Ford, Sloan, and the Automobile
The automobile is the preeminent machine of the modern world. In 1900 there were 8,000 registered automobiles in the United States; by 1939 there were 26 million.1 The car gave Americans a personal mobility and freedom unknown in the nineteenth century, and by 1939 auto manufacturing had become America’s leading industry. But in 1900 the future of the car was hardly clear. The market for automobiles then was small and exclusive, and cars powered by steam and electricity vied with those powered by gasoline. The car began to reach a mass market after Henry Ford’s introduction of the gasoline-powered Model T in 1908. America eventually outgrew Ford’s vision of a rugged egalitarian car, and a great rival, the General Motors Corporation under Alfred P. Sloan Jr., pulled ahead of Ford in the 1920s by meeting a growing demand for variety.
The Coming of Automobiles
The railway locomotives of the nineteenth century were external-combustion engines, in which a coal-fueled boiler heated water into steam. The steam went at high pressure into side cylinders, where it pushed pistons and rods attached to them. These rods turned the locomotive wheels. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Fair, Niklaus Otto of Germany demonstrated a new kind of piston engine in which the fuel burned inside the piston cylinder and not in a separate compartment (figure 5.1). Otto’s internal-combustion engine went through a cycle of four piston strokes. On the first downstroke, a mixture of coal gas and air entered the piston cylinder. On the upstroke, the piston head compressed the mixture. An electric spark then ignited the fuel, causing another downstroke that delivered power to turn an attached wheel. A second upstroke exhausted waste gases.2 Modern automobile engines adopted the four-stroke cycle (sidebar 5.1). Otto sold his machine as a stationary engine. In 1885 the German Karl Benz placed a gasoline-fueled engine on a three-wheeled carriage and began making cars. Gottlieb Daimler, whose company later merged with Benz, built a more stable four-wheeled gasoline car the following year, and Emile Levassor of France built a car with the engine mounted in front instead of under the seat or in back. The brothers Charles and Frank Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, designed and built a four-wheeled gasoline car in the United States in 1893. Americans soon began to drive the new vehicles (figure 5.2).3
Figure 5.1. Otto Engine at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Fair. Source: Phillip T. Sandhurst, The Great Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1876), p. 358.
The early gasoline car was not an easy machine to own. The engine was noisy, produced a sooty exhaust, and needed highly flammable fuel. A driver had to turn a hand crank in front of the car to start moving the pistons, and mechanical breakdowns were frequent. Steam and electric vehicles at first offered attractive alternatives. Steam engines had been used to power carriages and tractors in the nineteenth century. In 1898 the Stanley brothers began manufacturing steam-powered cars in Watertown, Massachusetts, that burned kerosene instead of coal. Stanley steamers could drive as fast as gasoline cars with internal-combustion engines. The Stanley cars took thirty minutes to start and had to stop frequently for water, but after 1901 steamers made by the rival White firm began to use preheated water and condensers to recycle steam. The Stanleys eventually adopted similar devices. Steam cars were complex and difficult to maintain, though, and most steam car makers switched to manufacturing gasoline cars with internal-combustion engines in the decade after 1900. The Stanleys continued to make steam cars but preferred to make them by hand, which limited their market to several thousand owners. The Stanley firm went out of business in the mid-1920s.4
External and Internal Combustion
The Four-Stroke Engine Cycle
Figure 5.2. Jane Newkirk (grandmother of senior author) in an early car. Source: Billington family album.
