The Model T has two stories. The obvious one is that it was a sound, utilitarian device that motorized the United States. It was free from many of the quirks of other early cars, was thoughtfully engineered, and, for the time, was relatively easy to drive thanks to a semiautomatic epicyclic transmission.
Henry Ford (1863–1947) was an intuitive engineer who had trained as a machinist in Detroit and acquired a deep understanding of manufacturing techniques. But he never forgot his farmboy roots and wanted to produce a car of extreme practicality that would benefit the rural people to whom he felt closest. The flexible, well-sprung Model T was at home on the unmade rural roads that covered the United States at that time.
The Model T also has equally great significance as a symbol and advertisement for Ford’s production-line techniques and became the focus of the worldwide admiration for what has since become known as Fordism. It has been suggested that the moving production line is the perfect realization of the project started in the Enlightenment to turn men into machines. Thus the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote, ‘Mechanical arts succeed best under a total suppression of sentiment and reason. Manufactures prosper where the workshop may … be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.’ This could be a perfect description of Ford’s integrated Highland Park factory. Intriguingly, Ford and his methods impressed both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin to an equal degree.
The concrete daylight factory at Highland Park, designed by Albert Kahn, was as much an innovation as the car for whose production it was designed. The ‘body drop’ here, where the body meets the engine and chassis, became an iconic part of the car mass-production process. This outdoor section, photographed in 1913, must have been a temporary expedient, however.
The Ford Model T – ‘the car that motorized America’.