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The Twenties
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The Roaring Twenties Key Events Maps Transcript Webography

Page 1234

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Henry Ford and his Model T.

[picture of Professor Miller]

Miller: The 1920s. It's the Jazz Age, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, the Age of Babbitts, Bootlegging, and Bathtub Gin. Americans were speeding up, moving out, buying more, having fun, dreaming bigger. It's a decade we're drawn back to, because it's here that we start to see ourselves, that Americans become recognizably modern. And no story describes this cultural transformation better than the story of the automobile revolution, and the rise of Los Angeles, the first auto-age city.

Henry Ford was at the center of these great changes, and he wasn't modest about his place in history. As he once said: "I invented the modern age." Now that's pushing it. But this cranky cultural reactionary, who, at the height of the Jazz Age, tried to revive square dancing and country fiddling, was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the Industrial Age.

His Model T Ford began this country's love affair with the car and turned America into an automobile civilization. But Ford's greatest innovation wasn't the Model T. It was the system he developed for making it, and thousands of other products. This was modern mass production, the single most important factor in making America the economic and military powerhouse of the 20th century.

Ford's system of belt-driven assembly line production is arguably the most important innovation of the Industrial Age. Ford, in fact, coined the word, "mass production." Until he did, in 1926, it was called Fordism. All of us are products, in one way or another, of Fordism.

[picture of Henry Ford]




His wasn't the first car. Europeans like Karl Benz had been making cars for at least a decade. But Ford's could go 20 miles per hour, a terrific speed back then; and it was reliable and didn't cost that much. As he built more cars and formed his own company with the backing of Detroit capitalists, Ford developed the idea that would make him the most powerful industrialist in America.

Mass Production & the Assembly Line

In 1900, most cars were rich men's toys. Ford wanted to build an inexpensive car for farmers like his Irish father. It would be rugged, reliable, and designed for rough country roads; and it would liberate rural people from the isolation that had nearly driven him crazy on his father's farm.

Ford was convinced there was only one way to make such a car. He'd fix on a design, freeze it, and then work on ways to reproduce it year after year. As he said, "The way to make cars is to make one automobile just like another automobile; just as one pen is like another pen, or one match is like another match when it comes from a match factory."


[picture of a Model T being assembled]


To drive down the price of his car he'd have to make lots of them. The profits would come from volume, not pricing. And that meant speeding up the work by simplifying it. Adam Smith had called it the division of labor.

By 1914, Ford and his engineers had installed a belt-driven movable production line that took the work to the worker, and then carried that man's work to another worker, and so, until a shining Model T rolled off the line. It was continuous flow production. No one had ever done this before.



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