He has more than 21 years of b-to-b publishing experience and has written about a wide variety of manufacturing and engineering topics. Austin is a graduate of the University of Michigan. Restricted Content You must have JavaScript enabled to enjoy a limited number of articles over the next 30 days. Please click here to continue without javascript.. It was a powerful car with a possible speed of 45 mph. It could run 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline.
It carried a horsepower, side-valve four-cylinder engine and two-speed planetary transmission on a inch wheelbase. Important to the long-term success of the Model T was Childe Harold Wills' experimentation with the properties of vanadium steel, which resulted in the lightness and durability that was an important trademark of the Model T.
Henry Ford had previously organized men and components to enhance Model T production, but the moving assembly line quickly improved chassis assembly speed from 12 hours and eight minutes to one hour and 33 minutes.
In , Ford produced , cars, more than all other automakers combined. It could be bought with a few months wages by a Ford worker. How did they do it? What Henry Ford and the Model T did was to pull together a lot of things that already existed better than anyone else had before. The Ford plants, some of which grew to be the biggest in the world, were cathedrals to the modern religion of productionism, but Ford was not the first man to build dark Satanic mills. Economies of scale had been observed for many decades.
The slaughterhouses of Chicago were the inspiration for Ford's moving assembly line technique. Ford's engineers saw how workers specialised in just one task, monotonously performed over and over at a pace set by the conveyor belt rather than any natural rhythm.
The ones in Chicago were known as "disassembly" lines, and Ford simply put the idea in reverse. Such division and specialisation of labour was advocated way back in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in Making standard interchangeable parts was a big factor in the Model T's serviceability and success and today's scrapyards are a direct consequence of the practice but the French had developed the technique in their guns during the Napoleonic wars.
Ransom Eli Olds' "curved dash" Oldsmobile of has a better claim than the T to be the world's first mass produced car.
Even the old "you can have any colour so long as it's black" saying is a bit of a myth. Ford may never have said this, and his cars were available in a variety of shades from to and , its last year. However, the brochure clearly states that "no option is given on color, tires, or equipment" and the majority were black, possibly because that was the colour of paint that dried fastest — and thus kept the assembly line moving quickest.
Ford's idea of a "universal car" was taken up by Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler with their own take on the people's car, the Volkswagen — a Model T with the engine in the wrong place that would eventually overtake it in sales, though many decades later.
Stalin too was an admirer of Ford's methods, applied with still more ferocity in his five-year plans. Nowadays, from Malaysia to Slovakia to Brazil, the car industry with all its ancillary industries and its potential for export earnings, is regarded as the key industry to foster economic growth.
We in the west may no longer work in factories much, and have entered the post-Fordism age, but there are plenty of our fellow human beings still doing things as Henry dictated. A few weeks ago another famous industrialist announced that he was to create a car that would industrialise and motorise his fast-growing nation with its vast distances and appalling roads.
It won't do much for climate change, but it's quite a flattering tribute to the abiding power of Ford's vision.
Motoring as we know it began on 29 January , when a patent was filed for this "horseless carriage" — the first car with an internal combustion engine. Named after its German inventor, Karl Benz, the Motorwagen was both revolutionary and very, very slow: it could barely top 10mph. Its luxury heralded the end of the horse and carriage as the aristocracy's preferred mode of transport. Manufacturing on the Bug did not actually begin in Germany until after the war.
Over , of these iconic 4x4s were produced by American factories, serving in every theatre of the Second World War. Where would farmers be without the Land Rover?
First unveiled at the Amsterdam motor show, early models were made from both steel and aluminium, due to the rationing of steel and post-war abundance of aluminium, which had been used to make aircraft. The first in a legendary line, many Series 1 Land Rovers can still be seen on our roads. More French than a string of onions this design classic has been adored and derided in equal measure.
Created after the Second World War, it was first marketed as an "umbrella on wheels" that could transport eggs without cracking them. Between and about four million cars were sold. The car that got Italy on the move. Fiat's practical and affordable was just three metres long, but its quirkily stylish profile ensured that it became a huge hit across the whole of Europe.
Production didn't end till — and a modern version was re-launched last year. Saab pioneered aerodynamic design, perhaps because it also made fighter aircraft. The 93 first achieved fame on the rally circuit, but its lasting legacy was in the field of safety: it was the first mass production car to have seatbelts as standard, leading Mercedes-Benz and later every other manufacturer to follow suit soon afterwards.
This revolutionary design was created by British Motoring Corporation boss Leonard Lord — who stipulated that 60 per cent of its length should be interior space — and designer Alec Issigonis.
The sleek but datable Mercedes-Benz "heckflosse" — or "fintail" — was the first production car with crumple zones. Captains of industry could buy the chrome-laden SEL model, with air suspension and fuel-injected engine; those on a more stringent budget could fire up the diesel, which retailed at a third of the price. The sexiest car ever made. Originally developed as a racer, the E-type was subsequently adapted for use on British roads, and became a symbol of the swinging Sixties.
Some models of this relatively cheap motor were able to top the mph milestone.
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