The Wild Wheel

THREE GENESIS AND EVOLUTION

THE jigsaw itself was a little crazy. You may identify the interlocking pieces. They are five, and you may name them as the car, the time, the idea, the method and the man; but when you have fitted them together you find something like a key piece missing. This you may call the X piece. It will turn out to be not a fact but a truth, touching the acorn.

So first the car.

During the first five years the Ford Motor Company made eight different models, some with two cylinders, some with four and one with six; some with a chain drive and some with a shaft drive, and one with the engine behind the driver’s seat. They were all good cars, as cars were then, and relatively cheap; and they sold so well that the business flourished. The original factory space had expanded five-fold in Detroit, there were fourteen branch houses, and the output was one hundred cars a day, when several of the eleven other stockholders became uneasy. They thought that was success enough. In My Life and Work Ford wrote:

“They wanted to do something to stop me from ruining the company, and when I replied to the effect that one hundred cars a day was only a trifle and that I hoped before long to make a thousand a day, they were inexpressibly shocked and, as I understand, seriously contemplated court action. If I had followed the general opinion of my associates I should have kept the business about as it was, put our funds into a fine administration building, tried to make bargains with such competitors as seemed too active, made new designs from time to time to catch the fancy of the public, and generally have passed into the position of a quiet respectable citizen with a quiet respectable business.”1

There were omens now, but they were still so dim that even the few who thought they could see them had moments of doubt and panic. They might have been hypnotized by a man who kept thinking out loud about a universal car for the people at the price of a horse and buggy.

He was by this time in control of the company, having a clear majority of the stock in his name, and could do as he pleased, unless his associates took him to court to protect their profits from his devouring imagination. They actually did that later.

One morning in 1909, with no warning to anybody, he announced that he was going to make only one car—and it would be the Model T. One might have it as a roadster or as a coupé, which was a difference of body only, and the buyer could have it any color he liked provided he wanted it black. In every other way these Model T’s would be all exactly alike. His public announcement read:

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be 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.”

In the next nineteen years he made fifteen million of them.

As Ford saw it the Model T had but four essentials. They were the power plant, the frame, the front axle and the rear axle, all so designed that no special skill would be required to repair or replace them. Any member of the male race could take it apart and put it together again.

Ford’s intention was to make the parts first interchangeable and then so simple and inexpensive that the owner of a car would never hire a mechanic. The parts would cost so little that it would be cheaper to buy new ones than to have old ones repaired, and they could be carried in hardware shops like nails or bolts.

Those who can remember their Model T days will be reminded of how they used to take the car apart with a monkey wrench and pliers, put the used or damaged parts in a gunny sack, take the sack to the nearest Ford station where it would be filled with new parts in exchange for the old—and a slight difference to pay—then home to put it all together again, with a perfectly absurd sense of ego satisfaction. More Model T’s were rebuilt in that manner, in barns and sheds and under the shade tree, than were ever sent to service stations.

2

IT IS impossible for members of this generation to know what a displacement the Model T had in the lives of their fathers. It was a mechanical animal such as never existed before and will never be seen again. It changed the folkways of a nation. It enriched the fund of native humor and became the butt of so many jokes that it was always on the defensive, which alone would have endeared it to a large segment of human nature. It had some of the characteristics of a mule, the patience of a camel, the courage of a bull terrier, and in bad situations it could be very gallant, although there was latent in it a whimsical hostility to the human race. When you cranked it on a cold morning it might come at you. To know if it had oil in the crankcase you had to crawl under it and fiddle with two pet cocks. To know where the gas was you had to lift the seat cushion, unscrew the cap and poke a stick into the gas tank. In emergencies it could do without either oil or gas. It had no speedometer. If you drove too fast and the engine got red hot you stopped to let it cool off. In the hills at night you could hear it, almost as one of the sounds of nature, taking a grade and saying:

Afraid-I-can’t—afraid—I—can’t––a-f-r-a-i-d——I––c—a—n—t——a——f——r——a——i——

Then:

Yes I can yes I can yes I can

That was when it was pushed into low gear and went over the top.

And it was ugly—ugly at first and uglier with the years. In the beginning it had some brass mountings and turned wooden knobs on the quadrant. These refinements disappeared one by one, until at last there was nowhere on it or in it one extra flourish of craftsmanship. This ruthless simplification took place as the price fell. “The price,” said Ford, “is an integral part of the design.” The price fell from $1,200 to $295, and the car became a thing of stark utility.