Electric battery-powered cars also appeared in the 1890s. These could be recharged with direct current at central power stations, which were happy to sell power in hours of off-peak usage. With rectifiers to convert A.C. to D.C., alternating current could be used for recharging as well. Because electrics were silent, clean, easy to drive, and reliable, they found a ready market, especially among women. Electric cars had a range of about fifty miles and needed several hours to recharge, but they were well-suited for driving short distances in town. Electric cars failed, though, for cultural reasons as much as for technical ones. Gasoline cars appealed to men, who enjoyed the challenge of driving and maintaining them. As gasoline cars gradually increased their speed, a key attraction to male drivers, they left electrics behind. Touring the countryside by automobile was also an ambition of most early car buyers and the limited range between rechargings meant that electrics could not be used for travel over long distances. Women who had bought electric cars remained loyal to them; but Charles Kettering’s 1911 invention of an electric self-starter made hand cranking unnecessary, and new women drivers began to switch to gasoline cars. Canned gasoline was easy to distribute through the network for distributing kerosene illuminants, and repair garages later sold gasoline from pumps. The electric power network did not reach most suburban households until the 1910s and 1920s, too late to give electric cars outside the cities a nearby supply of electricity.5
But in one respect cars using internal-combustion engines were no better than early steam and electric vehicles: their high cost. Purchase prices of $500 to $1,000 or more at the turn of the century permitted only the wealthy to buy automobiles. In Europe, cars were built in small numbers by firms whose names became synonomous with wealthy owners, such as Rolls-Royce in England and Bugatti in Italy. In the United States, luxury cars like the Pierce-Arrow also served a small market that could afford them.6 The manufacturing of early cars followed craft traditions, in which a few highly skilled workmen assembled each car in place in small workshops or factories. Buyers usually purchased cars directly from the factory and relied on urban garages or their own servants to maintain and repair them. The small scale of early automobile making also made it possible, however, for entrepreneurs with little capital to enter the business. Henry Ford was one of these entrepreneurs.
Henry Ford (1863–1947) grew up on a farm outside Detroit, Michigan (figure 5.3). He was fascinated by engines at an early age, worked as a steam engine repairman in the 1880s, and studied an Otto engine that came to the area. In 1891 he left for Detroit, where he worked as an engineer for the city’s Edison Illuminating Company and built a gasoline car in his free time. In June 1896 he successfully drove the car, a motorized carriage on four bicycle wheels that he called a “quadricycle.” In August, at a convention of the Edison companies in New York City, Ford met Thomas Edison, who encouraged him to keep working on a gasoline car. With the backing of the mayor and other investors, Ford resigned from Edison in 1899 and formed the Detroit Automobile Company. His share in the company was meagre, though, and his failure to produce a workable design forced the company to dissolve in November 1900.7
To raise capital for a new company, Ford decided to win fame as a racecar builder. Ever since the steamboat, new forms of transportation had proved themselves in races, either to beat a fixed time or to race competitors to finish in the fastest time. In 1807 Robert Fulton’s steamboat reached a speed of four miles per hour in a trip up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and back. In 1896 Frank Duryea beat a Benz car in a road race from New York City to Irvington-on-Hudson and back.8 Returning to the family farm, Henry Ford built a racecar and entered a meet held at Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on October 10, 1901, with a prize of $1,000. Alexander Winton of Cleveland, a carmaker and the country’s foremost racecar driver, also entered and was expected to win.
After the starting gun, Winton took an early lead but Ford began to gain on him as the local crowd cheered him on. Winton’s car then developed engine trouble and Ford caught up and won the race, gaining him the gratitude of Detroit and the backing of new investors to form a second company. The investors didn’t give Ford the freedom he wanted, though, and he left in March 1902. The company reorganized under Henry Leland and took the name Cadillac. Ford gave racing one last chance. On October 25, 1902, Winton returned to Grosse Pointe to avenge his earlier defeat, and Detroit eagerly awaited the rematch. A racing cyclist, Barney Oldfield, agreed to drive a new and more powerful car that Ford built (figure 5.4). Winton did not finish the race and Ford’s car won, setting an American record of under one minute six seconds per mile.9
Figure 5.3. Henry Ford, circa 1904. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. P.O. 1282.
