Ford Model T

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

By contrast, Ford had fallen behind the times with its aging product and its refusal to offer financing. As GM gained ground, even reductions in the Model T’s price were insufficient to revive Ford’s sales. By 1926 the Model T’s market share had fallen to 30 percent of cars sold in America, from its peak of 55 percent three years earlier. Ford ceased production in May 1927, shortly after the 15-millionth Model T had rolled off the line, then spent a year retooling its factories to build a new, more modern replacement, the Model A, which was launched in 1928. Tellingly, it could be purchased on an installment plan, had a closed-body design—and was offered in four colors.

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As car ownership came within reach of more people, in cities and countryside alike, some of the initial objections to the automobile, such as the noise and dust, came to be seen as a price worth paying for the greater freedom, convenience, and affordability it offered compared with horse-drawn vehicles. Perhaps surprisingly, given that Europe had been the birthplace of the technology, this happened in America first, thanks to one car in particular: the Ford Model T. 5 You Are What You Drive A family’s motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family. —SINCLAIR LEWIS, BABBITT, 1922 THE CAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING Anyone who wanted to buy a car in America in 1908 had no shortage of options.

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Many of these advertisements also refer to the cars’ performance and reliability, as indicated by their prowess in speed trials, hill climbs, and long-distance endurance races. This was a way to reassure potential buyers that as well as making them look good, the cars in question would not cause them embarrassment. What use, after all, is a car that indicates your wealth and status if it breaks down outside the opera? So the approach taken by the Ford Motor Company for its new Model T, which was launched in October 1908, was (like the car itself) something of a departure from the norm. Most of the advertisement is text, not imagery, and rather than being aspirational, its tone is practical and no-nonsense: “high priced quality in a low priced car … the Ford car will run more miles for less money than any other touring car manufactured.”

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne
Published 20 Jan 2014

The cars, being finely crafted and having multiple options, often broke down, requiring experts to fix them, and experts were expensive and in short supply. In one fell swoop, Ford’s Model T eliminated these two utility blocks. The Model T was called the car for the great multitude. It came in only one color (black) and one model, with scant options. In this way, Ford eliminated investments in image in the use phase. Instead of creating cars for weekends in the countryside—a luxury few could justify—Ford’s Model T was made for everyday use. It was reliable. It was durable; it was designed to travel effortlessly over dirt roads and in rain, sleet, or shine.

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By keeping the cars highly standardized and offering limited options and interchangeable parts, Ford’s revolutionary assembly line replaced skilled craftsmen with ordinary unskilled laborers who worked one small task faster and more efficiently, cutting the time to make a Model T from twenty-one days to four days and cutting labor hours by 60 percent.5 With lower costs, Ford was able to charge a price that was accessible to the mass market. Sales of the Model T exploded. Ford’s market share surged from 9 percent in 1908 to 61 percent in 1921, and by 1923, a majority of American households owned an automobile.6 Ford’s Model T exploded the size of the automobile industry, creating a huge blue ocean. So great was the blue ocean Ford created that the Model T replaced the horse-drawn carriage as the primary means of transport in the United States. General Motors By 1924, the car had become an essential household item, and the wealth of the average American household had grown.

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But is creativity a black box? When it comes to artistic creativity or scientific breakthroughs—think Gaudi’s majestic art or Marie Curie’s radium discovery—the answer may be yes. But is the same true for strategic creativity that drives value innovation that opens up new market spaces? Think Ford’s Model T in autos, Starbucks in coffee, or Salesforce.com in CRM software. Our research suggests no. It revealed common strategic patterns behind the successful creation of blue oceans. These patterns allowed us to develop underlying analytic frameworks, tools, and methodologies to systematically link innovation to value and reconstruct industry boundaries in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
by Vaclav Smil
Published 4 May 2021

In 1908, Henry Ford had been working in the auto business for more than a decade, and the Ford Motor Company, five years old and already profitable, had so far followed its peers by catering to the well-to-do. Its Model K, introduced in 1906, was priced at around $2,800, and the smaller Model N, introduced the same year, sold for $500—about what the average person earned in a year. Then, on August 12, 1908, the age of the automobile began, because on that day the first Ford Model T was assembled at Detroit’s Piquette Avenue Plant. It went on sale on October 1. Ford made his goals clear: “I will build a 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 . . . after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise.

