On September 27, 1908, Ford completed Model T No. 1 at its Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. It was neither the world’s first car nor Henry Ford’s first model, but it became the starting point for a major experiment in affordable motoring and large-scale production.
At the beginning of the 20th century, cars remained an expensive luxury that could be difficult to operate and repair. Ford wanted a vehicle for ordinary households: large enough for a family, simple to use and maintain, and affordable to people earning a decent wage. Early Model Ts sold for about $850, still a substantial price.
The decisive change came inside the factory. In 1913, Ford introduced a moving assembly line at its Highland Park plant. Instead of workers moving around the car, the vehicle moved past them while each worker performed a narrow, repeated task. The time needed to assemble a Model T chassis fell from more than 12 hours to about 90 minutes. As output increased, the price eventually dropped below $300.
In January 1914, Ford announced a five-dollar day for eligible employees, roughly twice the prevailing industrial wage. The measure helped reduce turnover in exhausting, repetitive assembly-line jobs and retain the workforce needed for mass production. It also advanced the idea that industrial workers could become customers for the goods they made.
Output rose from just over 10,000 Model Ts in 1909 to more than half a million in 1915. By 1921, the model accounted for nearly 57% of global car production. When production ended in 1927, more than 15 million had been built. The car reshaped daily life in the United States, encouraging roads, fuel stations, repair shops and suburbs, while Ford’s model of standardization and lower unit costs spread to other industries.
The system also carried costs. Assembly-line work was repetitive, timed and tightly controlled. Ford’s Sociological Department even examined the private lives of workers seeking the full wage. Fordism thus became more than a production technique: it represented a trade of higher wages and access to consumer goods for discipline and adaptation to the machine’s pace. Ford did not invent the car or the assembly line, but combined standard parts, speed and scale into a system that changed American industrial capitalism.