Ford organized a third company, the Ford Motor Company, in June 1903 with the principal backing of Alexander Malcomson, a coal dealer. Ford had a larger share now, and he ran the engineering side while Malcomson’s accountant, James Couzens, managed the rest of the business. The new firm survived and expanded by innovating in two ways. First, with the help of capable machinists such as C. Harold Wills, Ford introduced cars that embodied his intuition, against the conventional wisdom of the time, that cars could be lighter in weight and greater in power. Second, Couzens established a strong network of dealerships. He demanded that dealers pay the company in advance for the cars they sold instead of paying after selling them. Distributors also had to offer repair services to owners. Dealers who accepted these conditions discovered that they could make money, and the guarantee of service helped build the reputation of Ford cars.10
Figure 5.4. Henry Ford and Barney Oldfield next to Ford’s 999 racer. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. P. 188.4568.
Ford’s first car, the Model A, sold 1,700 cars in its first fifteen months. With this success, Ford was able to stay in business without having to rely on outside money. But his desire to make low-priced vehicles for a larger market came into conflict with Malcomson and his partners, who wanted the company to produce higher-priced models for wealthier buyers. After producing two high-priced models, the Models B and K, Ford bought out Malcomson in July 1906 and became majority owner of the company. He quickly brought out a new car, the Model N, that weighed 1,050 pounds but could reach a speed of forty-five miles per hour and sold for $600. The Model N raised Ford Motor Company sales from 1,600 cars in the 1905–6 season to 8,243 in 1906–7.11 Ford set his sights even higher and began planning the breakthrough car that became the Model T.
Figure 5.5. A 1908 Ford Model T. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. A-4810.
The Revolution of 1908
Ford rolled out the first Model T in 1908 (figure 5.5). The new car weighed 1,200 pounds and could go no faster than the Model N, but it delivered greater power to the wheels and incorporated several important innovations, principally the use of vanadium steel, a lightweight alloy that afforded the strength of a heavier car. Ford also designed the car for unpaved country roads with the body high above the ground. The Model T had an ungainly appearance as a result but could drive through mud and grass that other cars could not. Shifting gears was simpler than in any other car on the market, a crucial attraction to the ordinary buyers Ford wanted to reach. He also designed the car so that it could be understood and maintained by its owner.12
The Model T depended on three core systems to work: electric ignition, chemical combustion of the fuel, and mechanical transmission of power from the engine to the wheels. The Model T engine had four vertical cylinders and a piston in each cylinder connected to a single crankshaft underneath. When the pistons began moving, the crankshaft rotated. Gears (in a box) transmitted this rotation to a central driveshaft running lengthwise under the car to gears that turned the rear axle and its wheels (figure 5.6).13
To start the car, a driver turned a hand crank in front. The crank turned the crankshaft and also turned a magneto, a circular case in which a flywheel with magnets rotated around a fixed wire coil. The flywheel generated electricity in the same manner as a rotating armature in an electric generator. The electricity went to a revolving contact, the timer, which sent currents in sequence to four small transformers called coil units. Each coil unit stepped down the current and raised the voltage. The high-voltage electricity then fired a spark plug in each cylinder (sidebar 5.2). The firing ignited a mixture of gasoline and air that had entered the cylinder through a carburetor, and the combustion pushed down the piston in each cylinder.
The crankshaft connected the pistons so that when two pistons went down, the other two went up. Each cylinder went through a cycle of four strokes. Engineers measured the average power of combustion on the piston head using the same formula, PLAN/33,000, that James Watt had developed in the eighteenth century for measuring the horsepower in a piston steam engine. In an internal-combustion engine, automotive engineers called the result of this formula the indicated horsepower (sidebar 5.3).14 In the Model T at its top speed of thirty-seven miles per hour, the indicated horsepower was about twenty-three. Friction losses in the cylinders caused the power that reached the crankshaft, known as the brake horsepower, to be less, just under twenty. Further losses in the transmission of brake horsepower to the wheels reduced the power at the wheels, or traction horsepower, to about twelve. The Model T was still an efficient car for its time.15
Figure 5.6. Model T chassis. Source: Ford Manual: For Owners and Operators of Ford Cars (Detroit: Ford Motor Company, 1914), p. 4.