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But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.” He met those goals, thanks to his vision and to the talent he was able to recruit, notably the designers C. Harold Wills, Joseph A. Galamb, Eugene Farkas, Henry Love, C.J. Smith, Gus Degner, and Peter E. Martin. Ford Model T The four-cylinder water-cooled engine put out 15 kilowatts (today’s small cars are commonly eight times more powerful), the top speed was 72 kilometers per hour, and the price was low. The Runabout, the most popular model, sold for $825 in 1909, but continuous design and manufacturing improvements let Ford lower the price to $260 by 1925.

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The last car, made in Puebla, was number 21,529,464. But in many ways the Beetle was just an updated emulation of the Model T. There can never be any dispute over who mass-produced the first affordable passenger car. Modern cars have a terrible weight-to-payload ratio A century ago, the bestselling car in the United States, Ford’s Model T, wrung a watt from every 12 grams of its internal combustion engine. Now, engines in bestselling American cars are getting a watt per gram—a 92 percent improvement. That is the one bit of happy news I am going to impart in this chapter. Now for the bad news: the US data show that during the past 100 years, average engine power has increased more than 11-fold, to about 170 kilowatts.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

Difference between Accuracy and Precision John Wilkinson Boulton and Watt steam engine Joseph Bramah Henry Maudslay Maudslay’s “Lord Chancellor” bench micrometer (courtesy of the Science Museum Group Collection) Flintlock on a rifle Thomas Jefferson Springfield Armory “organ of muskets” Joseph Whitworth Crystal Palace Whitworth screws (courtesy of Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com) “Unpickable” Bramah lock Henry Royce Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (courtesy of Malcolm Asquith) Ford Model T Ford Model T (exploded) Henry Ford Ford assembly line Box of gauge blocks Qantas Flight 32 (2010 incident) (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau) Frank Whittle (courtesy of University of Cambridge) Turbine blades (courtesy of Michael Pätzold/Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de) Rolls-Royce Trent engine Qantas Flight 32 failed stub pipe diagram (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau) Early Leica camera Leica IIIcs Hubble Space Telescope Hubble mirror being polished Null corrector Jim Crocker (courtesy of NG Images) Roger Easton (courtesy of the U.S.

