Ford Model T
It is with some trepidation that I enter into this post. Following my recent excursion into early 20th century racing my interest was piqued in some of the cars from that era, roughly the period before WWII, but really pre-1930s. This is a new area for me since my interest in cars has mainly been restricted to the post-war years generally, and largely only the 1960s and later. Like many, I have a somewhat limited knowledge of pre-war cars. First there are the high-end models that we see annually at Pebble Beach and other concours d'Elegance-level car shows--the Duesenbergs, the Bugattis, etc. I have little expertise in this area, but the cars I usually see seem to have been expensive to begin with and have just increased in value since. Most of these cars have inhabited the rarefied air of the rich and famous since their initial purchase and hence us common folks can only eye them from afar with something of a detached interest.
Second, apart from the occasional classic car show, I know most of the lesser forms--Model Ts, Model As, Dodge, Chevy, etc.--from either old movies or more recent period films. This seems to lend something of a 2-dimensional cartoon quality to them, a sort of Keystone Kops version of automotive history. When someone mentions "Model T" we probably get a mental image mural involving the Marx Brothers and Ma & Pa Kettle together with modern enthusiasts sporting goggles and long leather coats dutifully cranking up their Model Ts and puttering off down the road.
We all know the significance of the Model T in terms of introducing mass production on an efficient moving assembly line, and the distribution of cars to the masses rather than the toys of the elites that automobiles largely were previously. What we rarely get is a feel for what these cars actually did. After all, out of the 15+ million Model Ts sold over its lifespan, I daresay most weren't used by comedians or road racers and they didn't just move off those magic assembly lines and simply disappear into the mist. Like the Pinto, and most other cars we here at Car Lust regularly feature, they were bought mostly by regular people to just go about their daily business, becoming a part of the very warp and weft of the fabric of American society. People lived in them, went to work in them, and more than a few amorous couples probably ... well, we won't go there. But the everyday lives of these cars are what I would like to highlight here and perhaps move the venerable Model T out of the realm of the fanciful and back on solid ground.
I won't bore you with details of the Model T production and design innovations; these are fairly well known, at least in general, and the video at the end of this post provides a nice graphic introduction to the Model T. I will, however, note a couple of items not mentioned in great detail there that helped make the Model T such a success. First, design-wise the Model T was both very simple and extremely standardized. This simplicity not only made it relatively easy to assemble, but also fairly straightforward to maintain. Most owners with some mechanical inclination (and people back then tended to be far more mechanically inclined than we are) could readily figure out the car's internals, obtain spare parts, and keep them running without all the infrastructure we enjoy today. Standardization also meant that many of the parts could easily be swapped between models and they were relatively easy to modify. This made the vehicle incredibly adaptable to whatever functions the end users had in mind.
Second, the basic design and operation didn't change much over the production life of the vehicle. This had both good and bad consequences. On the negative side, Ford somewhat obstinately refused to keep up with changes in the automotive world until the end of the Model T's run, giving other manufacturers marketing advantages in terms of ease of operation and styling. On the plus side, it meant that once you figured out your first T, you basically figured out all of them. This is important not only mechanically, but operationally as well. Here, for example, are the basic steps in starting and driving a Model T:
1) Engage neutral and the parking brake by pulling the handle on the floor backwards.
2) Retard the spark timing by pushing the timing lever all the way up and moving the throttle down a few notches, both levers located on the steering column.
3) Go to the front of the car (for crank-starts; electric starters were introduced in 1918) and close the choke by pulling the metal ring at the bottom of the radiator cover.
4) Move the crank to the 8 o'clock position and push it into the socket to engage it to the crankshaft.
Grasp the crank with only your fingers -- in case the crank jerks around and tries to break your wrist -- and then give it a good yank clockwise. Most of the time, a half-crank will start it up.
5) Hop in and advance the spark timing to avoid stalling.
And you're off! Except it's not quite as easy as simply hitting the gas and steering. The throttle, as indicated above, is a lever on the steering column. The brake pedal is still there, but it's on the right. The other two pedals control the transmission. To put the car into low gear, press the left pedal in slightly to engage neutral, throttle up a bit, disengage the parking brake, and depress the left pedal. To switch to high gear, throttle down a bit and ease up on the left peddle. The center peddle engages reverse.
