Unplanned Obsolescence
“I BELIEVE THAT I HAVE solved the problem of cheap as well as simple automobile construction. … The general public is interested only in the knowledge that a serviceable machine can be constructed at a price within the reach of many.” With these words Henry Ford boasted to reporters about his new design triumph. It was January 4, 1906, and the car in question was not the legendary Model T but its predecessor, the Model N.
The N was a sensation from its introduction at the automo—I bile shows in 1906. Earlier low-priced cars had been underpowered motorized horse buggies equipped with one-cylinder engines under the seat or in back, such as the 1901-6 curveddash Oldsmobile. Multicylinder cars with frontmounted engines could cost as much as ten times the annual income of a middle-class family. From the outset of his automotive career a decade before, Ford had been committed to developing a light car powerful for its weight. But despite mechanical excellence and a low price, the Model N had a grave shortcoming as a family car: It was a two-passenger runabout with a boattail rear deck ill suited to the addition of a tonneau to accommodate two more passengers. It was a reliable, affordable car for a country doctor making his rounds, but it was not the “farmer’s car” that Henry Ford envisioned building for a nation of farm families.
So even while he was deluged with orders for the N, Ford planned to replace it with an even better, more versatile “car for the great multitude,” the Model T. Then, once he had that legendary car, he remained intransigently committed to it—long after it started faltering in sales. On the eve of instituting its mass production at his Highland Park plant, in a January 27, 1913, interview with the Detroit Free Press , Ford called the T “the acme of motor car perfection.” He stubbornly clung to that belief until the late 1920s.
Ford’s inspiration for both the N and the T came after he learned about the possibilities of vanadium steel. The cornerstone of both the N’s and the T’s designs became the extensive use of vanadium steel in three tensile strengths, as necessitated by various components. It resisted shock and fatigue far better than the nickel steel it replaced and was easier to machine. Ford spokesmen claimed that “only vanadium steel was able to withstand the strain imposed by bad American roads.” And while increasing strength, it reduced weight.
THE MODEL T WAS FIRST made available to Ford dealers on October 1, 1908, and it was an immediate hit. No other car of its day offered so many advanced features. Among these were a novel three-point suspension of the engine, improved arc springs, an enclosed power plant and transmission, and a detachable cylinder head. New methods of casting parts, especially block casting of the engine, kept the price of the T below $1,000, well within the reach of middle-class purchasers. Ford’s advertising boast was essentially correct: “No car under $2,000 offers more, and no car over $2,000 offers more except in trimmings.” Yet the T already was no longer state-of-the-art by the time it went into mass production in 1913-14, and many of the changes that were made over time in the supposedly changeless car were not improvements.
Compared with its predecessor, the sportylooking Model N, the T appeared ungainly. The 100-inch-wheelbase automobile had a 56-inch front and a 60-inch rear tread (the distance between tires) and stood about seven feet tall with its top up. Its chassis was built high to clear the inevitable ruts and stumps of the rural roads of the day.
Not all T’s looked alike. Unlike the N, which came only as a runabout, the T was the “Universal Car,” by which Ford meant that a number of body types could be fitted to its chassis. Initially it was offered in a two-passenger runabout, a five-passenger touring car, a two-passenger closed coupe, and a seven-passenger semiclosed town car and landaulet, with prices ranging from $825 to $1,000. From 1910 through 1912 a Torpedo Roadster was available with slightly lower lines, achieved by changing the gas tank from a flat one under the driver’s seat to a circular one behind it. In 1915 a sedan was introduced, with two central doors that gave easy access to both the front and rear seats, and from 1915 through 1918 a two-passenger convertible coupelet was offered. In 1923 four-passenger two-door and four-door sedans—called Tudor and Fordor by Ford—replaced the central-doored sedan. And from 1910 on, customers whose needs were not met by the available production bodies could buy a bare Model T chassis, or after 1917 a Model TT truck chassis, and add a custom body of their own. This adaptability was a major source of the T’s universal appeal.
Nor did all T’s perform alike. In horsepower-to-weight ratio, the original T was no better than the N, and the T’s performance got worse into the 1920s. The N engine generated 15 brake horsepower (bhp) to drive an 800-pound two-passenger runabout; the initial T engine put out 22 bhp for a 1,200-pound, five-passenger touring car. The T’s power-to-weight ratio deteriorated over time as the engine was modified and the weight of the car increased. The chassis alone grew from 900 pounds in 1909 to 1,272 pounds by the time the T was withdrawn from the market in 1927. This was mostly due to the use of heavier steels. And the initial T’s compression ratio, high for its day, at about 4.5 to 1, was decreased in 1917 to 3.98 to 1, bringing the horsepower down to 20 bhp because of a lowering of gasoline quality.