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Scott, The Crack-Up, 307 fixtures (devices that hold workpiece absolutely secure), 100n, 102 flatness: of surface plates, 75–76, 119–20 of Whitworth’s billiard table, 124–25 flintlocks, see muskets, flintlock flour-milling machinery, 102 f number of lens, 219n Ford, Henry, 129, 131, 155–67, 157, 276 altruistic motives of, 155–56 early years of, 156–58 first motor car experiments of, 158–59 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, utilized by, 169–71 mass production assembly line created by, 160–67 Royce compared to, 131, 155–56, 158–59, 165–66 Westinghouse threshing engines in origin story of, 156–58 Ford Foundation, 166 Ford Model T (Tin Lizzie), 129, 155–56, 157, 160–67 decreases in price of, 165, 167 magneto assembly for, 164–65 production line for, 160–67 Ford Motor Company, 152, 155–67 complaints about SKF bearings at, 170 Edsel, 236 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, introduced at, 169–71 incorporation of, 131, 159 interchangeable parts essential at, 161n, 166, 170 Model A, 159–60 Model T, see Ford Model T (Tin Lizzie) precision’s role at Rolls-Royce vs., 131, 166–67 production line at, 160–65 “For want of a nail . . .” proverb, 244 foundries, electronic, 278n fountain pens, 58 France: Anglo-French rivalry over inventions and, 87n automobiles made in, 137–39 British wars with, 39n, 66, 73 decimal time in, 349n postrevolutionary Republican Calendar in, 333–34 social implications of precision as concern in, 90, 92, 117 standards for length and mass created by, 334–40; see also metric system system of interchangeable parts developed in, 87–94, 97, 98, 102 Franklin, Benjamin, 90, 222–23 French Academy of Sciences, 335 French Revolution, 59, 66, 92 frequency: Doppler effect and, 260–61 units of measurement and, 347–48 friction problem, in early clocks, 32–33, 35 Gainsborough, Thomas, 38–39 Galileo, 222, 332, 348 Galileo global navigation system, 270 Gascoigne, William, 77 Gaudy Night, 105 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, 167–71, 169 author’s introduction to, 2–4 Ford Motor Company and, 169–71 interchangeable parts and, 170 Johansson’s invention of, 167–68 gauges: go and no-go, for ensuring cannonball fit, 87 in gun manufacture, 89, 98–99, 100 gearwheels: from Ancient Greece (Antikythera mechanism), 24–27 producing, 4–5 uses for, 5–6 wooden, in Harrison’s clocks, 32–33 Gee, 259, 262 George III, King, 36, 74n George VI, King, 194–95 Germany, turbojet-powered aircraft developed by, 179, 184, 190–91, 195 Gernsback, Hugo, 181 glassblowers, scientific, 7 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 255 Global Positioning System (GPS), 37, 265–74 Doppler-based navigation system as precursor of, 259–65, 267 Easton’s invention of, 260, 265–68 ever-more-precise calculations of, 272–73 freed for civilian use, 269–70 major achievements of nineteenth-century cartography checked against data from, 273n military uses of, 269 other nations’ similar systems, 270 Parkinson’s vision for, 267–68, 268 run from tightly guarded Schriever Air Force Base, 270–72, 271, 272 time data for, 352–53 GLONASS, 270 Gloster Aircraft Company: experimental aircraft powered by jet engine (Gloster E28/29, or Pioneer), 190, 191–94 Gloster Meteor fighters, 192 Goddard Space Flight Center (Maryland), 234, 250–51, 294 Gould, Rupert, 34n graphene, 298 grasshopper escapement, 33 gravitational constant, 298 gravitational waves, detection of, 20–21, 300–306 see also LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) gravity: Bramah’s lock design and, 57 clock mechanisms and, 33, 354 link between time and, 354–55 pendulum swings and, 33, 333, 349 Whitworth’s measuring machine and, 121, 122 Great Britain: Anglo-French rivalry over inventions and, 87n divergent paths of industry in U.S. vs., 114–15 trading fortunes and, 31 War of 1812 and, 81–85 wars fought by, in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 39, 66–71 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (London, 1851), 111–27, 112 arrangement of exhibits at, 115–16 Bramah’s “challenge lock” picked at, 112n, 124, 125–27 Crystal Palace built for, 112, 113–14 extraordinary zeitgeist of the time and, 111–13 financing of, 113 great big iron machines displayed at, 114–16, 117–18 Hunt’s concern about social implications of machines displayed at, 116–17 origin of idea for, 112–13n Whitworth’s instruments and tools displayed at, 118–23 Great Trigonometric Survey of India, 273n Greece, Ancient: astronomers from, 26n gearwheels from (Antikythera mechanism), 24–27, 36 lost-wax method in, 204 measurement of time in, 27 Greenwich Royal Observatory, Harrison’s clocks at, 30–37 restoration of, 34n winding of, 30–31 Gribeauval, Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de, 87, 89, 92, 98 Guier, William, 259–62 Gulf War of 1991, 269 guns: Blanchard’s lathe for stocks of, 101–2 both precision and accuracy crucial in making of, 105 breech-loaded single-shot rifles, 97–98 French system of interchangeable parts applied to American precision-based manufacturing of, 97–100 Johansson’s invention of gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, and, 