The Fifteen Millionth Ford Model T - Full Documentary

the Model T is one of the most significant machines in industrial history what it did could only be done once it's the car that made people want cars it was that car that the average American could afford and give them the personal freedom that they've never experienced before the Model T defined the 20th century landscape and so what you're looking at is the 15 million car that changed the world the Model T started it off in 1905 you would have multiple modes of transportation so you'd have a street car there would also be horses with piano box buggies Livy horseback riders bicycles but you'd also see something different as far as vehicles to you would see a steam propelled vehicle you would see an electric vehicle we would also see petroleum-based vehicles think about this the world was not a petroleum-based community at that point in time the automobile was introduced in the United States in the 1890s and they were available from that point forward but they were very expensive and they were seen as novelties but the vehicle provided us of freedom and independence that those other forms of transportation did not most people didn't go 50 miles from their home in their whole life until they got their own car it's hard for people today to understand how transformative the Model T was it allowed you to do things you didn't know you wanted nobody knew they wanted to careen down a highway at 25 miles an hour because they could do it until they could of course the Model T eventually made Henry Ford famous throughout the country and eventually the world Henry Ford was an extraordinarily complex man Ford went in a million different directions and at 99 sides he only had this fifth or sixth grade education and was able to build the largest organization in the world Henry Ford was born July 30th 1863 about 10 miles from Detroit his father was a farmer his mother died giving birth to the eighth child so Henry Ford lost his mother when he was 12 years old wasn't a great student disliked the drudgery of the farm work at his father's farm dropped out of school walked the 10 miles to Detroit to work on the machine shops and he was 16 years old over the next several years he learned about engines he learned about foundry techniques he learned a lot about machines he got a job as an engineer with the Detroit Edison Company rose to become the chief engineer but he got interested in this newfangled technology that was kicking around horseless carriages and he built himself a horseless carriage the quadricycle it's a little two cylinder four or five horsepower engine finished on June the fourth of 1896 mr. Ford makes about a mile loop comes back for the work that morning and just knows that he can build a car people become aware of the work he's doing his boss invited him to a convention of Medicine engineers he is introduced to Thomas Edison it draws a picture of the car on a napkin Edison is said to have slammed his fist down on the table and said young man that's the right ideas stick with it mr. Ford said that no man up to that time had given him any encouragement and that pound on the table was worth whorls to him so he comes back and he keeps experimenting he started a company called Ford Motor Company he designed a series of cars his model in became the best-selling car in the country so by that time he had a good sense of what the public actually wanted to buy and could buy he'd had some failures behind it he had two failed car companies before Ford Motor Company he'd learn from his mistakes he also viewed the work that he was doing as play and he surrounded himself with people who were of like mine he had a very magnetic personality people who worked with him remembering him several years later said he was able to somehow attract people to work with them and then to buy into his vision a lot of manufacturers were thinking you know let's just build an expensive car we'll make a lot of profit on each car we sell and will target the rich that's our market Henry Ford moved this idea forward to create something that was not just a luxury automobile a Cadillac by this time is $1,700 really care for the wealthy something he always tried to do throughout his life and something that he thought was important for the malti was to improve the life of the farmer he grew up on that farm he understood that it was a very lonely isolated life your nearest neighbor might be two miles away which again was an incredible distance before the automobile Ford realized no we've got this massive untapped market there's no reason that middle class lower class people wouldn't want a car they would want all these advantages as well we've got to build a quality automobile one that is affordable enough for everyone no he knew that those farmers would buy such a car if he could make it and in 1907 Henry Ford told a couple of his people I want you to go up to the third floor I want you to wall off an area look double doors in so he get a car chassis in and out put a good lock on it I'm gonna go in there we're gonna design a new model with the secret experimental room being constructed in 1907 he would have been in there quite a bit working on the design of the car that put the world on wheels the Model T at the time the Model T was being designed I think this was Henry Ford Edie's best Henry Ford could