Electric Ignition
Fuel System
The traction horsepower had to be sufficient to grip the road and move forward. On an unpaved road, the rolling resistance was greater than on a paved surface, but the Model T was built for a nation of mostly unpaved roads and its traction horsepower enabled the car to drive at its top speed of 37 miles per hour. As speed increased, resistance of the air, or drag, became greater, but at its top speed the Model T did not encounter significant resistance from the air (sidebar 5.4).16 The car’s gearing system, similar in principle to that of a bicycle, enabled it to climb hills. By changing into a new gear on a bicycle, a rider could shorten or lengthen the distance traveled with each revolution of the pedal. In low gear, each pedal rotation caused the back wheel to turn much less distance than in high gear, which made pedaling easier going uphill. Because the chain transmissions on bicycles were not practical for cars, in its place the rotational power from the crankshaft traveled through a transmission box containing gearwheels of different sizes to a driveshaft running the length of the car.17 The Model T had two forward gear settings, high and low, and another setting for driving backwards (sidebar 5.5).
With the new car, America had an engineering design that brought together in one vehicle the key innovations of late-nineteenth-century electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering; the car, in turn, would soon stimulate the civil engineering of new roads and bridges. The simplicity of the numbers that described the car’s working parts defined a system of remarkable precision and sophistication. But the car was more than just an efficient machine—it expressed Ford’s social vision of a useful vehicle for the great mass of the population. Crucial to this vision was the car’s economy; the Model T could not have succeeded as a breakthrough machine without the new process developed by Ford and his engineers to manufacture the car for a mass market.
The Ford Assembly Line
The Model T was an immediate success. But demand soon exceeded Ford’s ability to manufacture the car by conventional methods. In common with other car makers in 1908, Ford built his cars from components supplied by others. Each car was assembled in place by workers who moved from car to car on the factory floor. To assemble a chassis required about twelve hours. Ford and his engineers studied the assembly process closely. They soon realized that they could accelerate production if the workers stayed in one place and the parts to be assembled came to them by conveyor systems. By the earlier methods, each worker had to perform a multitude of tasks requiring many skills. With a moving assembly, workers could now specialize in a single task, and these tasks could be subdivided. Moving to a much larger plant in the Highland Park section of Detroit in 1910, Ford developed over the next four years a production system consisting of a major assembly line fed by sub-assembly lines on which workers each performed a single repetitive task. The process reduced the time needed to make the chassis from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes (figure 5.7a and b).18
Traction Force
CR | = | coefficient of road resistance (0.015 for a paved road) |
W | = | weight of car (1,200 pounds for the Model T) |
CD | = | coefficient of drag (about 1.0 for the Model T) |
p | = | air pressure (0.00257 V2) (at 37 mph = 3.5 pounds per square foot) |
AF | = | frontal area of the car (about 28 square feet for the Model T) |
Traction Power
The idea of a moving assembly was not new; the meat-packing industry had developed it earlier. What made Ford’s assembly line revolutionary was his combination of a moving assembly with another American idea, manufacturing with standardized and interchangeable parts. Ford demanded of his suppliers that every part be machined to high tolerances, so that workers could rapidly assemble cars without having to adjust parts that didn’t exactly fit. To ensure high standards, Ford eventually produced all the parts required. The rapid mass production of inexpensive, well-built cars followed. In 1909 the Model T runabout sold for $825. By 1916 the price had fallen to $345. Sales rose from 78,440 cars in 1911–12 to 751,287 in 1916–17 (figure 5.8). Rival auto makers began to imitate Ford’s methods, and total car production in the United States rose to 1,745,702 in 1917. By then Ford had captured 43 percent of the market and was by far the largest car company.19
To sustain his success, however, Ford had to overcome two challenges: a charge of patent infringement and a high turnover in his labor force. In 1879 the lawyer George Selden of Rochester, New York, had patented an internal-combustion car. By filing a series of amendments, Selden had postponed the commencement of his patent until 1895, by which time it was clear that a market existed for cars. Patent law protected an invention for seventeen years and Selden sued Alexander Winton successfully in 1903 for infringing his claim. The major auto makers then formed an association that paid royalties to an electric vehicle company to which Selden had transferred his patent. Ford refused to join, and the association filed suit. In 1909 a federal district court in New York upheld the Selden patent and threatened to put Ford out of business. An appeals court ruled in Ford’s favor in 1911, however, by noting that Selden had only patented a two-stroke engine, not the four-stroke engine used by Ford and most other car makers. With only one more year of the Selden patent remaining, the association declined to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and the public hailed Ford as a giant killer.20
Figure 5.7a. Ford production: static assembly. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. P.O.1267.
