January 20, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, while Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he fundamentally changed the world's relationship with the automobile to what it is today. Here's the story of the man who claimed to have invented the modern age.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartMedia app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our Next story is about the man whose legacy sits
(00:35):
in your garage. Our storyteller is Richard Snow. Snow worked
at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was
its editor in chief for seventeen years. He's the author
of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Henry Ford is among the strangest, in some ways the
least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal
of the latter part of his life building on some
empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a vast museum devoted to
American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected
(01:22):
on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all
his life. I don't think he admired any living person more.
And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey,
along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived
in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt, so
(01:46):
the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And
when he went came. When he went to get the
right Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the pretty little
Queen Anne house the brothers had grown up in, and
it was a wooden building stood on stone foundation. He
had the mortar knocked out between the stones and reed
(02:07):
grounds so it would be on its same cement. This
tells a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain.
So a whole museum tells a lot about the man.
It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a
very interesting place to be.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
He loved mechanisms of all kinds.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
He loved watches, so in the village there are three watchmakers.
But there's no attorney's office. There's no nice little country bank,
because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And
there's something else about that place, I felt. When Ford
was a young man, and all the time he was
(02:47):
working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to
draw people to him, to trust him, to make them
work for him and do it happily. One of his
early friends called that the magnet. Asked Henry, he's got
the magnet? And I felt a dim tug of that
magnet's pull all the time I was in his museum,
(03:11):
and that's what made me want to write a book
about him. But of course I started the book with
considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more
about than Henry Ford, and this wasn't help. When I
told a friend what I was going to be writing about,
and he said, isn't that story about as well known
(03:34):
as the Nativity?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
That's certainly what I've been worried about.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
But after I spent a while with him, I began
thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well known after all,
or actually, rather that it was so well known that
we don't even realize it was his story. What I
mean is that everybody knows the name, and the comment
about history being made that he built a lot of cars,
(03:59):
But the true breath of his accomplishment is now so
much a part of the world we inhabit, that his
influences around us like the air we breathe, and as invisible.
Every century or so, our republic has been remade by
a new technology. One hundred and seventy years ago it
(04:19):
was the railroad, and in our time it's the microprocessor.
These technologies do more than change our habits. They change
the way we think. Thorreau listening we saw the railroads
come in listening to the trains steaming past, Waalden Pond wrote,
have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad
(04:39):
was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in
the depot than ever they did in the stage office?
And of course anyone over the age of twenty younger
than that, And it's simply your environment knows what the
computer and the internet are doing now. Well in between
the steam locomotive and the mac came Henry Ford's model T.
(05:05):
And when Ford was quite quite quite elderly, he was
speaking with a dearborn high school boy who was doing
a article on him for the high school newspaper. And
Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse and
square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful these
(05:25):
old days were. And the boy wasn't an easy sell
on this, and he said, well, that's all very well,
mister Ford, but we live in the modern age. Ord said,
young man, don't tell me about the modern age. I
invented the modern age. Now you'll notice he didn't say
(05:50):
I made a hell of a lot of cars. He's
said basically, he had fashioned the world he and the
boy were living in. And it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim,
and I've come to think it's very largely true. There
is a mystery to him. Certainly his close associates felt so.
(06:11):
Almost every one of his high lieutenants. It's interesting reading
them one after another. They'd all say, well, we worked
on this, and we were very close on that. But
I never really understood him. I never understood mister Ford.
Nobody called him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent
years working with Ford, wrote, in spite of a long
(06:32):
and fairly intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one
mental picture of which I can say this is the
man as he is, or as I know him. There
are in him lights so high and shadows so deep
that I cannot get the whole of him in proper focus.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
At the same time, and you're listening to one heck
of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller,
Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Forward. When we
come back, more of the man who invented the Modern
Age here on our American Stories. Plead habibe here the
(07:33):
host of our American Stories. Every day on this show,
we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories
from our big cities and small towns. But we truly
can't do the show without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
you love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:55):
a lot. Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give
and we continue with our American Stories and with Richard Snow.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The
(08:17):
Rise of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
A reporter who met him in nineteen fifteen was harsher
about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory
trick which may be played with one of the Ford
portraits photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered,
a benign, gently humorous expression dominates.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
When the other side is.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly malevolent calculation.
This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy, hollow eyes,
the pale eyes one would associate with a visionary or
a killer visionarian killer. Ford was full of contradictions right
(09:03):
from the very start, well whatever his mysteries. By the
time that reporter wrote that nineteen fifteen, a great many
people were trying to figure him out. He was on
his way to becoming the richest American, and once Theodore
Roosevelt died in nineteen nineteen, he was easily the most famous.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
This man who lived to read about the atomic bombs
falling on Japan was born three weeks after the Battle
of Gettysburg July eighteen sixty three, on a farm in Dearborn.
His father had been born an Irish tenant on an
Irish tenant farm, and he always seems to have felt
a sort of grateful surprise that he now owned not
(09:50):
only a farm of his own, but a prosperous one.
Henry fell a little differently. He loved everything about the
farm except the farming.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
He said.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
My early biest recollection is that, considering the results, there
was too much work on the place.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
That is the way I still feel about farming.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There are clouds of folklore about Ford's boyhood, a lot
of them sent up by Ford himself, but it does
seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting
onto machinery burdens that people had borne since biblical times.
He said, even when I was very young, I suspected
(10:29):
that farm work might somehow be done in a better way.
That is what took me into mechanics. Although my mother
always said I was a born mechanic. He very early
began taking things apart to see how they would work,
and he always got them back together. But what he
took apart and got back together often ran better. A
(10:50):
neighbor said that every clock in the Ford household shuddered
when it saw it coming. But he did more harm
than good with the clocks, and by the time he
was twelve he was repairing neighbors watches. Now the next year,
when he was thirteen, his mother died, and he expressed
the loss in you know, the best way he knew how.
