Ford puts a car within reach of the middle class: the Model T sells for $825
For three decades, automobiles had been playthings for the wealthy: hand-built, unreliable, and priced far beyond an ordinary salary. On October 1, 1908, Ford Motor Company began selling the Model T, a car designed from the start for mass production rather than custom craftsmanship, Its price would later fall, from $780 in 1910 to $290 in 1924. Orders poured in immediately: 15,000 within 48 hours. Henry Ford had promised a car "for the great multitude."
The Model T recast the automobile as a middle-class necessity rather than a luxury, and Ford's assembly-line methods became a model other American industries soon adopted. By 1918 half the cars on American roads were Model Ts, letting workers live farther from their jobs and turning Detroit into the capital of a new industrial age.
QWhy could a cranking Model T driver get knocked flat by his own car?
Cold weather thickened the oil in the Model T's wet clutch, which could prevent the clutch discs from slipping freely even when the gearshift sat in neutral. Worn drive bands made the problem worse, letting the car creep forward on its own. A driver turning the hand crank at the front of the car could suddenly find it lurching toward him, pinning him against the crank he was still holding. Ford never fitted the Model T with a starter battery in its early years, so hand-cranking was the only way to start it, and this quirk of the planetary transmission made the ritual genuinely dangerous for the unwary owner. Electric starting did not arrive until 1919, more than a decade into production.
QHow did Ford dealers prove the Model T's front axle wouldn't snap?
Ford had the front axle drop-forged from a single piece of vanadium steel, then twisted sample axles through eight full rotations, a full 2,880 degrees, before sending them to dealerships for display. The showroom stunt let salesmen demonstrate the metal's strength right in front of skeptical farmers and shopkeepers who associated cars with fragile, expensive machinery prone to breaking on rutted roads. Vanadium steel was still a relatively new material for American manufacturing at the time, and Ford's engineers used it specifically because ordinary roads outside cities were dirt tracks that would have destroyed a lesser axle. Salesmen used the twisted axle to sell durability, not speed.
QWhy did some Model Ts end up running on railroad tracks instead of roads?
The Model T's standard 56-inch wheel track sat almost exactly on the 4-foot-8.5-inch standard railroad gauge used across most of the country, so owners frequently swapped on flanged wheels and turned the car into a motorized rail inspection vehicle, nicknamed a speeder. Ford even offered a special-order 60-inch track, advertised for Southern roads, which happened to match the old 5-foot gauge still used on a handful of remaining Southern lines left over from before the Civil War. One surviving example, kept by the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railroad in Maine, was adapted to run on track as narrow as 2 feet, though that conversion required far more extensive modification.