This 3-pedal, throttle-on-a-stick setup seems needlessly complex to our modern eyes, but it does have its advantages. With some skill, it is possible to switch from forward to reverse quickly and directly. Anyone who's ever been stuck in snow, mud, or sand, can readily see the advantage this provides: you can rock the car back and forth from the driver's seat. Considering the state of the road system at the time, this is a very nice feature to have.
Stopping the car was similarly complicated: throttle down and simultaneously hit the brake and find neutral with the left pedal. While this sounds like an operational nightmare, a little practice was all it took for the process to become second nature, and with over 15 million sold, a lot of people figured it out readily enough. And once you did, you were set for every other Model T on the road.
The simplicity and durability of the Model T made it useful for any number of functions and, further increasing the vehicle's potential uses, Ford would also sell a bare chassis with no body. First and foremost, of course, the Model T was for personal transportation. The basic car came in several body styles, including a coupe, open runabout, roadster, and town car. Many were converted to trucks and delivery vehicles, and by 1917 Ford was making its own truck bodies available, with a heavier chassis, designated the Model TT. The truck versions, factory or conversions, delivered a variety of goods from water to beer to, well, in the hearse version, your deceased Aunt Margaret. The TT version was rated for up to one ton, but for heavier loads some were equipped with solid rubber rear tires. These tended to have a very rough ride.
During the First World War, the Allies pressed many Model Ts into service as ambulances. A wooden box was attached to the standard auto chassis; it could hold up to three stretchers or four seated passengers, plus additional passengers in the seat. More than 4,000 were shipped to Europe to be driven by such luminaries as Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway.
Other uses included paddy wagons, mobile lumber and grain mills, and even an itinerant wedding chapel. You could modify them even further for use on the farm. A company called Pull Ford could outfit one with frame extensions and steel lugged wheels which could be bolted directly onto the back end for use as a tractor (see photo, right). Sales literature noted that one could plow one's field all week, and then unbolt the back end and drive it to church on Sunday.
Model Ts weren't just found on roads. Some companies even outfitted them as snowmobiles. The Snowmobile Company, Inc. of West Ossipee, NH received a patent for a snowmobile conversion kit for the Model T that converted the front wheels to skis and the back end to a tread design. These may seem extravagances today but they did have their uses, especially among doctors and mail carriers in more rural areas. Simply by replacing the front skis with wheels, many were sold as desert vehicles, an early form of the half-track famous from WWII.
Since the Model T was designed with the no-roads of rural America in mind, the Model T became an excellent vehicle for carrying out fieldwork of many types. Soil surveys (and any survey requiring accurate measurement of distances over many miles) were revolutionized by vehicular surveys:
"The greatest time-saver in soil survey field work was introduced in North Carolina in 1920. W. B. Cobb and W. A. Davis, in Tyrrell County, used a Model T Ford as the mode of transportation. Road measurements were by means of special speedometer-odometer attached to the right side of the dash of the auto and connected by a flexible cable to a small gear box clamped to the right frame of the forward axle."
They also found similar uses among geologists tracing out rock exposures, and, really, any professional who needed to get into the back country. Tracy Storer, a zoologist, did fieldwork in a Model T in Yosemite starting in 1914 cataloging the animal populations found there:
"In a memoir, Storer would recall a 1919 trip when he and Grinnell had to unpack their Model T, hand carry their gear and reload the car at every hairpin turn in the road."
My personal favorite fieldwork for this is, of course, archaeological. The vehicles found favor among archaeologists for many of the same reasons as others venturing out into the back of beyond: they were tough, light, and could go virtually anywhere. Francis Riddell (right), an archaeologist who worked in California, Alaska, and Peru, used a 1927 Ford Model T Roadster Pickup Truck to survey large swaths of California.
Ford Model Ts even made their way to Egypt and Mesopotamia, carrying many famous archaeologists to their equally famous sites. In Egypt especially, the lightweight car was excellent for traversing the rocky and sometimes sandy deserts near the Nile Valley. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, one of the few early female Egyptologists, used Model Ts in her surveys around the Fayum Depression in the 1920s, and James H. Breasted--founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago--toured much of the Middle East in 1919-1920 in various Model Ts (left). Another less familiar American archaeologist, Alfred Kroeber (quite famous and highly respected in archaeological circles) is said to have "trained" Carl Vogelin in fieldwork by simply telling him to "get a Model T and a cast iron frying pan."
