On September 27, 1908, the first production Ford Model T came off the line at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. It was designed by Henry Ford, Joseph Galamb and Childe Wills, and it sold for 825 dollars. By the time production ended in May 1927, about 15 million had been built, which was more than half the world's cars at one point.
The car was not new in its engineering and was new in what it was for. It had a 177 cubic inch four-cylinder engine of about 20 horsepower, a two-speed planetary transmission, and a top speed of about 45 miles an hour. What distinguished it was that it was built for bad roads: high ground clearance, a simple and strong chassis of vanadium steel, and a suspension that could be repaired by a blacksmith. Ford's previous cars were expensive and light, and this one was meant for farmers.
The price made it. When the Model T came out, a cheap car cost about 2,000 dollars and the average annual wage in American manufacturing was under 600. By 1916 the touring car was 360 dollars and Ford was taking in about 500,000 orders a year. By 1921 it was 325 and the company had about 55 per cent of the American market.
What made the price possible was the moving assembly line, introduced at Highland Park in December 1913. It was not Ford's invention, and it existed in breweries, flour mills and the Chicago stockyards, where Ford's engineers went to look at the disassembly lines. The first application was to a flywheel magneto, where the time to assemble one fell from about 20 minutes to 5. Applied to the whole car, it cut chassis assembly from about 12 hours and 30 minutes to about 1 hour and 33 minutes.
The wage was the rest. In January 1914 Ford announced a five-dollar day, more than double the going rate, for an eight-hour day, with the factory running three shifts. It was a way of dealing with turnover, which had been about 370 per cent a year, and with absenteeism, and it worked: turnover fell to about 16 per cent. It also made Ford's workers able to buy the cars.
The company did not survive the change it made. Ford refused to bring out a new model for nineteen years, on the argument that the Model T was good enough and that the company should keep the price down, and by 1926 Chevrolet had overtaken it. The Model A came later. By then the Model T had made the United States a country of drivers.