The loyalty of people to Model T for nearly two decades was both rational and partisan. Ford car owners were sensitive. A joke was all right if it was meant right; aspersions they resented personally. In any case, they had the unanswerable retort. The one thing it could never be accused of was failure. It never failed, or almost never, and if it did—“that,” said Ford, “is my fault.”

Not only was it light in weight and a high stepper for dirt roads, getting through when other cars stuck fast; it was in all essential respects very excellently made. The choke rod might look like a piece of bailing wire, but it never broke, and the steel of the chassis, the axles and other important parts had the toughness of original sin.

Long before Model T, Ford one day picked up a stem valve from the wreck of a French racing car. It was light and very strong and nobody knew what kind of steel it was. He sent it to a metallurgist for analysis. It turned out to be vanadium steel. No American steel mill had ever made it. He brought a man from Europe who knew how and then subsidized a small steel mill to try it—“For,” he said, “that is the kind of steel I want for the universal car I am going to build.” After some failures he got it, and it was nearly three times as strong as the steel American motorcars until then were made of. After that he measured the demands an automobile made upon the steel in its different parts and ended by putting twenty kinds of steel in the Model T—one kind for toughness, one kind for hardness, another for elasticity, and so on.

3

AT THE age of nineteen Model T died. It froze to death.

One weakness of mass production is rigidity. Variety and quantity are strangers. If it is quantity you want you are obliged, as the engineers say, to “freeze” the design.

When you have miles of machines all tuned and geared in a certain way, each machine doing only the special thing it has the habit of doing, and from these machines more than one hundred thousand parts flowing with timed precision to a moving assembly line to fall exactly into place on the automobile that grows as it moves and is finished when it gets to the end of the line—then you have mass production. But obviously you cannot change the design of the automobile without tearing your factory to pieces. A change of design will mean new parts, and for new parts you will need new machines and time to teach new habits to old machines. Ford was first with this method and went further with it than anybody else, and that was why he could keep reducing the price of the car. He was continually adding new and more powerful machines, but only for the purpose of making the same car faster and faster.

So it was that year after year it was the same Model T, and the more it changed in little ways the more it was the same thing still.

Meanwhile, everything else was changing. Dirt roads turned to concrete. People grew richer and could pay more for automobiles. Other motorcar makers, following Ford’s methods, were able to bring down the cost of much more attractive cars.

First the Dodge brothers, who had got very rich making Ford’s engines until he began making them for himself, brought out a very good small car, and said as they did it: “Think how many Ford buyers would like to own a real automobile by paying only a little more.” That was a dagger thrust.

Then General Motors began to displace Model T with its Chevrolet, as that car evolved in the hands of a production genius named William S. Knudsen, who had learned how with Ford.

Even Ford jokes had used themselves up, all but the last and most cruel one of all, from Will Rogers.

In one of its unpredictable moods the country had gone dithery over the thought of Henry Ford for President, to succeed Coolidge. Rogers drawled that to get himself elected it would be necessary for Ford to say only: “Voters, if you elect me I’ll change the front end.”

For a long time the boss mechanic lingered at the bedside of his creature. He could see it was very sick; he was slow to believe the disease could be fatal—the disease of change. He blamed his salesmen, the times, the mores and manners. The people were running after style; they were beguiled by appearances. The one remedy he could think of was his own patent price paregoric, but the magic was no longer in it. Fewer and fewer people wanted Model T’s. That was the fact he had to face.

When at last he faced it and gave up the struggle he went overboard. He would not change the Model T. He would make a new car, from the tread up. That was the beginning of the Model A.

4

IN A plant that had made 1,800,000 cars a year—more than four a minute—everything stopped. Every machine in it had to be remade, retaught or sent to the furnace. Hundreds of new machines had to be invented. An entirely new way of doing things had to be evolved.

While the Ford plant was down cold, General Motors with its on-coming Chevrolet, and now also Chrysler with his first car, were taking the low-priced field. Ford dealers had nothing to sell.

Could he do it?

That became a national question. Starting from taw, with nothing behind him but the rejected Model T, could he produce what might be called a modern automobile good enough and soon enough to meet all this new competition? The odds were so heavily against him, as rational people thought, that at that time the fabulous Ford Motor Company could not have been sold in Wall Street at five cents on the dollar.

One day the executives of a large Philadelphia advertising agency called me on the telephone. They had taken the contract to do publicity for the new Ford car, and one of their ideas was to take some writers out to Dearborn to witness the evolution of it on the spot. Would I go? I said I was intending to go out, but not under the auspices of an advertising agency.

