The Car for the Great Multitude: The Ford Model T Debuts

It began behind a locked door on the third floor of a Detroit factory.

In the winter of 1906–07, Henry Ford quietly walled off a room inside his Piquette Avenue plant. With a handful of trusted draftsmen, engineers, and machinists, he spent nearly two years there in secrecy, sketching, casting, and testing a car that would break every rule of the automobile business. At the time, cars were playthings of the rich — at the start of 1908, fewer than 200,000 automobiles were on American roads.

Ford had a different vision. "I will build a car for the great multitude," he said. It would be large enough for a family, small enough for one person to maintain, built of the best materials — and priced so that no working man would be unable to own one.

That car was the Model T, and on October 1, 1908, Ford introduced it to the world. It was simple and sturdy: a 22-horsepower, four-cylinder engine, a body of tough heat-treated steel, and a weight of only about 1,200 pounds — light enough to handle rough dirt roads, strong enough to survive them. It could run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Early versions could even run on gasoline or a hemp-based fuel. The price: $825 — a serious sum then, but far less than what other cars cost.

Americans wanted it. In its first year, Ford sold more than 10,000 Model Ts, a new record for a single automobile model. Newspapers were already calling it the car of the century. Then came the breakthrough that made the car truly universal. In 1913, Ford's Highland Park factory introduced the moving assembly line, which slashed the time it took to build each car — and as costs fell, so did the price. By 1925, a Model T sold for just $260. By 1918, half of all the cars in the United States were Model Ts.

Between 1908 and 1927, Ford built some 15 million Model Ts — the longest production run of any automobile model in history, a record that stood until the Volkswagen Beetle passed it in 1972. The little car carried farmers to market, doctors to patients, and families to places their grandparents had never dreamed of reaching in a single day. It filled the roads with gas stations and repair shops, and in time it made highways, suburbs, and the family road trip possible.

The automobile existed before October 1, 1908. But on that day, it belonged to everyone — and the world started moving.

Photo: unknown photographer, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).