While musician Jerry Reed teases one of the greatest inventions of modern man, the motor car, calling it a gas drinking, piston clanking, air polluting, smoke belching, four-wheeled buggy in his brilliant number ‘Lord Mr Ford’, there can be no trivialisation of the greatness of Henry Ford. With his brainchild, the Ford Model T, he made motorised transport accessible to the average Joe in America, and later all over the world.
The Model T, or ‘Tin Lizzie’ as it was lovingly nicknamed, was revolutionary. The first automobile to be mass produced with an assembly-line type production, it set a manufacturing trend that has not changed much even to this day. In 1914, within six years of its launch, a Model T could be produced every 93 minutes, as compared to the 728 figure initially.
The Ford also saw technological innovations like interchangeable parts (a result of true mass production) and vanadium alloy construction that benefited the car with lightness and efficiency. The four-cylinder, 2.9-litre engine provided the car with the pulling power of twenty steeds, and a top speed of around 70 kmph even on poor road surfaces, pretty darn impressive for a car that cost only $290 (around 1.5 lakh in today’s value) by the mid-twenties. Additionally, the Model T was popularly converted into makeshift tractors, much appreciated by farmers at the time. As with every car, Tin Lizzie had her quirks as well. Cold starts called for the family gymnast, since the car would roll forward while manually cranking it, because of thickened oil in its wet clutch system. And since the car did not have a fuel pump but relied on gravity to supply the car’s gasoline, climbing up slopes with low gas was not always possible. That was solved by popping the two-speed gearbox into reverse and then making the ascent! Most of us nowadays take affordable cars for granted, constantly wanting more and more for less and less. But without the Model T, it would have probably taken the majority of humanity much longer to enjoy the universal joy that is motoring.
The writer is an automobile enthusiast based in Kodaikanal.