They said: “That’s all right. Anyhow, we’re not so sure now it’s a good idea. You know these people, don’t you?”

I said yes, I knew them.

They said: “Let’s forget the idea. Will you meet us for lunch? There’s something we want to talk to you about.”

At lunch they said: “Like everybody else, we’ve long been sold on the myth of Ford efficiency. Now we are out there looking at it. We’ve been there three months. We don’t see it. In fact, we can hardly believe what we see.”

I asked: “What do you see?”

They said: “You won’t believe it either. There stands the car in the middle of the floor, nearly finished so far as we can make out. Every morning the engineers gather around it, just looking at it, waiting for Ford to appear. When he comes he reaches inside, rattles something, shakes his head and says, ‘That won’t do. You’ve got to think of something better than that.’ One of them says, ‘Can you think of anything, Mr. Ford?’ He rattles the thing again, walks a little off and comes back, makes some pencil marks on a piece of paper, hands it to them and says, ‘Try something like that.’ The next morning they gather round the car again, and when Ford comes in he asks, ‘Got it on?’ They say, ‘Yes, Mr. Ford.’ He reaches in, rattles the thing again, whatever it is, makes a gesture of disgust and says, ‘That’s worse.’ With that he walks off, leaving them there gazing at the car. It’s like that day after day, with the whole country screaming for the new Ford car. We don’t understand it.”

I said: “You don’t know what you are looking at. That’s invention and it cannot take place in any other way. Wait until the car is on the assembly line and then look for efficiency.”

A little later I was in Dearborn. Knowing what the old practice had been, I was amazed at how they were setting up to make the new car. The crankshaft for example. Formerly, truing the forged crankshaft had been the work of a blacksmith, who held it on an anvil, sighted it, hit it here and there with a machine hammer, sighted it again, and then threw it on the pile. That was all right for the Model T. It would not do at all for the new car. Now they had a machine on which to spin the crankshaft at variable rates of speed; vibration was indicated on dials of sensitive recording instruments, and by other instruments the light and heavy spots on the forging could be exactly located for correction. That was one reason why the new car’s engine was going to be much smoother than the Model T engine. And that kind of new practice went through the entire plant.

I was in Cameron’s office when Ford came in. The Philadelphia advertising people were sitting in the corner, to listen. With the air of one who expects to be understood Ford said to me: “I believe in what we are doing. We had to do it. But you know, the only thing wrong with the Model T was that people got tired of looking at it.”

That was, I think, the only statement of defeat I ever heard him make about anything.

I said: “The new car will be good. Everybody knows that. But the Chevrolet and the Plymouth are good cars too. What are you going to say about the new Ford car that they cannot say about theirs?”

With a gesture of impatience he replied: “I don’t know. Ask the advertising people over there. That’s their job.”

To tease the advertising men in the corner, I said: “Do you think advertising sells a car?”

He answered shortly and emphatically: “No. A car has got to sell itself.”

I asked: “Then why are you going to advertise this new car in a big way?”

At that he gave what was perhaps the best argument for advertising the listeners in the corner had ever heard, to fit a case like this.

He said: “They kept at me about it until I was sick of the subject. At last I said, ‘All right. If you have to have that kind of doctor, get the best one you can find.’ Since then I’ve been thinking about it and now I’m for it. You know why? The Ford Motor Company is so big that it has to include everything. Advertising is a special feature of the American scheme. Advertising has to live too. For that reason we have to include it.”

I said: “Now you are going to make all the new cars you can and add them to the market. General Motors is going to go on making all the Chevrolets it can, and Chrysler all the Plymouths he can, whereas the total automobiles the market can absorb in a year is some definite quantity. Why can’t you determine statistically what that quantity is and all govern yourselves accordingly?”

His first answer was frivolous. He said: “You want to take all the fun out of the game.”

I said: “No. I’m only thinking it might be possible to bring some kind of stability into the motor industry.”

“Stability,” he said, as if he would bite it. “Stability is a dead fish floating downstream. The only kind of stability we know in this country is change.”

“Not that,” I said. “What I’m really thinking of is the recurring evil of unemployment from overproduction.”

“Overproduction!” he said, more hopeful of biting that one. “It’s a false word. When you say a thing has been overproduced, all you can possibly mean is that it is wrong in price or wrong in time. I suppose now you could make too many buggies at any price. They would be wrong in time.”

