Henry Ford perfected mass-production with the assembly of his 1908 Model T. As his technique got better, prices of the car plummeted.

When announced in 1908 the price of the Model T Ford was $825, or $26,211 today (£21,284). Within five years the Model T’s price had halved. By 1920 it had halved again. Then by 1925 the price was down to $260 ($8,260 today).

How did Henry Ford do it? And what did a Chicago abbatoir have to do with it? Read on for more…

The price of the Model T Ford back then has been adjusted for inflation. The dollar has had an average inflation rate of 3.08% per year between 1908 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 3,077.13%.

That means that today’s prices are 32 times higher than average prices since 1908, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. A dollar today only buys 3% of what it could buy back then (source: In 2013 Dollars).

So the U.S. dollar has lost 97% of its value since 1908!

The price of new motor cars in 1908 plummeted like today’s electronic goods. The price fell steadily during the car’s life. And Henry Ford’s secret was this: he mastered the art of mass production.

Early cars had been made by hand by craftsmen used to selecting and adjusting parts to make a perfect fit. This fettling took a lot of time. But Ford had always wanted to increase the productivity of his factories.

To build the Model N, his previous car, he had the constituent parts placed in a row on the factory floor and the skeleton car dragged along the row on skids and slowly assembled.

Similarly, at first the Model T chassis was loaded onto a three-wheeled dolly and wheeled along the line as it was built.

Ford thought he could do better than that. While studying the dismemberment of animal carcasses on moving conveyor belts in a Chicago slaughterhouse, it struck him that he was trying to do much the same thing, but in reverse.

The meat canning industry also used continuous processing. So did the breweries and bakeries.

So Henry Ford broke down the assembly of the Model T into 84 discrete steps and trained each worker to perform just one action. He hired a time-and-motion expert to study every process and to refine it.

In 1913 he added his first moving assembly line: the fitting of magnets into flywheels. By 1914 assembly lines building complete cars were travelling at six feet a minute. This reduced the time to build one Model T from 12 hours to one hour 33 minutes and enabled the price to be cut in half to $440. Ford had brought the work to the workers.

However, the workers didn’t like it. Ford noticed that his men were leaving to join his competitors, and staff turnover rose 400%. They complained that they now found the work boring as they were performing one repeated task, over and over again instead of building a whole vehicle.

Also, they loathed the strict discipline of the moving assembly line, where if you missed a task you found yourself struggling to complete it while barging into the next group of workers. Cars ended up missing vital parts, and men went home exhausted.

Charlie Chaplin satirised the dehumanising nature of the assembly line in his film, Modern Times. Distracted by a fly buzzing around his face, he struggles to keep up with the moving line, crashes into his fellow workers and causes chaos.

Cars have never been so cheap since. Added complications such as front brakes, electric starters, batteries, airbags, anti-lock braking, safety belts, heating etc have all increased costs.

So today the cheapest car you can buy in the States today is the Chevrolet Spark at $14,595, about twice the price of the 1925 Model T Ford, adjusted for inflation (source: Car and Driver).

Did you know?…

…that there was once an American car on sale for just $125, or $1930 today? Read about the Smith Flyer here

One of the cleverest parts of the Model T Ford was its transmission, but its design and operation has long been a mystery to enthusiasts and the public alike.

Fans of the car might know that you changed gear by pressing pedals. But where was the throttle pedal? Any why were there only two gears? If you’ve ever been puzzled by the Tin Lizzie’s transmission, read on…

The least satisfactory aspect of early cars was the sliding-pinion crash gearbox (transmission), which originated from the back gearing of lathes. To change into another gear the driver had to disengage the clutch, de-select the current pair of gears and slide another pair of spinning gears into engagement with each other, with horrific grinding, screeching noises.

“C’est brutal, mais il marche” or:

“it’s brutal, but it works.”

René Panhard, speaking about his crash gearbox of 1891

And so early cars were hard to drive because of this difficulty of changing gears with the old crash gearbox. You had to learn skills such as double declutching, and have a lot of mechanical sympathy. Many new owners point blank refused to drive the car, hiring a driver, or staggered around in top gear as much as they could.

Acknowledging everyone’s dissatisfaction with the crash gearbox, Henry Ford looked around for something easier to operate.

Realising that on the Great Plains of the United States there might be no-one within a hundred miles to show you how to drive the thing, Henry Ford used an epicyclic gearbox in his previous Model A, and he would again in the Model T.

By simply pushing down a pedal the car would go forward slowly. Letting the pedal up again would make it change into high gear, going forwards faster. Pressing another pedal would make it stop. Pushing another would make it go backwards. This all seemed more natural to horse riders: Henry Ford’s first customers.

The Model T gearbox resembled the inside of a giant pocket watch. Epicyclic, or planetary gears run together in constant mesh with other gears which are attached to brake drums. These planet gears drive a sun gear called a Driven gear.