Perhaps even more famously, the Model T was featured in at least one of the Indiana Jones movies, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The beginning of the film showed young Indiana in "Utah, 1912" coming upon a group of, shall we say, "early archaeologists" finding the Cross of Coronado. After snatching the relic Indy is chased home by some of the bad guys, only to be met by the local sheriff arriving in a convertible Model T.
Interestingly, one of the archetypes of fieldwork in far-flung areas of the globe upon which Indiana Jones was based, Roy Chapman Andrews, spent many years exploring Mongolia and the Gobi desert, but he preferred Dodges.
Far from being a slightly goofy looking, rickety, cartoonish automobile, the Model T was truly the workhorse of turn-of-the-century America, and, for that matter, the world. It was most definitely not designed or built to be a curio for the rich and famous to sport about in, but for hard working men and women to carry out the business of their lives. In some ways, it's barely recognizable to us these days as a real, honest-to-goodness car or truck, but in a lot of ways it's not all that obsolete either. Forbes magazine recently put a 1921 Model T speedster up against a Hummer H2 in a 475-foot hill climb, and the Tin Lizzie bested it by almost a full second. This isn't to suggest that a 90-year old Model T is really all that comparable to a modern SUV--its closest recent cousin is probably The Thing--but it does highlight the very basic functional nature of these cars and reminds us that people used these cars much like we do and that good design is simply timeless.
--Anthony Cagle
Credits:
The Egypt photo is from Motor Trend.
The snowmobile image is from the Model T Ford Snowmobile Club. The Model T tractor conversion is from The Prairie Farm Report.
The following video shows much of what went into building the Model T and the sorts of terrain traversed by them.
That Car Guy on December 18, 2009 at 06:21 AM
Nice post and piece of history, Anthony! I heard somewhere that the reason all Model Ts came in black was because that color absorbs heat the fastest of all colors, so the cars would cure faster in the bake oven immediately after being painted. Also, buying only one color in bulk made the paint order simpler and cheaper.
I used to work at the Nissan plant here in Tennessee, and the films of that production line brought back lots of memories. One major difference today, though, is that assembly line technicians rotate jobs every two hours or so, in order to not do the same, repetative job all day. Being cross-trained also helped staff the plant should a worker not be able to do their job one day.
As far as "...by 1917 Ford was making its own truck bodies available, with a heavier chassis, designated the Model TT." It's a good thing Henry Ford didn't look out at the early morning wet grass and originally name the Model T the "dew."
John B on December 18, 2009 at 08:56 AM
One of the major internet news sites, MSNBC IIRC, linked to a Newsweek feature on the 10 worst cars. Among the list were the expected 1970s compacts, a nod to environmentalists by naming a couple of SUVs (which aren't even cars according to our government), and a few marketing failures like the Edsel.
But where the author showed his complete and utter ignorance was naming the Model T as a bad car.
Reading the article, he really didn't have anything bad to say about it other than it was basic.
Huh?
The car is more than 100 years old...so sorry, no heated seats, self parking aids or GPS.
The point of the T was it WAS basic.
Basic enough for generations of farm mechanics to fix.
Basic enough so people who had never driven anything other than a horse drawn wagon could now have a motorized transport. Think of it, the T was probably the only machine many owned. They didn't have indoor plumbing or elctric lights, but thanks to Henry, they had a car.
But most importantly, it was basic enough to be affordable to everyone.
And for those of us who are into old cars, the Ts and As started the "old car hobby" by being the first cars widely restored. The genesis of today's aftermarket parts business came from Ford parts suppliers. Hemmings Motor News in its early days had two categories for cars and parts: Ford and "non-Ford"
Even an English survey named the T as the "Car of the Century" beating out its closest rival, the Austin Mini (which is a great car, but its importance is in the packaging of its mechanics rather than a revolution in transportation).
You're correct, the T should be remembered for more than black and white memories of cars in Mack Sennett films. (BTW: I don't recall seeing the Marx Brothers in a T. Their films came along in the 30s, well past the T's film period).
Next time you see one at a car show, stop and give it the attention it deserves. And talk to its owner, you might learn a few things.
Anthony Cagle on December 18, 2009 at 09:06 AM
"One of the major internet news sites, MSNBC IIRC, linked to a Newsweek feature on the 10 worst cars."
Yeah, I thought about supplying a link to a Time magazine list like that and put the T as one of the Worst Cars simply for the environmental angle: it let normal people have cars and ruined Gaia so it must be horrible.