One of his favorite maxims was that we learn as we go along. He had just learned two things. Change had killed Model T, so therefore he embraced change; and the fate of Model T was proof that a useful thing may be overproduced if it is wrong in time, though it may be only that in a new time people are bored with the look of it.

This was hardly a subject that could be pursued.

I said: “Once you led everybody with service. No man with a Ford car could ever find himself far from a service station. The others have now caught up with you. They all provide excellent service, having learned it from you. What new advantage can you think of in place of that old one?”

He said: “The time is coming when an automobile will be so right that it will need no more service than a bar of soap. It will just wear out, like the one-horse shay.”

5

THE womb time of Model A was nine months. The public showing of it was a carnival event. Day after day all over the country people waited in long queues for a chance to see it. What they wanted to see much more than an automobile was whether Ford had been able to do it. He had.

It was a sane four-cylinder car, and when people said, “The Ford now is just another automobile,” they meant that it had a proper gear shift and all the regular conveniences, and was no longer a species apart. The name was a guarantee of manufacturing integrity. It did more damage to the purse than the Model T, of course, and yet it was the most car for your money, and the demand for it was such that one month after the first showing the Ford Motor Company was producing six thousand a day. That was 1,800,000 a year for so long as the market could stand it.

Then the same thing that had happened to Model T happened also to Model A. The design became rigid.

Meanwhile Ford’s competitors continued to bring out improved models each year. From doing it and from thinking it out far ahead they had learned how to retool their factories for a new design and then bring it to birth with no very acute labor pains. Their annual exhibitions of more attractive cars were like fashion shows. Even if this year’s car was no better than last year’s, it had more frills, more eye appeal and more style. And some of the improvements were radical. General Motors offered a six-cylinder Chevrolet “for the price of a four,” and Chrysler made a Plymouth with hydraulic brakes and a very sweet engine, and was so proud of it that he drove it himself to Dearborn and left it there with a taunting message for Ford. Wouldn’t he like to drive a better car than his Model A? If he liked it he could keep it.

At the age of five years Model A died. It had gone out of style.

So again there had to be a new car from scratch—not a change of Model A, but something original. Again the Ford Motor Company went down cold for an indeterminate time. Again Ford dealers had nothing to sell; and this time it was so bad that they began to desert. When they complained to Ford he said, “I don’t want to know how many Chevrolet cars were sold last year nor how many will be sold this year. I don’t care.”

It was rumored that the new car would be an eight-cylinder job; it would be an automobile to end this silly competition once for all. A little of this news was let out to dealers, to keep them holding on, and then they heard that a terrific publicity campaign was all ready to be launched. Weeks more of waiting ran into months. Where was the car? What had happened to it? Its unexplained nonappearance became news in the trade journals and then in the papers.

For a second time in his life Ford couldn’t have sold out in Wall Street for five cents on the dollar.

At length I went to Dearborn to find out what was wrong. The only lucid person there was Cameron.

He said: “I can make it simple as a statement of fact. But the facts are badly involved. We are dealing here with two very different men, one the inventor and one the manufacturer; both of them Mr. Ford. Formerly by the grace of God they had managed to come out at about the same place at the same time. This time the inventor is so far ahead of the manufacturer that we are all going crazy.”

“Well, specifically, what?”

“The engine, for one thing. It’s going to be an eight-cylinder V engine, as you probably know. For everybody else, for the Cadillac, it’s good enough to cast a V engine block in two pieces and bolt them together. That’s not good enough for Mr. Ford. He says it has to be cast all in one piece. Our foundry men kept telling him it couldn’t be done. He said they had to do it. I think at first he didn’t know himself how it could be done, else he would have told them. That went on for weeks. Then one day he went into the foundry and did it with his own hands. Now we’ve got an eight-cylinder V engine block in one piece, which is something nobody else ever had, but what will happen next we don’t know.”

“That’s wonderful advertising copy,” I said. “Why not take pages of newspaper space and tell the story just that way? It will keep everybody waiting patiently.”

“No,” he said. “I know it’s good copy. But we don’t do things that way.”

When at last the wonderful V-8 appeared it was the finest car Ford had ever made. Moreover, the design of it was not permitted to freeze. Year after year it was improved, if only in appearance. A new and strange kind of expert had been admitted to the Ford premises—one who could not be told by a Ford mechanic, “You do it our way.” It was the industrial designer. Styling was as important as the engine.

Yet for all that, the Ford Motor Company’s preeminence was lost. The V-8 could not restore it to first place.