By braking or releasing the brake drums with the pedals you can make the planetary gears run on different sized gears, making them drive the Driven gear at Slow speed or Reverse. Locking the whole lot together with a clutch gives you High speed. It sounds simple, doesn’t it…

Despite Henry Ford’s claims, he hadn’t invented the epicyclic gearbox: that was the Ancient Greeks in about 500 BCE. The Antikythera Mechanism was a sort of clockwork pocket astronomical calculator which employed epicyclic gearing which imitated the Moon’s progress around the Earth. But Ford probably never knew – or cared – that what he found had been invented by the Ancient Greeks.

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.

Henry Ford, in an interview with reporter Charles N. Wheeler for the Chicago Tribune, 1916

The British inventer and car maker Walter Wilson had used an epicyclic gearbox in his Wilson-Pilcher cars of 1901, realising that large torques could be controlled with small input forces (source wikipedia).

The epicyclic gearbox was not particularly new in the US, either, the 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash had a similar gearbox.

What Kind of Transmission did a Model T Ford Have?

The Model T Ford had an epicyclic transmission or gearbox. The two forward speeds of the Model T (there were only two), and the single reverse were engaged by pressing pedals that stuck out of the floor.

These applied wood or cotton-faced friction brake bands to the gear sets, locking one or other of the gears, and therefore providing a low ratio or a reverse.

How Does the Model T Ford Transmission Work?

An animation is worth a thousand words. See wikipedia.

The Model T Ford transmission works like this: the engine flywheel drives (or rotates) three planetary gears mounted on it. Each of these three planetary gears has three rings of different gears on it. The front one is meshed with (or geared to) a driven sun gear. This drives the Brake drum and also the rear wheels (see modeltcentral.com).

The other two rings of gears on the planetary gears are meshed with either the Slow Speed drum’s gear, or the Reverse drum’s gear. When the clutch is engaged, the whole lot revolves together and you get High Speed.

You can select Slow Speed gear, High Speed or Reverse Gear. These are selected by the drums being locked in place by brake bands, which are clamped onto the drums by pushing the floor pedals.

These force the planetary gears to roll round either the Slow speed gear or the Reverse gear. The planetary gears then revolve the Driven gear which rotates the rear wheels and makes the car move along (see below)

You can easily adjust the brake bands by removing the floorboards and screwing the appropriate nut along its adjusting stud (source youtube.com ).

Pushing the left pedal engages Slow Speed and disengages the clutch. Lifting the left pedal engages the clutch, which locks the whole gear train, which gives you High Speed.

Remember this is not an automatic transmission, it is at best semi-automatic as you still have to select the correct ratio by using the pedals. At the rear of the transmission is the Brake drum, which when clamped by the Brake band slows down or brakes the rear wheels only.

How Do You Shift Gears on a Ford Model T, Then?

When you climb into a Model T Ford you will find three pedals on the floor. These are for the clutch, brake, and gas, right?

Wrong!

None of these is the gas/throttle. From the left, first you find the gear pedal. Pushed and held all the way down it selects first gear. Neutral is halfway up, and all the way up is top gear. Remember the Model T only had two speeds forward and one reverse.

The middle pedal was for reverse, and the right pedal was the brake. The gas, throttle, or accelerator was a lever to the right of the steering wheel, just like a tractor. The lever to the left of the column was the spark advance/retard.

Once you get the engine running by swinging the starting handle at the front you jump behind the wheel and in your left hand grasp the brake lever which has been pulled back to safely hold the car and also put the transmission in neutral.

Place your left foot lightly on the left pedal, keeping it in neutral, your other foot on the right brake pedal to hold it stopped. Then pull down on the right-hand throttle lever on the steering column gently to increase the engine to a fast idle.

Then release the emergency brake lever on your left and press the left pedal firmly to the floor – no gentle slipping, as this will burn out the Slow Speed band. The car will now start to move forwards.

Now you can pull the throttle/gas/accelerator lever down to increase the speed. As your road speed increases you can let the left pedal all the way up. This engages the clutch and shifts the transmission to its top gear, or high gear. You then adjust the throttle lever to the road speed you want.

Now you are driving, the Model T Ford feels like a go-cart on stilts.

This all takes time to learn, but probably less time than learning to ride a horse. (source curbside.tv).

Did the Model T Ford Have a Clutch?

The Model T Ford has a clutch, but not the single disc dry clutch found in most manual gearbox cars. It is a multi-disc clutch running in engine oil. There are no less than twenty-five clutch plates!

Today’s automatic gearboxes still have epicyclic gearsets, brake bands and multi-plate clutchs running in oil, so Henry Ford was certainly following the right lines.

What was the Warford Transmission?

For those who found the Model T’s two speeds too limiting for hill climbing and fast road cruising there was the option of fitting an auxilliary extra transmission behind the standard transmission . The Warford Underdrive gearbox was patented in November 1911, not long after the car was introduced by Ford. It provided two gears, or ratios.

The Warford was offered to the Model T Ford owner as an auxilliary transmission for improved load hauling and hill climbing. It mounted straight on to the back of the Model T transmission, with the tailshaft cup and uni-joint fitting into the rear of the Warford. It was necessary to shorten the car’s tailshaft and rear radius rods as well, so it was a serious bit of surgery.