Furthermore, after mid-April 1909 the centrifugal water pump and fan of the original T were abandoned for far less efficient “thermosyphon” cooling. This led to a shorter engine block and crankshaft and a lower cylinder head. Les Henry, a Model T authority, points out that Ford himself said the initial Model T lasted only into 1909; because so many later changes were deleterious, the 1910 Torpedo Roadster “had undoubtedly the best performance and greatest speed of all Model T Fords ever produced.”
In contrast with the overall excellence and several advanced features of the Model T design, the car’s electrical system, planetary transmission, and braking were obsolete or soon to be obsolete even at its introduction. Yet Ford stuck with them while instituting the mass-production techniques at his Highland Park plant in 1913 and 1914 that made fundamental design changes extremely difficult. Thus these antiquated features were frozen into the T’s design for the life of the model’s nineteen-year production run.
LIKE MANY OTHER AMERICAN CARS IN 1908, THE Model T depended on a magneto ignition, and like all cars of the time, it had to be hand-cranked to start. Its standard lighting equipment was three oil lamps—one at the tail and two on the sides. Headlights powered by Prestolite tanks on the running boards were an option before 1910, as were the windshield, horn, and folding top. None of this was unusual on cars of the century’s first decade.
On the other hand, Charles Kettering’s total electrical system for starting, ignition, and lighting was introduced in the 1912 Cadillac, and by 1916 it was a feature on almost all American cars, the Model T being the notable exception. By 1915 electric headlamps were standard on the T, but because of the variable voltage generated by the magneto, they were dim at low speeds and so bright they burned out at high speeds. An electric horn powered by the magneto became standard in 1917, but electric self-starting did not become available even as an option until 1919 and was not standard on all Model T’s until 1926.
Model T’s were initially equipped with two pedals and two hand levers on the driver’s left side to operate the transmission and the brakes. (The throttle was operated with a small lever on the steering column.) The left-hand pedal was the clutch; it put the car into low speed when depressed, into neutral when halfway depressed, and into high when released. The other pedal operated a contractingband brake on the drive shaft. One lever put the car into reverse; the other lever operated internal expanding emergency drum brakes on the rear wheels. The reverse lever was abandoned for a third pedal, between the clutch and the brake, after the first 800 units.
After 1910, as speeds over 20 miles per hour became common, most American cars switched to a pedal to operate mechanical brakes on the rear wheels and a lever to operate a contracting-band brake on the drive shaft, reversing the Model T’s arrangement. Then in 1918 Malcolm Loughead (who later changed his name to Lockheed and became famous in aviation) introduced four-wheel hydraulic brakes, a revolutionary improvement first used on the 1920 Duesenberg. Ford saw no need for them on the T.
BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF SYNCHROMESH IN the 1929 Cadillac, shifting without clashing gears on a sliding-gear transmission required learning the fine art of double declutching, which was quite difficult for the average driver. In contrast, the T’s planetary transmission simply required the driver to depress and release the clutch pedal. But the planetary was more complex and expensive to build than the sliding gear, and it was limited to two gears at the time, which meant that the engine had to be geared down so that moderate grades could be negotiated on the higher gear. Consequently, as Philip G. Gott reports in his study of the automotive transmission, “in 1909, 24 automobile models of the 292 made that year used a planetary gearing system. By 1913, Ford stood alone.”
Still another design anomaly was that until 1925 T’s were equipped with slightly different-size front and rear wheels and tires: 30” x 3½” on the front and 30” x 33½” on the rear. This served no purpose except to make motorists carry two different sets of spares, in a day when tires had to be changed quite often. In the 1925 model year 30” x 33½” tires became standard equipment all around (they had been available as an option since 1919). In the American automobile industry as a whole, Model T-style clincher rims were quickly displaced after 1919 by straight-side rims; the 1927 Model T was the last new car to be equipped with clincher rims.
On the other hand, Ford was the first large auto manufacturer to place an order for the low-pressure “balloon” tires developed by Firestone in 1922. Balloon tires had thinner walls than earlier ones, a lower, fatter profile, and lower pressure, and they made possible more sensitive steering. Late in the 1925 model year, balloon tires on demountable-rim wooden wheels were offered as an option for the T, and by early 1926 they were standard on all T body types. Unaccountably, however, especially given Ford’s obsessions with simplicity in design and reducing production costs, the functionally superior and much cheaper stamped-out steel disc wheels developed by the Budd Manufacturing Company as early as 1913 were never adopted.
