The
Ford Model T
From the beginning Henry Ford fought with his financial backers. Their idea was
to make automobiles to order and the highest price possible for
each car.
Ford
wanted to find a way to mass produce cars and make them available to everyone. He began experimenting in order to find the
simplest mechanism possible, something with the parts, that would be easy to repair.
At the same time he wanted a car that was rugged and powerful. There should be
nothing elegant about it; in fact, the uglier the . It must look to be no more
than what it was: utilitarian.
Once he found the right for such a car, Ford
thought he could spend all his time and effort not on improving the car but rather on
different methods of producing it. If he turned out the same car every year he could
lower his costs and his price to the buyer. Eventually Ford was able to
manufacture the car he wanted to. He
called it the Model T.
Stockholders in his
company began to bitterly when they realized he planned to
lower the price every
year. The Model T went into production in
1909. Four years later the company was a thousand cars a day. In 1915 the one-millionth
Model T came off the assembly line.