The motor industry by this time was grown up. All cars were good. Nobody could afford to make a poor one.

6

FOR grand mechanics it was twilight time. Engineers, scientists and technicians were taking over. General Motors had provided itself with one of the finest research laboratories in the world. Chrysler followed.

At Dearborn there was an engineering laboratory. Ford said of it: “We do nothing at all in what is sometimes ambitiously called research, except as it relates to our single object, which is making motors and putting them on wheels. In our engineering laboratory we are equipped to do almost anything we care to do, but our method is the Edison method of trial and error. . . .”

The boss mechanic speaking. Science is all right. But only a mechanic could have made Model T.

What made the Ford world so fabulous was not the car. All the time there were other and better cars, even from the beginning; and his was by no means the beginning.

One day in the engineering laboratory we happened to pass through his private shop—a mechanic’s dream come true. He reached under the bench and dragged into the light his most precious relic.

“That’s it,” he said.

It was the first Ford car—a buggy box mounted on four bicycle wheels, with some tiny machinery under the seat. He was seven years of nights making it, while holding a job as engineer in the powerhouse of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. As he identified the bits and pieces of scrap it was made of—engine cylinders from a steam exhaust pipe, wheel hubs from railroad washers, and so on—he remembered driving it for the first time by the light of a lantern in the middle of a rainy night, how he had got from the mayor of Detroit a special permit to appear on the streets with it in daylight, and how when it stalled, as it sometimes did, he would chain it to a lamppost for fear somebody would make off with it before he could get back with repairs. The drive was a little leather belt, which perhaps had a better bite in the rain that first night. He could go only forward, but it would go, and it got him home, where Mrs. Ford was waiting with an umbrella.

“It would go now,” he said, “if they hadn’t been taking souvenirs off.”

Then he pushed it back, saying: “That’s what we beat the Selden patents with.”

You may not remember. Selden was an obscure patent lawyer. He waited until the motor industry was already big and then turned up with sleeping patents that seemed to cover any automobile with an internal-combustion engine. He formed a licensing organization and notified all the makers of that kind of car to come in and settle on a royalty basis. One motor company resisted and was beaten in court, whereupon there was created the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, all paying tribute for the right to use the Selden patents. The royalty was 1½ per cent of their gross sales, and that was Golconda for Selden, who never in his life had tried to make an automobile.

Ford alone stood out. The Selden people took him to court and threatened also to hold every individual buyer of a Ford car liable for patent infringement. Ford thereupon offered with every Ford car a bond to protect the buyer. It became a celebrated matter and put Ford in the popular position of fighting the black powers of Wall Street. The first decision went against him. He appealed to a higher court and won.

It was true, as he said, that he won with that relic he had just pushed back under the bench. The interesting fact is, however, that although he stood alone and won alone, the decision of the court that delivered him delivered also the entire motor industry from the Selden trap. That was so because all automobiles with the internal-combustion engine were based on one and the same principle. If Ford was not infringing the Selden patents neither was anybody else.

All of which means simply that in the first Ford car there was no new principle, nothing that others did not know too and were already doing. It was a mechanic’s achievement, not an original invention. And so it was in the next one and the next one and in all the millions of Ford cars that followed. There was not in any of them a new basic principle. What his competitors learned and borrowed from him was nothing from the car itself.

7

AFTER the car, the next two pieces from the whimsy of the jigsaw were those named the time and the idea.

They go naturally together. No great success can be wrong in time. How often do we say of a brilliant man who has failed that he was before his time? Thirty years sooner both Ford and his Model T would have been too soon; thirty years later they would have been too late.

The fantasy of a horseless carriage was very old. In the Iliad you find Vulcan making for the gods wheeled vehicles that moved by an invisible force. Or you will find it in Ezekiel 1:15, when the angels appeared on wheels, and it was “as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel,” so that “when those went these went and when those stood these stood,” this being the first vision of what happens in the transmission and differential mechanisms of your automobile. Nahum prophesied that “chariots shall rage in the streets and they shall jostle one against another in the broadways.”

For twenty centuries men dreamed dreams, made drawings and fashioned models of self-propelled vehicles. They were all before their time.

The modern automobile was not possible without a marvelous advance in the mechanical arts, a science of metallurgy, a science of chemistry, precision tools, experience with the behavior of explosive gases, vulcanized rubber, the electric spark, petroleum for the fuel of the internal-combustion engine and oil for the lubrication of its parts.