be a difficult guy to work for he was demanding but at that point he was still open minded and he would listen to other people's ideas which is what you need in a creative process like these guys were on the cutting edge and it was exciting to be in that room designing this thing what the ideas flying the gentleman named Joseph gallim is one of the about dozen or less people that were allowed in the experimental room he said that for about ten months they would work from seven or eight o'clock in the morning till eight or nine o'clock at night continuously on the design of the car they wanted to build a car that was going to be evolutionary but it ended up being revolutionary the Model T provided not only an expensive car but also a vehicle that was a very well-built and frankly state-of-the-art car when it was introduced in the fall of 1908 the Model T is a beautiful example of a bunch of different ideas coming together they did a completely new engine this was the first single block four-cylinder engine 20 quarts power very very peppy it had a separable cylinder head so much easier to work on every Model T was delivered with a set of tools and you were expected to learn how to repair your own car you can undo the bolts take the cylinder head off there were the vowels there was the head you could do the maintenance put them back together and go on your way that's the way every internal combustion is now in 1907 hardly anybody was doing that it was really difficult to do they managed to pull it off so it was a big selling point he had this flywheel magneto which was all enclosed running in oil so you carried your electric generator along with you the flywheel magneto is really one of the singular characteristics of the Model T engine the Model T was actually driven and shifted with your feet Ford used what we call a planetary transmission the planetary transmission was even by 1907 regarded by many automakers as kind of behind the times they were going to sliding gear transmissions which were very hard to shift the planetary transmission was easy to learn to drive so it opened up this whole set of potential customers who'd never driven a car before seems like everyone's on leave but we've got to do something about those roads at the beginning of the century we had probably the worst roads in the industrialized world so any car that was going to drive on these roads had to be able to take a lot of punishment but one way to do that is to make the car big and strong and heavy that also meant expensive there's another approach make the car really flexible don't fight the boats go with them there's one car that takes you anywhere you want to go the model team strong sturdy with a will of its own the Model T frame is so flexible that if two people get at the opposite end by hand they can twist it a real key to the Model T was lightweight and before it made use of an alloy known as vanadium steel very light but incredibly strong and flexible so things like the chassis and the crankshaft could be thinner and therefore lighter but still be strong there's no end to what you can do when you own a car when the Model T came out he had to tell his dealers that you stop taking orders that they couldn't keep up that's how popular it was from the very very beginning it changed America almost overnight Monti was the most successful car of all time Henry Ford by 1924 is listed as one of the three richest men in the world at over a billion dollars by the 1920s everybody who wants a car basically has one this is the first car that many Americans own it was becoming the universal vehicle the Model T absolutely built its way into the popular culture not just of its time but thereafter there are a lot of great songs that were written about the Model T at the time still the Model T's in popular culture so we cruise people don't realize the impact with the automobile had on our dating and courtship rituals you know prior to the car if a young couple wanted to see each other typically the young man would come to the young lady's house and they would sit there in her parlor they were lucky perhaps the parents would go to another room or they might be able to go sit out on the front porch but they now had a way to leave the home and basically have a private space parking at the drive-in or out at Inspiration Point we take that for granted today but of course they didn't exist before the automobile if you're gonna try to tell people what the models he did you know in a nutshell the the quick way to do it is say you know this is the car that put the world on wheels but what does that mean and we had ways to get around before the automobile horses generally don't move much faster than a person can walk that's about four miles an hour if you have a vehicle that can travel 15 miles an hour all of a sudden you vastly increase the area that people keep traveling you opened up the possibility of even pleasure travel that's started connect people where you could go see relatives II you know maybe three four times a year you could probably celebrate birthdays where you couldn't do that before they could go visit friends just socialize they could go into town not once a week or once every two weeks but once every other day or once every day if they needed to get supplies I think two of the great Broadway musical The Music Man where the the salesman