He said, the house was like a watch without a mainspring.
(11:16):
And it was perhaps and nearness of her death that
made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he
called the most important, biggest event of my early years.
His father was driving him into town in his wagon
family wagon when they came upon a steam farm engine
moving their way. Here's how clearly Ford described it sixty
(11:38):
years later. I remember that engine as though I had
seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle
other than horse drawn that I had ever seen. It
was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and
was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels.
I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses,
(11:58):
but this one had a chain that made a between
the engine and the rear wheels. The engineer was very
glad to explain the whole affair.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
He was proud of it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the
propelling wheel and the belt put on to drive the machinery.
He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions
a minute, and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running.
And here Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive,
(12:28):
makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his
life took a course that would change everyone else's. This
last he means the engine running in neutral while not
driving the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in
the modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines,
which are easily stopped and started, but it became very
(12:50):
important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which
took me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
My toys were all tools, he wrote. When he was
in his sixties, he added, and they still are.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
But of course, as a teenager he had to learn
to use those tools, and he couldn't have found himself
in a better place to do that. Detroit had standing
timber all around. There was lake shipping, there was iron ore,
and the city took advantage of all of this. When
Henry Ford turned seventeen and left home to go, there
already had one hundred and twenty thousand residents, ten railroads
(13:30):
feeding it, and it was home to a thousand different
manufacturing businesses, machine shops scattered everywhere. Ford spent a few
months in business school there, and that was the only
time in his life when his handle writing was legible,
But his real education came from the machine shops. He
held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he
(13:52):
worked with. He had an almost instinctive sense of machinery.
Even at the end of his life, he could look
at ten identical arborets laid out on a bench and
point to the one that had something wrong with it. Yeah,
and he loved being among machines. But a few years
later he was back in Dearborn on the farm. He'd
been lured there by his father with the promise of
(14:13):
forty acres of land and his eighty acres. His father
still hoped Henry would become a farmer too. Ford didn't
want the farm land, but he went because he did
want to be perceived as a more stable citizen. And
the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen
in love with an eighteen year old named Clara Bryant.
(14:34):
He'd met her at a New Year's Eve dance. He
loved dancing all his life, and he married her in
eighteen eighty eight, and she turned out to be a
great choice. She was steady and staunch and brave, and
had such complete faith in him that he took to
calling her.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
The Great Believer.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And being married to Henry Cannamin easy for her at
first because Over the next ten years, they lived in
ten rental houses, and all during that time Ford was
experimenting with creating with a machine that would do what
the steam traction engine had, which was drive itself. He
knew all about steam engines by now and decided there
was simply too heavy to power what he had in mind,
(15:13):
so he began to look to gasoline and the internal
combustion engine. He started building a car in the woodshed
behind his rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too
modest to think. It was actually a rather substantial little
brick building. You can see it or a replica of
it today in the Greenfield village. It was a lonely
and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch.
(15:36):
When Ford needed a carburetor, he had to invent one.
He didn't even have a name for it. The word
hadn't come into the language. Shed and he worked on
his first car for months and felt it was finally
ready in June of eighteen ninety six. And it gives
a good idea of the intensity of purpose with whichy,
the concentration with which he worked that it was only
(15:57):
when he was ready to take it out on its
trial run that he discovered it was too big to
fit through the woodshed door. While he fixed that with
an axe and got his car started and coaxed his
too cylinder engine into life, and drove off into his future.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And hours.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The car worked, and he improved it and finally got
it running well enough to convince Detroit lumber tycoon to
finance what Ford called the.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Detroit Automobile Company.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was
to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later,
Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said,
of course, there was no demand for an automobile. There
never is for a new product.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story
of Henry Ford. My toys were all tools, he recalled.
They still are, and my goodness they were. And Detroit
at the turn of the century we're talking about eighteen nineties.
In the time that Ford went there and started to
work there, there were one hundred thousand plus citizens. Ten
(17:15):
railroad lines fed the city, and there were all kinds
of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course, Ford, while
this is living large, being amongst all of those people,
making all of those machines. And it's interesting the first
ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals, working on
(17:36):
his car for months. And as he put it, of
course there was no demand for the automobile. There never
is for a new product. And he was cutting new ground.
Henry Ford. When we come back more of the story
of the man who invented the Modern Age here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:11):
and Richard Snow, the author of I Invented the Modern Age,
The Rise of Henry Ford, Let's pick up where we
last left off, and I think.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything
on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford said
a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course,
there was no demand for an automobile. There never is
for a new product. Matt Run's totally countered to the
(18:43):
old saw about invention being the in the necessity being
the mother of invention, and this very often it's exactly
the other way around. Invention being the mother of necessity
is you know, nobody wanted an iPhone until they.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Had one in their hand.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Anyway, Ford got his start company started, and seems instantly
to have lost interest in it. I just wandered away,
wouldn't show up.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Nobody knows why.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars. More likely
he resented working for anybody. He never liked having a boss,
and shed something that He then went on to ruin
a second company, and he was still able for a
third throw of the dice to find a circle smaller
(19:31):
but a real circle of investors for his next enterprise,
which he found in nineteen three with twenty eight thousand
dollars capital paid in. This one bore his own name,
the Ford Motor Company, and it would last now. His
investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor Company to build
expensive cars. In nineteen seven, the Packard Gray Wolf sports car,
(19:54):
though that term wouldn't exist for another forty years, cost
ten thousand dollars, and a nice suburban house might go
for eighteen hundred dollars. Now, work that calculation out today,
and if prices have stayed relative, the house would cost
maybe one point two million, and a Dodge Viper would
cost six million dollars. So of course it was more
(20:14):
desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than something
worth hundreds of dollars, Ford leaved exactly the opposite.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Make the car cheaper.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to
farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly
ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said,
and told one of the backers of his new company,
is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one
pin is like another pin when it comes from a
pin factory, or a match like another match when it
(20:47):
comes from a match factory.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
But how to do it? How to do it?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers.
Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life,
or rather the virtue of loyalty and steadiness that the
order that he saw in it. The car would be
fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair,
rugged enough to negotiated the truly dreadful roads at the time,
(21:13):
versatile enough to be hooked up to a band, a fresher,
or a pump. Now by nineteen four he was a success,
but he saw hidden inside every car he built, the
ghost of a much greater car. And in nineteen eight
he called together as most trusted executives and started designing
one in a sealed off room in his factory. And
(21:34):
here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it
ever would, and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to
a creative end. A contradictions because the car he was
building would be at once as perfectly simple as he
could make it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance,
have four cylinders, when no inexpensive car had more than two,
(21:58):
and the engines in multi cylinder cars tended just to
be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain. Ford
wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal,
and while his helpers were trying to figure out how
to do this, Ford had another thought, slice off the top.
That is, have the engine in a single casting with
(22:19):
its four cylinders wholly accessible, and then fit the cylinder
head on top of it like a hat and bolt
that down. And that's how car engines are built to
this day. The steering wheel and American cars and all
cars was almost always on the right ancient tradition on
that because the steam locomotive engineers sat head end right hand.
(22:42):
In his cabin, Ford thought it belonged on the left,
put it there, and there it stays, unless you're English.
The materials in the body would be cheapest he could
make them, but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel,
which was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new
to the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet
from his first Model A and now is currently selling
(23:04):
the Model S. So we named the new car the
Model T and put it on the market in October
of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in eighteen seventy nine, a
Rochester patent attorney named George Selden looked at a gasoline
engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go,
and drafted a patent said that it would be attached
(23:27):
to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say
how that would happen, and then he sent it into
the patent office. But in those days you could put
off a patent for seventeen years by making tiny modifications
to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive
basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing, and
(23:49):
then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of
the automobile, and he got money backing him and started
to exact ransom from all the car makers, even young
General motors finally rolled over, and only Ford foughtum fought on,
fought them alone. Patent litigation was extremely expensive. Ford was
(24:11):
spending two dollars a car on the but he stuck
it out right till the end, and he won, and
that and that there he got.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, he actually got.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Headlines that read things like God Bless Henry Ford. Now
the bottle t is no longer any sort of force
in our lives, But I think it refuses to look
placid or quainter to acquire that gloss of appeal that
the that time puts on so many ugly things that
(24:39):
high on lovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the
boxy antiques power to change a world. The car was
tall because the ruts were deep, thanks in part to
the vanadium steel. It was both tough and light, only
eleven hundred pounds, and it could scramble over marshy terrain
that would mobilize heavier cars for what became so ubiquitous
(25:01):
an American fixed her. It had many eccentricities. Beginning moved forward,
called a planetary transmission collector friend of mine who owns
a model. He told me once that you could leave
it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal it because nobody
could figure out how to drive it. Three pedals sprouted
from the floor. One on the right was to break
(25:22):
the one in the middle put the car in the reverse.
The one on the left made it go forward, and
low gear went pressed to the floor, and then high
gear when released. The driving gears were all engaged by
bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened. But with
all those petals on the floor, no one was an accelerator.
That was a lever on the steering wheel, which you
thumbed downward to feed more gas to the engine. And
(25:44):
when you wanted to know how much more gas you
had to feed, you left to feed. You stopped, climbed out,
lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the gas cap
beneath it, and poked in the tank with a wooden
stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Instead of inches.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
But for all the fussing the car required, it went,
it went, and it was as dependable as a cast
iron stove.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of
I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Go and buy this book. You won't put it down.
And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated. No
one understood the man. That's true, he probably didn't understand himself,
but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. And
(26:35):
he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt. As
to entrepreneurs throughout history, the Right Brothers we learned from
David McCullough had that same kind of courage, and not
that manufacturing excellence. By the way, mass marketing and mass
manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Wright brothers.
(26:55):
And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking
about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally everyone
was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford
trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T
had many eccentricities, it worked and it was as dependable
as a cast iron stove. When we come back more
(27:19):
of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here on our
American stories. And we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
the story of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we
last left off with Author Richard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Snow Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told
it the President Wilson when he met him about the
farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have
him buried in his Modelty and the lawyer no reason
for this, The man said, because I ain't been a
hole yet that it couldn't get me out of.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
And when it.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Was time to stay put and do some farm work,
you could take off a rear wheel and hook it
up to a thresher sawmill. The owner was expected to
know how to do that, and indeed to maintain the
car generally. Midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson, who owned the
succession of Model Ts in the twenties, wrote about this.
He said, the whole car was simple, accessible. In the evening,
(28:30):
you could tighten the bands, look at the timer, clean
the plugs. A weekend would do nicely to reline the bands,
or grind the valves and clean the carbon, or maybe
tighten the rods. A four day vacation was plenty to
overhaul the engine or the rear end. If any of
these jobs was a bit beyond your experience, you had
merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew, but
would come over and help. The rapifications of this were
(28:55):
far reaching and frequently unexpected.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
In the Second World War.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
For example, Germans were often superior to their American counterparts,
but that advantage was canceled by how quickly a disabled
sherman could get itself prepared and back into action, and
the Germans were baffled and dismayed. Defined that, among his
many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had created a whole generation
(29:21):
of mechanics.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
But perhaps the Model.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
T's most profound impact, what made it the single most
significant automobile ever built, was social. In nineteen eighteen, a
Georgia farm wife for Henry Ford, your car lifted us
out of the mud.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
It brought joy into our lives.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
The Model T broke the age old isolation of the
farm in less than a decade, and wherever it went
it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways
and roadside fixtures like motels and of course, gas stations,
and a new way of thinking about and time. And
in the nineteen thirties John Steinbeck looked back with a
(30:05):
sort of sardonic awe on what had done in just
half of his lifetime. Now, of course, the Model T
could never have had such an effect had it not
been deployed in enormous numbers, and this, even more than
the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A
number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars
(30:26):
a day during the Model t's early years, and that
demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture. But there is a
fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production, and it
was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age.