At a point of time, say about 1880, all of these prerequisites began coming together in a rush in one field of free knowledge. It was then certain that in a little while many inventive minds would be working on parallel lines toward sudden realization of a very old dream. That is why it is impossible to say who invented what now we call the automobile, deriving its power from the internal-combustion engine.

Many people may have forgotten that it ever had any other kind of engine. The natural motive power seemed at first to be steam and some inventors clung to it in an obstinate manner. Then electric power was tried. During the first twenty years of the motor age steam, electricity and gas were in competition; each had its partisans. As late as 1897 the outcome was still in doubt. The day of the horseless carriage was arriving. Almost anybody could see that. But what would its motive power be? When in that year Thomas A. Edison said that the city streets would soon be full of vehicles driven by motors, he was asked if the power would be electricity, and he was expected to say yes because electricity was his obsession.

But he said: “I don’t think so. As it looks at present, it is more likely that they will be run by gasoline or naphtha motors.”

Edison and Ford met for the first time at a dinner of electricity people, Ford attending as chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. He was then building his first car and he explained his little internal-combustion engine to Edison, who said: “That’s it, young man. You are on the right line. Don’t let anybody throw you off.”

Edison was right. The internal-combustion engine became the universal power of the automobile, here and everywhere else. In retrospect this may seem a little strange, because in mechanical theory the steam engine was much more efficient. Indeed, a mechanical engineer confronted for the first time with a blueprint of the internal-combustion engine with its silly poppet valves would be bound to say: “I suppose it would run. I can’t imagine it would ever be efficient.” The difficulties that had to be overcome to make it efficient were enormous. Its success was owing partly to the incentive of difficulty, which caused a vast amount of thought to become focused on it—since men do react that way—and partly to the marvelous and unpredictable availability of gasoline as motor fuel.

8

IT WAS not only that the materials and the knowledge became all at once present in time; there was what might be called a psychological dimension. The automobile itself was right in time. The mood of the people was restive and adventurous. They were in love with movement and speed and all in a great hurry to be somewhere and do something.

“Everybody,” said Ford, “wants to be someplace he ain’t. As soon as he gets there he wants to go right back.”

Moreover, they were beginning to understand mechanical power as no people had ever understood it before.

If you could put into their individual hands a simple, complete and self-contained means of swift transportation, at a price they could afford to pay, the demand would be insatiable.

That is what Ford saw. That is what he meant when he said: “I will build a motor car for the great multitude.” It was the magnificent and controlling idea of his life, and it was not the idea of a mechanic.

In twenty years it changed the habits and ways of thinking of an entire people and had, moreover, significant social consequences. Until then the automobile had been a plaything for the rich. Before Model T, Wood-row Wilson, speaking from his Princeton pulpit, had said that as a “new symbol of wealth’s arrogance” the automobile was creating socialism in the hearts of the people. How different when anybody could own an automobile—and one that could keep going under conditions that often stopped the rich man’s car.

Thus by a fortuitous running together of many things it was a time when the greatest unsatisfied want in the country was for an everyman’s automobile. It might have been something else; in that case, given a Ford, the Model T would have been something else.

Ford once said: “The automobile is not what you see. Think of it as just a way of using power. Our civilization, such as it is, rests on cheap and convenient power.”

After a day at River Rouge with Sorensen we came at twilight to his private office, which was a kind of watch tower on stilts, and at the top of the steps we stopped and stood there looking down on one of the stupendous industrial scenes of the world. He was the production manager and a genius at it.

He said: “You know, that isn’t just automobiles. It might be anything else that people wanted enough of. It’s the way of making it, the automobile or anything else.”

But it was the automobile that people were then wanting enough of, and Ford’s way of making it so revolutionized industrial method that the cost of making all cars was amazingly reduced. The automobile became therefore a necessary convenience of life, and by the time Model T had gone out of style it was possible for people to choose among a number of others. Yet this was true only because the entire motor industry had been obliged by the fact of fifteen million Model T’s.

 

2My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1922 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

• 1* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
• 2That was in his book Today and Tomorrow,* which he did in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in 1926. The complete theory had by that time arrived—the theory, namely, that the wage earner is more important as a consumer than as a producer. How much of that formulation was Ford’s and how much of it Crowther’s one cannot say. They wrote several books together, with Ford speaking in the first person as I or we, and the ideas were entirely his own, but as he conceived them they were wordless revelations or sudden flashes of insight. It was Crowther’s part to clothe them with reason and argument and house them in proper premises.