talked about the trouble with their trade in 1912 and they specifically call out the Ford Model T is changing the way these consumers are buying things they now go into town to buy cans rather than waiting for the traveling salesman maybe trouble me the people want to go we want to get want to get get up and go now I don't have to go out to train schedule I can get in my car and I can go on my schedule that in itself that would be enough if that's all it did the rest of it was unanticipated the age of the automobile changes nearly every aspect of American life when it first came out in late 1908 it cost eight hundred and fifty dollars which was not cheap it was kind of maybe a little lower middle price but it was the best value on the market then Ford Motor Company set out on a relentless drive to lower the price they kept improving the production methods they kept changing the parts on the car to make them cheaper to produce Henry Ford said that every time he dropped the price by a dollar they gained a thousand customers so for instance the brass headlights went away by fourteen the brass radiator went away in the middle of the model year of 1916 and the price continued to come down at one point you could buy Model T for $295 of course in Ford's desire to drive the price of the Model T down that eventually led them to stumble on to the whole assembly line moving assembly lines had been around for a long time and again this was the case where Ford was looking at other industries oddly enough he was looking at the meatpacking industry where they would bring in animal carcasses and they would move them on a line workers would take parts off of those animals and then by the end of the line you have meat in cans Ford said what if we turn that around and add parts to the vehicle as it moves through the plan so he did not invent that he did not invent interchangeable parts they had been around for more than 100 years what Ford did was really perfect the assembly line for making something that was highly complicated in the Model T had something like five thousand parts and it was a major accomplishment each man on the line became a specialist he did one thing and he did it perfectly and passed the work along to the next man after they moved to the Highland Park plant by the beginning of 1914 the final moving assembly line reduced the time it took to assemble a Model T from twelve and a half hours down to 93 minutes it is said by 1924 they were down to 12 minutes the way the Model T was built with the moving assembly line affected all forms of production in United States over time consumer goods become more available at a lower price because of the assembly line that spawned by the Model T assembly line work Henry Ford found to his chagrin it was work that most people didn't want to do it was relentless and it was even more relentless in the early days you had these craftsmen and we're assembling the entire card now I was standing one place on the line doing the same operation monotonous Lee for nine or ten hours a day six days a week they were quitting in droves so Ford announced on January the 5th of 1914 that a week later on January 12th wages would be raised from two dollars and 34 cents a day for a production worker to $5 a day making us workers the first in the world that can afford the cars they were building nobody made that much money so many people wanted to get that they crowded the Highland Park plant and the regular workers could not get in they had to bring out the fire hoses squirt them all to give them away there are always workers at Ford who are skilled workers who were making more than $5 a day the people who were eligible for that elevation to $5 a day were really the unskilled workers and that's what made it so amazing is you could be unskilled and have the possibility of making this kind of money other industrialists called him a communist socialist he was going to bankrupt the company and destroy the US economy the news of the $5 day spread across the world and Ford had a huge influx of immigrants from all over Europe most of them not speaking English Ford set up an English school taught them English you also actually had to qualify for that by by your behavior so he created what they called a sociological department that literally came and inspected your house to see if you were worthy of this five dollars a day there was a huge dollop of paternalism here that no one would accept today Ford really was trying to encourage families to spend it wisely spend it on the family spend it responsibly be a responsible citizen that's what he wanted you've also created a relatively high wage for these people who can turn around and buy lots of stuff with it tens of thousands of men on one single payroll have money for themselves and for their family to spend much of the rise of the middle class in the 20th century is the fruits of this relationship between the assembly line and pay the Model T begins to make suburbs possible beyond the limits of a fixed rail line when you leave 1915 and you go into 1920s people are building on the outskirts of towns not only in towns and then suburbia in the future and then in post-war America boom [Music] and created opportunities for people who live in areas where they wanted to live and then drive to work where they wanted to work so Ford is actually changing the world as he