The Model T was a success. Ford could sell as
many as he could make. The way to make them,
(30:48):
he believed, lay in precision and speed. Precision meant part
so scrupulously manufactured that one would always fit where it belonged,
without any time consuming shaping or filing, a speed lay
and breaking down the manufacturing process into every smaller segments.
(31:09):
This began in the spring of nineteen thirteen with the magneto,
which generated the electricity to fire the plugs. It took
a worker twenty minutes to assemble one. When one worker
put it together put another together. Ford separated the process
into twenty nine steps, and rather than one worker doing
twenty nine things, twenty nine workers would do one thing
(31:32):
as the parts moved past their stations on what was
the first modern assembly line. Before it had taken twenty minutes.
Now it took thirteen minutes. So with the engine, then
the transmission, then the upholstery, the axles, and the radiators,
finally the whole car itself all was Ford said, bring
the work to the man, not the man to the work.
(31:54):
When Ford first unveiled his Model TY, it took twelve
and a half hours to make one. A little more
and a decade later, it took exactly a minute before
the Model T was done. A car was coming off
the line every ten seconds. Ford made his millionth Model
T in nineteen fifteen, his two millionth in nineteen seventeen,
and so on for a while, a million cars a year,
(32:15):
and then in the early twenties two million. And he
always lowered the price. He flew directly in the face
of all principles of monopoly capitalism, which of course hold
that if you have a desirable item that you alone
own and other people want, you raised the price. Not Ford,
he said, every time I shave a dollar off the price,
(32:37):
I gain a thousand new customers. So the car had
begun at eight hundred and fifty dollars and ended two
decades later at two hundred ninety five dollars. In nineteen nine,
the company made a profit of the two hundred and
twenty dollars and eleven cents on each car. With the
moving assembly line up and running, the profit fell to
(32:57):
ninety nine thirty four, and that was fine with Ford.
And then in nineteen fourteen he announced that he was
raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars
a day. This was twice the going rate for industrial work,
and it caused a sensation. He understood that it would
be big news. Think he would I don't think he
quite prepared for the astonishing response that got. People came
(33:20):
in from all over the country, and in fact he
finally had to discourage him by saying he would only
hire people who had lived in or around Detroit for
two years or more. Ford's workers became his customers. No
man who bolted together a packard gray Wolf could ever
own one. Every Ford worker who wanted to could own
a Ford. So Ford also created a modern cycle of
(33:44):
consumerism in which we still live during the Great Black
diaspora after the First World War up north to Detroit.
The African Americans knew there were two shops, only two
shops that were worth of applying to. Packard might give
you a job, and Ford probably would give you a job.
And he actually had blacks running gangs of whites with
(34:09):
the power to fire them, which I think was not
I can't think of another American industry in nineteen twenty
four where that would have where that would have applied
at all.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
And in the end he had to give it up.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
The last Model T came off the line, probably six
or seven years later than it should have. In nineteen
twenty seven, Ford had made fifteen and a half million
of them, and when production ceased there were more than
eleven millions still on the road. And of course there
was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow
the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it
(34:44):
was the biggest story of nineteen twenty seven. Car sales
dropped everywhere in a boom time as people waited to
see what was coming. It took the factory, of course,
several months toy tool and when the new car, Ford
had started over fresh by calling it the mo was
announced that December. The New York World said the excitement
(35:05):
could hardly have been greater had Powaw, the sacred white
Elephant of Burma elected to sit for seven days on
the flagpole of the Woolworth Building. It sold well eight
hundred thousand in his first year, but Chevrolet sold a
million that same year, and the Ford Motor Company would
never again be making one out of every two cars
(35:27):
on the American road in any event. That was Henry Ford.
How really to assess the true impact of this man,
It may still be too early. We're certainly still immersed
in the modern world he created. I think Will Rogers,
(35:47):
many years, many years ago, came pretty close when he
said to Henry Ford, with none of his usual folksiness,
it may take one hundred years to tell whether you
hurt us more than you helped us.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
But you certainly didn't leave us where you found us.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing and production
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Richard Snow What a storyteller and what a story to tell.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The
Rise of Henry Ford. And there's so much to unpack here,
my goodness. The story is about World War Two, that
(36:35):
we'd always heard that Americans could just get under the
hood of anything and fix it. Well, this happened because
of Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation of
auto mechanics and tinkerers. I mean, to this day, that's
why there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of
what he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process,
(36:58):
the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to
the man, and of course bringing the speed with which
he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours
to one minute. Ten years later and millions and millions
rolled off the assembly line, all totaled fifteen and a
(37:19):
half million Model tees. And the thing I think most
important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism
and monopoly is that he did that thing no one
expected someone with such market dominance to do, which should
generally be rip off the American public and raise prices forward,
(37:40):
always working to lower the price. And at the same
time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers,
doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers. That
Will Rogers line was the best of all. It may
take one hundred years to tell whether you helped us
or hurt us. You sure didn't leave us where you
(38:01):
found us. The story of Henry Ford, the story of
the Modern Age, and the man who invented it. Here
on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the
iHeartMedia app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our Next story is about the man whose legacy sits
(00:35):
in your garage. Our storyteller is Richard Snow. Snow worked
at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was
its editor in chief for seventeen years. He's the author
of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Henry Ford is among the strangest, in some ways the
least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal
of the latter part of his life building on some
empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a vast museum devoted to
American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected
(01:22):
on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all
his life. I don't think he admired any living person more.
