appear at the factory doors in Dearborn every forty seconds.