knows it by creating this new middle class it's important to remember Ford had no concept of these ultimate consequences what Henry Ford was also creating and he didn't realize it he was creating large numbers of relatively unskilled people in the same industry if they decided that it was in their interest to get together and organize and maybe withhold their labor they could bring any one of those industries to their knees as long as the wages were being paid and everything was going along they didn't do that but comes the Great Depression and companies can no longer pay these wages the workers then begin to organize and then ultimately these unions have enormous power and so the development of this humble automobile unwittingly created the conditions that gave rise to industrial unions and even Henry Ford who hated labor unions ultimately had to sign a contract with the United Auto Workers the Model T had an enormous effect on the world at large it was the perfect car at the perfect time it just hit sort of all the points that people wanted and bingo over time they sold 15 million of them the Model T was in production for nearly 20 years introduced in 1908 built right up through may of 1927 a lot of Ford's executives and his engineers realized even by 1922-23 that the car was a dinosaur it was time to be replaced by 1927 it really was obsolete one reason he's stuck with the Model T is that he didn't like the idea of people buying all these luxuries that he didn't think we're really necessary he thought the Model T was on the car you ever really needed the world had changed it's the roaring 20s and people now are buying cars and reflect their personality their lifestyle and so they were looking elsewhere so Ford finally and reluctantly was convinced it was time to let the car go and within Ford Motor Company there was a realization that this is a special event this is the passing of an era they had already done commemorations of the five millionth to ten millionth Ford they were all now up to 15 million something more than 50 million were made but symbolically this was the end of the Model T may 26 1927 the 15 million throttle T rolled off the assembly line in Highland Park all of the executives and the VIPs came out Henry Ford and Edsel Ford were there to watch this car come off the line if we had to describe the change over that last day when the 15 million Model T was built in one word I think that word would probably be bittersweet Edsel Ford Henry son who was officially the president of the company was driving the car off the line Henry was sitting in the passenger seat there's a wonderful picture of Henry and insulin Edsel looks happy he's finally glad to see this car laid to rest he's finally convinced his father they're going to lose leadership in the automobile history if they don't replace the Model T Henry on the other hand it's got this pensive look on his face because he doesn't really know what the future brings he spent much of his life to come to this point where he's created this car in this company in this production system and now it's all gonna have to change Henry Ford has given in and it's probably very Alan collie very upset about his baby the Model T going away they drive it from there to the Ford engineering laboratory and Dearborn where it's displayed with one of the first 1909 Model T's and Henry Ford's first car the quadricycle you know this is it this is where we started this is where we are now and we're ready to move on to the next thing the day previous the engine was made some of the original workers were there to strike the 15,000,000 onto the engine each one had an opportunity at one of those digits [Music] I would describe this car as a window into 1927 this is a preserved example of the vehicle just as it came off Ford assembly line granted it was a special vehicle and that was the last one but it's not as though they did anything different in the production techniques it was still built the same way as any of those other cars at that time it's hard to find original examples of these vehicles but this is one so this car becomes out of the textbook or the reference source for people who want to find out how did they do that all those years ago the chassis the engine the transmission the flywheel Magneto it's all virtually the same as the first Model T's that were produced in 1908 this car really never lived life out in the wild it was always held back by Ford realizing it was a special piece needed to be preserved it was brought over here to Greenfield Village is on display at the Mack Avenue plant and it's been out here and been at the village since 1927 Greenfield Village is a must-see open-air museum there you get to rhyme in interventive Model T people giving them sometimes and say oh this is a nice scrapbook or this is a pretty well both copy no those are real cars [Music] the 15,000,000 multi is significant because in that era making 15 million cars was a paradigm change it literally changed our lives it is an object that brings people together is the purpose of that 15 million quality is question of what is the next Model T in the world what is that next paradigm change [Music] you you

Channel: Hagerty Drivers Foundation

Views: 130,662

Rating: 4.928287 out of 5

Keywords: drivehistory, model t

Id: c8ObnK8RSU0

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020