And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey,
along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived
in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt, so
(01:46):
the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And
when he went came. When he went to get the
right Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the pretty little
Queen Anne house the brothers had grown up in, and
it was a wooden building stood on stone foundation. He
had the mortar knocked out between the stones and reed
(02:07):
grounds so it would be on its same cement. This
tells a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain.
So a whole museum tells a lot about the man.
It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a
very interesting place to be.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
He loved mechanisms of all kinds.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
He loved watches, so in the village there are three watchmakers.
But there's no attorney's office. There's no nice little country bank,
because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And
there's something else about that place, I felt. When Ford
was a young man, and all the time he was
(02:47):
working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to
draw people to him, to trust him, to make them
work for him and do it happily. One of his
early friends called that the magnet. Asked Henry, he's got
the magnet? And I felt a dim tug of that
magnet's pull all the time I was in his museum,
(03:11):
and that's what made me want to write a book
about him. But of course I started the book with
considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more
about than Henry Ford, and this wasn't help. When I
told a friend what I was going to be writing about,
and he said, isn't that story about as well known
(03:34):
as the Nativity?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
That's certainly what I've been worried about.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
But after I spent a while with him, I began
thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well known after all,
or actually, rather that it was so well known that
we don't even realize it was his story. What I
mean is that everybody knows the name, and the comment
about history being made that he built a lot of cars,
(03:59):
But the true breath of his accomplishment is now so
much a part of the world we inhabit, that his
influences around us like the air we breathe, and as invisible.
Every century or so, our republic has been remade by
a new technology. One hundred and seventy years ago it
(04:19):
was the railroad, and in our time it's the microprocessor.
These technologies do more than change our habits. They change
the way we think. Thorreau listening we saw the railroads
come in listening to the trains steaming past, Waalden Pond wrote,
have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad
(04:39):
was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in
the depot than ever they did in the stage office?
And of course anyone over the age of twenty younger
than that, And it's simply your environment knows what the
computer and the internet are doing now. Well in between
the steam locomotive and the mac came Henry Ford's model T.
(05:05):
And when Ford was quite quite quite elderly, he was
speaking with a dearborn high school boy who was doing
a article on him for the high school newspaper. And
Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse and
square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful these
(05:25):
old days were. And the boy wasn't an easy sell
on this, and he said, well, that's all very well,
mister Ford, but we live in the modern age. Ord said,
young man, don't tell me about the modern age. I
invented the modern age. Now you'll notice he didn't say
(05:50):
I made a hell of a lot of cars. He's
said basically, he had fashioned the world he and the
boy were living in. And it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim,
and I've come to think it's very largely true. There
is a mystery to him. Certainly his close associates felt so.
(06:11):
Almost every one of his high lieutenants. It's interesting reading
them one after another. They'd all say, well, we worked
on this, and we were very close on that. But
I never really understood him. I never understood mister Ford.
Nobody called him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent
years working with Ford, wrote, in spite of a long
(06:32):
and fairly intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one
mental picture of which I can say this is the
man as he is, or as I know him. There
are in him lights so high and shadows so deep
that I cannot get the whole of him in proper focus.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
At the same time, and you're listening to one heck
of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller,
Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Forward. When we
come back, more of the man who invented the Modern
Age here on our American Stories. Plead habibe here the
(07:33):
host of our American Stories. Every day on this show,
we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories
from our big cities and small towns. But we truly
can't do the show without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
you love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:55):
a lot. Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give
and we continue with our American Stories and with Richard Snow.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The
(08:17):
Rise of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
A reporter who met him in nineteen fifteen was harsher
about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory
trick which may be played with one of the Ford
portraits photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered,
a benign, gently humorous expression dominates.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
When the other side is.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly malevolent calculation.
This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy, hollow eyes,
the pale eyes one would associate with a visionary or
a killer visionarian killer. Ford was full of contradictions right
(09:03):
from the very start, well whatever his mysteries. By the
time that reporter wrote that nineteen fifteen, a great many
people were trying to figure him out. He was on
his way to becoming the richest American, and once Theodore
Roosevelt died in nineteen nineteen, he was easily the most famous.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
This man who lived to read about the atomic bombs
falling on Japan was born three weeks after the Battle
of Gettysburg July eighteen sixty three, on a farm in Dearborn.
His father had been born an Irish tenant on an
Irish tenant farm, and he always seems to have felt
a sort of grateful surprise that he now owned not
(09:50):
only a farm of his own, but a prosperous one.
Henry fell a little differently. He loved everything about the
farm except the farming.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
He said.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
My early biest recollection is that, considering the results, there
was too much work on the place.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
That is the way I still feel about farming.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There are clouds of folklore about Ford's boyhood, a lot
of them sent up by Ford himself, but it does
seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting
onto machinery burdens that people had borne since biblical times.
He said, even when I was very young, I suspected
(10:29):
that farm work might somehow be done in a better way.
That is what took me into mechanics. Although my mother
always said I was a born mechanic. He very early
began taking things apart to see how they would work,
and he always got them back together. But what he
took apart and got back together often ran better. A
(10:50):
neighbor said that every clock in the Ford household shuddered
when it saw it coming. But he did more harm
than good with the clocks, and by the time he
was twelve he was repairing neighbors watches. Now the next year,
when he was thirteen, his mother died, and he expressed
the loss in you know, the best way he knew how.