Cookie the Dog's Owner on December 18, 2009 at 09:35 AM
The T was basic, but in 1908 "basic" was all there was. The most opulent Packard of 1908, the one that cost as much as the average new house, was not a whole lot faster, more comfortable, or mechanically complicated. What the T did that was so revolutionary was to transform personal mobility from something only the wealthy could afford to something almost anyone could afford.
The environmentalists should also give the T credit for cleaning up the environment. Before automobiles, when horse-drawn transport was used, the amount of nasty, smelly, disease-bearing animal waste that needed to be removed from the average city's streets every day was staggering.
Thanks for the excellent article, Anthony.
That Car Guy on December 18, 2009 at 11:36 AM
John B, I'm wrapping up a post on the Mini and the MINI. Please stay tuned!
David Colborne on December 18, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Cookie - that's a good point. The only options you could really get back then were different colors and different seating materials. It's not like you could get a radio installed, and, even if you could, what would you listen to? I could see installing a Victrola in one, but, as bad as those roads were, that would've quickly turned into an easy way to ruin your wax cylinder collection, assuming they didn't just melt from being out in the sun. Engines and transmissions were similarly primitive - most of those old engines "redlined" at RPMs that most modern engines almost idle at. Synchromesh? What's that?
The craziest part about the Model T was precisely how flexible they really were. It wasn't just that they could go anywhere - they could almost run on anything, too. If it could compress and spark, it'd turn the pistons and the car would go. This was important since fuel supplies were irregular in both quantity and quality. Sorry, no Techron in 1908.
Stephen on December 18, 2009 at 05:54 PM
Ever wonder why so many European marques have 2.8 liter engines?
The model T scared the Europeans so bad they instituted an engine size tax that made the 2.9 liter model T much more expensive. Since taxes never go away, the European manufactures kept making 2.8 liter engines
Steaming Pile on December 21, 2009 at 06:48 AM
@DC - According to Wikipedia, a typical batch of gasoline in 1930 had an octane rating of about 40. This after a couple of decades of improvements in refining methods. Aviation gas ran about 75-80 octane, but only because of a considerably more expensive process for making it. Tetraethyl lead, MTBE, and other means of increasing octane ratings was years and years in the future.
To burn such a primitive version of gasoline, you needed fairly low compression, which reduced power and efficiency.
Don Gwinn on December 27, 2009 at 06:18 PM
In Peter Capstick's excellent biography of Wally Johnson, *The Last Ivory Hunter*, he retells Wally's stories of his early days in the African bush with an old used rifle, scrounged ammunition, and a well-used Ford Model T. Johnson used to carry a full set of pistons, rings and bearings and rebuild the four-cylinder engine in the field on a regular basis! He also was of the opinion that later 4x4 "hunting cars" he used were easier in some ways and more comfortable, but couldn't go anywhere the T couldn't.
The T had those huge wheels that could bridge weird angles and gaps, going up and over obstacles that would be like chocks to smaller tires, and apparently reverse was geared amazingly low, so Johnson used to climb dunes and berms in reverse.
That book is full of great car stories, like the one about the time Wally was bitten by a Gaboon Viper (or was it a black mamba?) and only one of his camp trackers would even try to go with him to the hospital an eternity away, because it was considered such bad luck to be in his presence at his death--which was considered inevitable. Wally had to drive (his man didn't know how) and partway there, shivering in his blanket with fever and pain, he heard the engine stall out. It was an obstruction in the fuel line, and guess who had to fix it?
Rickster on April 03, 2010 at 02:52 PM
Since Roy's name came up... if interested to know a little more about this 20th century adventurer, explorer from Beloit WI you can find it at http://www.roychapmanandrewssociety.org
We're working to keep the sense of adventure in discovery he inspires alive. :)
tomm on June 16, 2010 at 02:22 PM
Time magazine named it one of the 'worst' simply because it was a car for the masses and of course 'ruined cities'. But the elitist car haters know nothing about history. They think "everyone lived in cities before WWII and took trolleys and all was right with the world"
The T was really meant for rural owners, and it helped bring about prosperity in the 1910s and 20s. [Ignore 1929 for now]. Also, people had horses for personal mobility, and cities were not well populated until the 40's.
Anyway, point is, Time is one of the elite media that thinks we should all give up cars and live in urban high rises. So phooey to them. LOL ;-)