The idea was to order the car with the higher 3:1 ratio final drive. The car could then cruise with lower engine revs or higher road speeds than the standard low ratio differential. When a moderate hill was encountered the driver could remain in High gear and shift into the Warford Underdrive, giving a slightly lower ratio.

If a steep hill was encountered the driver could first shift into Low gear, then use the Warford Underdrive to provide an even lower ratio to defeat the steepest hill when carrying the heaviest load (source modelTcentral.com).

The early manual gearbox Range Rovers had the option of a Fairey Overdrive which did much the same thing as the Warford Underdrive Gearbox but provided an overdrive instead of underdrive.

It reduced the engine revs at high speeds or enabled the old Range Rover to exceed 100 mph. I had one of these with a 6.5 litre GM diesel V8 fitted, but the monstrous torque blew the Fairey Overdrive apart, not once but twice.

Did you know…?

Henry Ford’s cost scrimping was legendary. The company manufacturing the transmission gears for Ford was given careful specifications for the wooden boxes that the gears were to be shipped in. When a manager from the company visited the Ford plant he found out why.

The workers were cutting up the empty wooden shipping crates and using them to make the floorboards in the Model T. So if your car’s floorboads are original they were once the containers that the transmission gears came in.

Contrary to common belief, Model T Fords did not only come in black, in fact the first cars came in blue, gray, green, and red, but not black. Only from the years 1914 to 1925 were Model T Fords only available in black.

One of the most persistent car myths is that Henry Ford decreed that his customers for the Model T could have any colour they liked as long as it was black. So did Henry Ford really say this, and was it true? Well, sort of. And sort of…

Henry Ford did not actually utter those exact words. In his autobiography he wrote:

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.”

Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922)

And so like many famous quotes it sounds good but isn’t actually what was said. Somebody somewhere “improved” Ford’s quote and in so doing made it memorable. It has become part of the legend of this legendary car: the obsessive pursuit of the mass production of an identical product. And it worked: by 1918 half the cars on the roads of the USA were Model T Fords.

Those early Model Ts were sold in almost any color… except for black. Red, gray, green, and blue were all available, but not black. The first black Model T didn’t roll off the assembly line until 1913.

So why did the boss decide to sell only black cars? Here’s why: it was more efficient that way. Henry Ford explained the philosophy behind his car:

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude…constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise…so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

Henry Ford, 6/6/13 Ford Times.

Henry Ford relentlessly drove the price of the Model T down. When announced in 1908 the price of the Model T Ford was $825, or $26,211 today (£21,284). Within five years the Model T’s price had halved. By 1920 it had halved again. Then by 1925 the price was down to $260 ($8,260 today). (see our article:)

The main reason for painting all the Model Ts in black from 1914 was simple: economy of scale. It was cheaper that way. There was nothing particularly special about the colour; black didn’t dry any quicker, nor was it easier to apply.

If there was a technical reason I suspect it was that you can use very slightly less black paint to cover a panel: anyone who has ever spray painted a car knows that white paint, for example will often need another coat to hide imperfections.

There was another reason. The First World War caused disruption of the chemical industry in the US, so sourcing different coloured dyes became more difficult.

And it is interesting to note that during the life of the Model T the Ford Motor Company used no less than 30 types of black paint to coat different parts of the car (source McCalley, Model T Ford: The Car That Changed the World.) Multiplying that number by a dozen colour varieties would have cost money.

It is true that for around ten years of production, from 1914 to 1925 the Model T was only available in black. But for the last two years of the car’s life, with falling sales, six new colours were offered, including Royal Maroon, Phoenix Brown and Highland Green (source woot.com)

Why Were All Early Model T Fords Black?

Early Model T Fords, from 1908 to 1914 were available several colours: blue, gray, green, and red, but not black.

From 1914 to 1925, halfway through the production run the Model T was only available in black.

Then for roughly the last two years of production, from 1925 to 1927 the Model T was available in six new colours including brown, maroon and green.

So, although Henry Ford did order that all his Model T’s should be black this didn’t happen until the seventh year of production. The claim that all Model Ts were black is fake history.

Why Did Henry Ford Choose Black for the Model T Ford?

The Ford Motor Company explains on its website that “the policy was in place solely for efficiency and uniformity. The car was only offered in black from 1914-1925, however before and after that various models of the vehicle could be purchased in a variety of colors including blue, red, grey, and green.” (source: corporate.ford.com)

A fuller quote is here and might remind readers of another revolutionary car maker, Elon Musk:

‘In 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to be the Model T, and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and I remarked  “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production. More than that, they did not particularly care.’

Henry Ford, My Life and Work 1922

To summarise, black was chosen because it was cheaper to produce cars in just one colour. Black paint also covers panels more efficiently than other colours. So less paint needed to be bought.

Were All Subsequent Model T Fords Black, or Different Colours?

In the last two years of production, from 1925 to 1927 the Model T was available in black and also in six new colours including brown, maroon and green.