He said, the house was like a watch without a mainspring.
(11:16):
And it was perhaps and nearness of her death that
made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he
called the most important, biggest event of my early years.
His father was driving him into town in his wagon
family wagon when they came upon a steam farm engine
moving their way. Here's how clearly Ford described it sixty
(11:38):
years later. I remember that engine as though I had
seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle
other than horse drawn that I had ever seen. It
was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and
was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels.
I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses,
(11:58):
but this one had a chain that made a between
the engine and the rear wheels. The engineer was very
glad to explain the whole affair.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
He was proud of it.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the
propelling wheel and the belt put on to drive the machinery.
He told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions
a minute, and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running.
And here Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive,
(12:28):
makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his
life took a course that would change everyone else's. This
last he means the engine running in neutral while not
driving the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in
the modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines,
which are easily stopped and started, but it became very
(12:50):
important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which
took me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
My toys were all tools, he wrote. When he was
in his sixties, he added, and they still are.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
But of course, as a teenager he had to learn
to use those tools, and he couldn't have found himself
in a better place to do that. Detroit had standing
timber all around. There was lake shipping, there was iron ore,
and the city took advantage of all of this. When
Henry Ford turned seventeen and left home to go, there
already had one hundred and twenty thousand residents, ten railroads
(13:30):
feeding it, and it was home to a thousand different
manufacturing businesses, machine shops scattered everywhere. Ford spent a few
months in business school there, and that was the only
time in his life when his handle writing was legible,
But his real education came from the machine shops. He
held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he
(13:52):
worked with. He had an almost instinctive sense of machinery.
Even at the end of his life, he could look
at ten identical arborets laid out on a bench and
point to the one that had something wrong with it. Yeah,
and he loved being among machines. But a few years
later he was back in Dearborn on the farm. He'd
been lured there by his father with the promise of
(14:13):
forty acres of land and his eighty acres. His father
still hoped Henry would become a farmer too. Ford didn't
want the farm land, but he went because he did
want to be perceived as a more stable citizen. And
the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen
in love with an eighteen year old named Clara Bryant.
(14:34):
He'd met her at a New Year's Eve dance. He
loved dancing all his life, and he married her in
eighteen eighty eight, and she turned out to be a
great choice. She was steady and staunch and brave, and
had such complete faith in him that he took to
calling her.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
The Great Believer.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And being married to Henry Cannamin easy for her at
first because Over the next ten years, they lived in
ten rental houses, and all during that time Ford was
experimenting with creating with a machine that would do what
the steam traction engine had, which was drive itself. He
knew all about steam engines by now and decided there
was simply too heavy to power what he had in mind,
(15:13):
so he began to look to gasoline and the internal
combustion engine. He started building a car in the woodshed
behind his rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too
modest to think. It was actually a rather substantial little
brick building. You can see it or a replica of
it today in the Greenfield village. It was a lonely
and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch.
(15:36):
When Ford needed a carburetor, he had to invent one.
He didn't even have a name for it. The word
hadn't come into the language. Shed and he worked on
his first car for months and felt it was finally
ready in June of eighteen ninety six. And it gives
a good idea of the intensity of purpose with whichy,
the concentration with which he worked that it was only
(15:57):
when he was ready to take it out on its
trial run that he discovered it was too big to
fit through the woodshed door. While he fixed that with
an axe and got his car started and coaxed his
too cylinder engine into life, and drove off into his future.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And hours.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
The car worked, and he improved it and finally got
it running well enough to convince Detroit lumber tycoon to
finance what Ford called the.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Detroit Automobile Company.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was
to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later,
Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said,
of course, there was no demand for an automobile. There
never is for a new product.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story
of Henry Ford. My toys were all tools, he recalled.
They still are, and my goodness they were. And Detroit
at the turn of the century we're talking about eighteen nineties.
In the time that Ford went there and started to
work there, there were one hundred thousand plus citizens. Ten
(17:15):
railroad lines fed the city, and there were all kinds
of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course, Ford, while
this is living large, being amongst all of those people,
making all of those machines. And it's interesting the first
ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals, working on
(17:36):
his car for months. And as he put it, of
course there was no demand for the automobile. There never
is for a new product. And he was cutting new ground.
Henry Ford. When we come back more of the story
of the man who invented the Modern Age here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(18:11):
and Richard Snow, the author of I Invented the Modern Age,
The Rise of Henry Ford, Let's pick up where we
last left off, and I think.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything
on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford said
a very interesting thing about it. He said, of course,
there was no demand for an automobile. There never is
for a new product. Matt Run's totally countered to the
(18:43):
old saw about invention being the in the necessity being
the mother of invention, and this very often it's exactly
the other way around. Invention being the mother of necessity
is you know, nobody wanted an iPhone until they.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Had one in their hand.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Anyway, Ford got his start company started, and seems instantly
to have lost interest in it. I just wandered away,
wouldn't show up.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Nobody knows why.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars. More likely
he resented working for anybody. He never liked having a boss,
and shed something that He then went on to ruin
a second company, and he was still able for a
third throw of the dice to find a circle smaller
(19:31):
but a real circle of investors for his next enterprise,
which he found in nineteen three with twenty eight thousand
dollars capital paid in. This one bore his own name,
the Ford Motor Company, and it would last now. His
investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor Company to build
expensive cars. In nineteen seven, the Packard Gray Wolf sports car,
(19:54):
though that term wouldn't exist for another forty years, cost
ten thousand dollars, and a nice suburban house might go
for eighteen hundred dollars. Now, work that calculation out today,
and if prices have stayed relative, the house would cost
maybe one point two million, and a Dodge Viper would
cost six million dollars. So of course it was more
(20:14):
desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than something
worth hundreds of dollars, Ford leaved exactly the opposite.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Make the car cheaper.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to
farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly
ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said,
and told one of the backers of his new company,
is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one
pin is like another pin when it comes from a
pin factory, or a match like another match when it
(20:47):
comes from a match factory.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
But how to do it? How to do it?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers.
Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life,
or rather the virtue of loyalty and steadiness that the
order that he saw in it. The car would be
fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair,
rugged enough to negotiated the truly dreadful roads at the time,
(21:13):
versatile enough to be hooked up to a band, a fresher,
or a pump. Now by nineteen four he was a success,
but he saw hidden inside every car he built, the
ghost of a much greater car. And in nineteen eight
he called together as most trusted executives and started designing
one in a sealed off room in his factory. And
(21:34):
here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it
ever would, and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to
a creative end. A contradictions because the car he was
building would be at once as perfectly simple as he
could make it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance,
have four cylinders, when no inexpensive car had more than two,
(21:58):
and the engines in multi cylinder cars tended just to
be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain. Ford
wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal,
and while his helpers were trying to figure out how
to do this, Ford had another thought, slice off the top.
That is, have the engine in a single casting with
(22:19):
its four cylinders wholly accessible, and then fit the cylinder
head on top of it like a hat and bolt
that down. And that's how car engines are built to
this day. The steering wheel and American cars and all
cars was almost always on the right ancient tradition on
that because the steam locomotive engineers sat head end right hand.
(22:42):
In his cabin, Ford thought it belonged on the left,
put it there, and there it stays, unless you're English.
The materials in the body would be cheapest he could
make them, but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel,
which was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new
to the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet
from his first Model A and now is currently selling
(23:04):
the Model S. So we named the new car the
Model T and put it on the market in October
of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in eighteen seventy nine, a
Rochester patent attorney named George Selden looked at a gasoline
engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go,
and drafted a patent said that it would be attached
(23:27):
to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say
how that would happen, and then he sent it into
the patent office. But in those days you could put
off a patent for seventeen years by making tiny modifications
to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive
basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing, and
(23:49):
then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of
the automobile, and he got money backing him and started
to exact ransom from all the car makers, even young
General motors finally rolled over, and only Ford foughtum fought on,
fought them alone. Patent litigation was extremely expensive. Ford was
(24:11):
spending two dollars a car on the but he stuck
it out right till the end, and he won, and
that and that there he got.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, he actually got.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Headlines that read things like God Bless Henry Ford. Now
the bottle t is no longer any sort of force
in our lives, But I think it refuses to look
placid or quainter to acquire that gloss of appeal that
the that time puts on so many ugly things that
(24:39):
high on lovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the
boxy antiques power to change a world. The car was
tall because the ruts were deep, thanks in part to
the vanadium steel. It was both tough and light, only
eleven hundred pounds, and it could scramble over marshy terrain
that would mobilize heavier cars for what became so ubiquitous
(25:01):
an American fixed her. It had many eccentricities. Beginning moved forward,
called a planetary transmission collector friend of mine who owns
a model. He told me once that you could leave
it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal it because nobody
could figure out how to drive it. Three pedals sprouted
from the floor. One on the right was to break
(25:22):
the one in the middle put the car in the reverse.
The one on the left made it go forward, and
low gear went pressed to the floor, and then high
gear when released. The driving gears were all engaged by
bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened. But with
all those petals on the floor, no one was an accelerator.
That was a lever on the steering wheel, which you
thumbed downward to feed more gas to the engine. And
(25:44):
when you wanted to know how much more gas you
had to feed, you left to feed. You stopped, climbed out,
lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the gas cap
beneath it, and poked in the tank with a wooden
stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Instead of inches.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
But for all the fussing the car required, it went,
it went, and it was as dependable as a cast
iron stove.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of
I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
Go and buy this book. You won't put it down.
And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated. No
one understood the man. That's true, he probably didn't understand himself,
but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. And
(26:35):
he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt. As
to entrepreneurs throughout history, the Right Brothers we learned from
David McCullough had that same kind of courage, and not
that manufacturing excellence. By the way, mass marketing and mass
manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Wright brothers.
(26:55):
And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking
about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally everyone
was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford
trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T
had many eccentricities, it worked and it was as dependable
as a cast iron stove. When we come back more
(27:19):
of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here on our
American stories. And we continue with our American stories and
(27:40):
the story of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we
last left off with Author Richard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Snow Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told
it the President Wilson when he met him about the
farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have
him buried in his Modelty and the lawyer no reason
for this, The man said, because I ain't been a
hole yet that it couldn't get me out of.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
And when it.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Was time to stay put and do some farm work,
you could take off a rear wheel and hook it
up to a thresher sawmill. The owner was expected to
know how to do that, and indeed to maintain the
car generally. Midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson, who owned the
succession of Model Ts in the twenties, wrote about this.
He said, the whole car was simple, accessible. In the evening,
(28:30):
you could tighten the bands, look at the timer, clean
the plugs. A weekend would do nicely to reline the bands,
or grind the valves and clean the carbon, or maybe
tighten the rods. A four day vacation was plenty to
overhaul the engine or the rear end. If any of
these jobs was a bit beyond your experience, you had
merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew, but
would come over and help. The rapifications of this were
(28:55):
far reaching and frequently unexpected.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
In the Second World War.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
For example, Germans were often superior to their American counterparts,
but that advantage was canceled by how quickly a disabled
sherman could get itself prepared and back into action, and
the Germans were baffled and dismayed. Defined that, among his
many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had created a whole generation
(29:21):
of mechanics.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
But perhaps the Model.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
T's most profound impact, what made it the single most
significant automobile ever built, was social. In nineteen eighteen, a
Georgia farm wife for Henry Ford, your car lifted us
out of the mud.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
It brought joy into our lives.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
The Model T broke the age old isolation of the
farm in less than a decade, and wherever it went
it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways
and roadside fixtures like motels and of course, gas stations,
and a new way of thinking about and time. And
in the nineteen thirties John Steinbeck looked back with a
(30:05):
sort of sardonic awe on what had done in just
half of his lifetime. Now, of course, the Model T
could never have had such an effect had it not
been deployed in enormous numbers, and this, even more than
the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A
number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars
(30:26):
a day during the Model t's early years, and that
demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture. But there is a
fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production, and it
was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age.