Labor proved to be a second challenge. The reduction of work to a single task afforded employment to less skilled workers, including large numbers of immigrants from Europe, many black migrants from the American South, and some women and disabled people. But the grinding repetition of the assembly line produced a high turnover each year. Line workers earned about $2.50 a day for a nine-hour day, a rate typical of other firms in the auto industry. In 1914 Ford dramatically raised the wage to $5.00 a day for an eight-hour shift. Ford acted from mixed motives. He needed to reduce turnover and he wanted to prevent labor unions from attracting support. But he also wanted workers to benefit from the efficiency of their work and to be able to buy cars. His competitors denounced Ford as a socialist, and again the public hailed him as a man of the people. His acclaim unfortunately proved short-lived.21
Figure 5.7b. Ford production: moving assembly. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. P.O. 3342.
Alfred P. Sloan and General Motors
World War I (1914–1918), which the United States entered in its last two years, strengthened the demand for motor vehicles but also caused enormous price inflation. By 1920 the dollar had lost half of its purchasing power and the five-dollar day meant less. More seriously for Ford, a great new rival to his company was emerging, General Motors. Under Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who headed the firm in the 1920s, GM displaced Ford as the largest car manufacturer by responding more flexibly to changing demand.
Figure 5.8. One day’s production of Model T cars, 1913. Courtesy of The Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI. Photograph no. P.O.716.
General Motors had its origins in 1904, when a successful carriage maker, William C. Durant (figure 5.9a), switched to cars and took over a small auto manufacturing company founded by David Buick in Flint, Michigan. In 1908 Durant merged Buick with the Oldsmobile firm of Ransom Olds to form General Motors (GM), adding the Cadillac and Oakland (later renamed Pontiac) companies in 1909. By 1910, with its popular Buick Model 10, General Motors sold more cars than Ford. Durant had financed his expansion with money borrowed from New York banks, however, and a short recession in 1910 caused his bankers to call in their loans. He lost control of GM, which soon fell behind Ford in its share of the market. Durant then launched a new company with the Swiss racecar driver Louis Chevrolet and bought back control of General Motors in 1916, adding the Chevrolet company to its roster. But Durant lost control again in the recession of 1920. At that time, the DuPont family of Delaware had a substantial investment in GM, and Pierre S. DuPont took over as the company’s president from 1920 to 1923.22
Figure 5.9a. William C. Durant. Source: The World’s Work, 40:5 (September 1920): 495.
Figure 5.9b. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library, Photographs nos. 69.2, P-SL634-1, PO 96-232.
Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1875–1966) had headed a roller bearing company that General Motors acquired in 1916 (figure 5.9b). In 1918 Sloan joined the managing committee of General Motors, and in 1920 he became the principal assistant to Pierre DuPont. At Sloan’s urging, the auto company made two crucial changes. First, instead of the centralized and rigid management that Ford imposed on his own company, GM created a small executive staff that issued broad numerical targets for sales, market share, and profits, leaving the operating divisions of the company (Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Chevrolet) wide latitude in meeting them. Second, GM provided consumers with more choice. Each of the five GM divisions served a particular market, with Cadillac providing the most expensive cars and Chevrolet the least costly ones. Most of the working parts of GM cars were standardized but body shape and other visible details varied. Annual style changes also became a feature of GM by the 1930s. Sloan’s innovations appealed to the social differences in society that Ford’s Model T stood against. But Sloan, who became president of General Motors in 1923, also responded to a public demand for greater variety in cars that Ford was unwilling to meet.23
By the 1920s the public had begun to tire of the Model T. Better roads made its ruggedness less attractive. The basic design of the car didn’t change, and as sales fell, the company finally phased it out in 1927 and began marketing new cars across a range of prices. By then General Motors had taken Ford’s place as the largest U.S. auto company.24 Ford believed that producing an affordable and reliable car was ethical as well as profitable.25 But his success depended on rigid standardization, and an autocratic tendency in his personality grew stronger in his later years. In a 1915 libel suit, he declared, “History is more or less bunk.” He denounced banks, unions, and jazz music for undermining the small-town way of life, even as his automobiles were helping to end the isolation of rural America. In the early 1920s Ford paid for a series of anti-Semitic articles in a local newspaper that he owned, for which he apologized in 1927. In his later years, Ford exemplified the danger of believing that success in one area of endeavor entitled him to trust his judgment in others. He willed his fortune to establish the Ford Foundation, however, which he left free to support more inclusive goals for society and the world.26
Sloan’s management of General Motors was not without controversy either. In the early 1920s, the company overruled his advice and produced an innovative air-cooled Chevrolet engine to compete with the water-cooled engines used in other cars. The new engine was rushed into production before its design had been fully worked out and tested, and cars with the new engines could not be sold.27 But Sloan was skeptical as much because the engine was innovative as because the innovation was poorly executed. He believed that the market for cars was maturing and that General Motors would succeed primarily by meeting the need to replace automobiles already in use.28
Sloan demanded that new cars incorporate improvements only after careful study and agreement within the company. One other innovation by GM in the 1920s, the development of leaded gasoline, led to serious trouble. Cases of lead poisoning among chemical workers who produced the additive raised public concerns that GM and the oil companies tried to dismiss. Public health authorities in the 1920s, however, approved leaded gasoline, which remained in use until environmental concerns led to its phasing out in the 1970s.29
Science made little contribution to the automobile in its early years. But the automobile assembly line became an example to many of a new ideal of “scientific management” articulated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. In an influential 1911 book, Taylor argued that industry needed to make every task more efficient by knowing the action of every worker at every moment. To design their assembly line, Ford managers employed time and motion studies of the kind urged by Taylor, and the regimentation of the assembly line caused some social critics to see in modern engineering a totalitarian imperative that robs humanity of its freedom.30
There is no evidence that Ford was inspired by Taylor, whose goal was to measure and reward the productivity of individuals. Ford’s aim instead was to standardize the output of each worker.31 Taylor saw only the efficiencies to be squeezed out of a technology that was already established. If Ford had tried to do the same, he would have improved the static assembly of cars instead of abandoning it for a moving assembly line.32 Taylor’s ideal helped encourage a broader misconception that engineering is a matter of using science and mathematics to determine a “one best way.” Although it involves calculations, engineering is not just mathematical problem-solving in which there are only right answers and wrong answers. Numbers always constrain what engineering can do but the engineer always has a choice in what to design. The consequences of technological choice are never a matter of inherent or technical necessity, and the idea that an optimal solution exists to every technical problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of modern engineering.
Americans changed their way of life as they came to rely more and more on automobiles.33 The car and the road brought together all four principles of network, process, machine, and structure: electricity for ignition, gasoline for fuel, the internal-combustion engine, and the new roads and bridges stimulated and required by the car. After the breakthrough innovation of the Model T, the automotive industry followed the pattern of other industries in shifting, during the 1920s, to the more incremental kinds of change associated with an established technology and market. In the meantime, a second great use for the internal-combustion engine, in the airplane, made an even more radical change in transportation possible: human flight in heavier-than-air craft.