Ford was devoted to vanadium steel as the material for his chassis, yet the bodies of the early T’s were made of wood paneling over wood framing, with steel used only for the flat-topped fenders. This weakness was corrected by 1911, when sheet-steel panels over a wood frame became standard for T bodies. A few aluminum-paneled T’s were also produced over the years, and in 1924 the doors on the closed cars came to be fabricated entirely of steel. But even before the Model T went into mass production, the all-steel open car body had been developed by the Budd Manufacturing Company and had made an appearance in the 1912 Oakland and Hupmobile.
Les Henry gives the best brief account of “the seeming paradox of change in the changeless Model T.” He observes that “no generalization concerning the Model T is ever safe; too many minute changes were constantly being worked upon it for the purposes of speeding production, cutting costs, or—to a very limited degree—customer appeal. … Actually, Model T cars [even] during a given production year did vary in many points and were not so much alike as ‘peas in a pod’ as legend would have us believe.” Some of the variation resulted simply from Ford’s dependence until the 1920s on outside suppliers for certain parts. Model T’s were still further individualized by their owners, as businesses producing some 5,000 accessories to upgrade the T mushroomed with the car’s popularity.
Although the T’s fenders were, as legend states, always finished in black, initially the runabout came primarily in pearl gray, the touring car in red, and the town car and landaulet in green. In 1910 dark green became standard for all body types; it was followed by dark blue from 1911 through 1913. Black was not even listed as an option until it became the standard color for all T’s in 1914. The reason was that only black japanned enamel dried fast enough for the newly instituted system of mass production. Mass-produced cars of all hues and shades of the rainbow became possible only with the development of Duco lacquer, which debuted in the “True Blue” of the 1924 Oakland. In 1926 the standard Model T colors became dark green for the Tudor and dark maroon for the Fordor.
Through 1912 the Model T’s upholstery was all leather, and extensive use was made of brass brightwork—all-brass side and head lamps, a brass radiator shell, a brass bulb horn, and a brassbound windshield with brass braces. The leather and brass trim became casualties of mass production. Beginning in 1913, the side and head lamps were made of steel painted black, brass was removed from the bulb horn and windshield, and artificial leather was used in the door panels and seat backs. The small brass radiator was replaced by a larger black-painted steel one in 1917 as part of a distinctive “new look” in T styling.
The 1914 model year was the last in which the Ford really looked antique. The 1909 T’s low, aluminum-covered, box-like hood butted abruptly against its high vertical windshield and cherrywood dash. It had no front doors. Its seats were perched far above the line of the hood and the straight belt line of the body, which ran from the back of the front seat to the severe inwardtapering line of the rear end of the car. In 1913 the bodies became smooth-sided, and front doors were added—with the “door” on the driver’s side unaccountably a dummy panel.
The “modernization” of the T in 1917, after transitional changes in 1915 and 1916, meant a much higher pressedsteel radiator and rounded pressed-steel hood, contoured up to join the windshield with a metal cowl replacing the flat wood dash. The fenders were now contoured and crowned as well, and nickel plating replaced what little brass trim was left. Further modernization followed in the 1920s, when the radiator was raised and bodies were lowered to their practical limits. In 1926 the T chassis was lowered, the fenders enlarged, and the radiator shell nickel-plated. The Model T was essentially a different-looking car after 1917 and then again by the end of its production a decade later.
THE FORD MODEL T WAS THE ARCHETYPICAL AMER ican car made for American conditions. It was designed to be easy to drive and repair, high enough to clear wretched rural roads, and powerful enough to pull itself out of the mud and serve as a workhorse around the farm. Its tough large-bore, shortstroke engine stood in contrast with the small-bore, longstroke British engine, designed for fuel economy. Europe’s low-priced, light cars were underpowered bantams; the T could carry a farm family to town on Saturday with several crates of poultry or produce lashed to its sides. No wonder the T sold well all over the world, especially in countries of the British Empire, where driving conditions were like those in the United States. By the time it ceased production, on May 27, 1927, more than fifteen million had been built, a record surpassed only by the Volkswagen Beetle in a much larger post-World War II market.
This phenomenal success was due less to the excellence of the T’s design than to the progressive lowering of its price, from an initial $825 to a mere $260 in 1927 for the runabout, made possible by the moving assembly line. Indeed, price alone accounted for the T’s continuing domination of the low-priced-auto market into the 1920s. For as we have seen, the car was already technologically obsolete by the time its creator introduced modern mass production.