The Model T was a success. Ford could sell as
many as he could make. The way to make them,
(30:48):
he believed, lay in precision and speed. Precision meant part
so scrupulously manufactured that one would always fit where it belonged,
without any time consuming shaping or filing, a speed lay
and breaking down the manufacturing process into every smaller segments.
(31:09):
This began in the spring of nineteen thirteen with the magneto,
which generated the electricity to fire the plugs. It took
a worker twenty minutes to assemble one. When one worker
put it together put another together. Ford separated the process
into twenty nine steps, and rather than one worker doing
twenty nine things, twenty nine workers would do one thing
(31:32):
as the parts moved past their stations on what was
the first modern assembly line. Before it had taken twenty minutes.
Now it took thirteen minutes. So with the engine, then
the transmission, then the upholstery, the axles, and the radiators,
finally the whole car itself all was Ford said, bring
the work to the man, not the man to the work.
(31:54):
When Ford first unveiled his Model TY, it took twelve
and a half hours to make one. A little more
and a decade later, it took exactly a minute before
the Model T was done. A car was coming off
the line every ten seconds. Ford made his millionth Model
T in nineteen fifteen, his two millionth in nineteen seventeen,
and so on for a while, a million cars a year,
(32:15):
and then in the early twenties two million. And he
always lowered the price. He flew directly in the face
of all principles of monopoly capitalism, which of course hold
that if you have a desirable item that you alone
own and other people want, you raised the price. Not Ford,
he said, every time I shave a dollar off the price,
(32:37):
I gain a thousand new customers. So the car had
begun at eight hundred and fifty dollars and ended two
decades later at two hundred ninety five dollars. In nineteen nine,
the company made a profit of the two hundred and
twenty dollars and eleven cents on each car. With the
moving assembly line up and running, the profit fell to
(32:57):
ninety nine thirty four, and that was fine with Ford.
And then in nineteen fourteen he announced that he was
raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars
a day. This was twice the going rate for industrial work,
and it caused a sensation. He understood that it would
be big news. Think he would I don't think he
quite prepared for the astonishing response that got. People came
(33:20):
in from all over the country, and in fact he
finally had to discourage him by saying he would only
hire people who had lived in or around Detroit for
two years or more. Ford's workers became his customers. No
man who bolted together a packard gray Wolf could ever
own one. Every Ford worker who wanted to could own
a Ford. So Ford also created a modern cycle of
(33:44):
consumerism in which we still live during the Great Black
diaspora after the First World War up north to Detroit.
The African Americans knew there were two shops, only two
shops that were worth of applying to. Packard might give
you a job, and Ford probably would give you a job.
And he actually had blacks running gangs of whites with
(34:09):
the power to fire them, which I think was not
I can't think of another American industry in nineteen twenty
four where that would have where that would have applied
at all.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
And in the end he had to give it up.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
The last Model T came off the line, probably six
or seven years later than it should have. In nineteen
twenty seven, Ford had made fifteen and a half million
of them, and when production ceased there were more than
eleven millions still on the road. And of course there
was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow
the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it
(34:44):
was the biggest story of nineteen twenty seven. Car sales
dropped everywhere in a boom time as people waited to
see what was coming. It took the factory, of course,
several months toy tool and when the new car, Ford
had started over fresh by calling it the mo was
announced that December. The New York World said the excitement
(35:05):
could hardly have been greater had Powaw, the sacred white
Elephant of Burma elected to sit for seven days on
the flagpole of the Woolworth Building. It sold well eight
hundred thousand in his first year, but Chevrolet sold a
million that same year, and the Ford Motor Company would
never again be making one out of every two cars
(35:27):
on the American road in any event. That was Henry Ford.
How really to assess the true impact of this man,
It may still be too early. We're certainly still immersed
in the modern world he created. I think Will Rogers,
(35:47):
many years, many years ago, came pretty close when he
said to Henry Ford, with none of his usual folksiness,
it may take one hundred years to tell whether you
hurt us more than you helped us.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
But you certainly didn't leave us where you found us.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing and production
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Richard Snow What a storyteller and what a story to tell.
He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The
Rise of Henry Ford. And there's so much to unpack here,
my goodness. The story is about World War Two, that
(36:35):
we'd always heard that Americans could just get under the
hood of anything and fix it. Well, this happened because
of Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation of
auto mechanics and tinkerers. I mean, to this day, that's
why there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of
what he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process,
(36:58):
the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to
the man, and of course bringing the speed with which
he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours
to one minute. Ten years later and millions and millions
rolled off the assembly line, all totaled fifteen and a
(37:19):
half million Model tees. And the thing I think most
important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism
and monopoly is that he did that thing no one
expected someone with such market dominance to do, which should
generally be rip off the American public and raise prices forward,
(37:40):
always working to lower the price. And at the same
time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers,
doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers. That
Will Rogers line was the best of all. It may
take one hundred years to tell whether you helped us
or hurt us. You sure didn't leave us where you
(38:01):
found us. The story of Henry Ford, the story of
the Modern Age, and the man who invented it. Here
on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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