167–68 machines first used to make components of, 98, 99–100 rudiments of mass production assembly lines in manufacture of, 161n Victoria’s opening shot in 1860 Grand Rifle Match, 107–10 see also muskets, flintlock Hall, Bishop Joseph, Works, 331 Hall, John, 97–98, 99–100, 102 handcrafting: Antikythera mechanism and, 24–25, 27 Blanc’s standardization system and, 89–90, 92, 98 eliminated in Ford’s assembly line, 165, 166–67 Japanese appreciation for, 308, 309–10, 314, 316, 319–29 machine tools vs., 35, 38, 60, 72–73, 98–99 at Rolls-Royce, 6, 131, 152–55, 165, 166 social consequences of move away from, 72–75, 89–90, 116–17 and survival of craftsmanship in France, 92 in Whitney’s gun factory, 96–97 Hanford, Wash., cleanup site, 19–20 Harpers Ferry Armory (Va.), 98, 99, 102, 161n Harrison, John, 24, 30–37, 47, 67, 105, 267n balance mechanisms in clocks made by, 33, 35 Board of Longitude prize and, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35–36 large pendulum clocks made by (H1, H2, and H3), 30–31, 32–34, 35 restoration of clocks made by, 34n sea watches made by (H4 and K1), 31–32, 34–36 testing of clocks made by, 34, 35–36, 39 winding of clocks made by, 30–31, 33, 35 Harrison, William, 35–36 Hattori, K., and Company, 311–13 Hattori, Kintaro, 310–12 Heinkel Company, 184, 195 Heinkel He 178, 190–91 Heisenberg, Werner, 212–13, 298 Die Physik der Atomkerne, 275 Herbert, George, 244n Herschel family (William, Caroline, John, and Alexander), 229–30n Hiroshima, atomic bomb dropped on, 281 Hitler, Adolf, 187, 191 Hobbs, Alfred C., 124, 125–27 Hoerni, Jean Amédée, 284–85, 286n, 287 Hooker, Sir Stanley, 139 hour: defining, 28, 334, 349 displayed by mechanical clocks, 28–29 Hubble, Edwin, 2321 Hubble Space Telescope, 229–53, 230 cost of, 232 delays in launch date of, 243n first images from (First Light), 234–35, 251 flaw in main mirror of, 234, 234–43; see also Perkin-Elmer Corporation High Speed Photometer in, 247, 248, 250 money matters and, 237n news of failure announced to press, 235–36 placed into orbit, 230–32, 233 public reverence for, 229–30 repair of, 244–51 second images from (Second Light), 251–52 size and appearance of, 232–33 teacup affair and, 238 ultimate success of, 252–53 Wide Field and Planetary Camera in (Wiffpic), 247–48, 249 Hucknall Casings and Structures plant (Rolls-Royce), 209–10, 211, 229 Hunt, Robert, 116–17 hydraulic press, 57–58 India, Great Trigonometric Survey of, 273n Individual and the Universe, The (Lovell), 215 Industrial Revolution, 39, 41, 44, 51, 73, 74n, 111, 304 integrated circuitry, 286–99 devices made possible by, 287–88 Noyce’s work in genesis of, 286, 287, 288n printing with photolithographic machines, 277, 277–78, 286–87, 294 see also microprocessor chips; transisters Intel, 288–92 ASML machines bought by, 275–76, 277, 277–78 Chandler, Ariz., fabrication plant of (Fab 42), 275–76, 277–78, 291–92 first-ever commercially available microprocessor made by (Intel 4004), 288–89, 290, 292 founding of, 288 mutual dependency of ASML and, 278 interchangeable parts, 63, 71, 105, 114, 276, 312 in Ford’s mass production assembly lines, 161n, 166, 170 for guns, 84–85, 86, 87–100 system of, developed in France, 87–94, 97, 98, 102 interferometers: classic, 300 laser, 242–43 LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), 20–21, 299–306, 303, 305 null connector as, 240–41 internal combustion engine, 158 aircraft powered by, 178–213; see also jet engines International Astronomical Union, 344 International Committee on Weights and Measures (1960), 345–46 International Metre Commission (1872), 338 International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), 339 International Prototype Meter (IPM), 339 International System of Units (SI), 16–17n, 346 iron, 38, 39 cannon making and, 39, 41–44 Japanese handcrafted objects made of, 309–10 lathes made of, rather than wood, 61, 64 machines to manufacture pulley blocks made of, 71 smelting and forging, 40–41, 43, 49 steam engines made of, 46, 48–52 Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring technique for, 42–44, 49–52, 304–6 Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale, 41 Ito, Tsutomi, 321–22 Jacula Prudentum, 244n James Webb Space Telescope, 231n, 294, 295, 299 Janety, Marc Étienne, 336, 337 Japan, 308–29 bamboo objects handcrafted in, 325, 326 fondness for handcrafting in, 308, 309–10, 314, 316, 319–29 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in (2011), 322, 323–25 Living National Treasures of, 325–26 rigorous appreciation of perfect in, 308–9, 314 timekeeping traditions in, 310–11 urushi (handmade lacquerware) of, 326–28, 327 Westernization in, 310, 311 see also Seiko Japanese Railways, 313–14 Jay, John, 92–93 Jefferson, Thomas, 52 Blanc’s flintlock system and, 90, 92–94, 96 Whitney’s contract and demonstration and, 95, 96 Jet Age, inauguration of, 193 jet engines, 173–213 alloys for blades in, 200, 201, 203 Americans’ initial lack of interest in, 179 bird strikes and, 203n British public told of, 194 complexity within, 196–97 experimental aircraft fitted with, 190, 191–94 financial backing for development of, 184–85, 189 first passenger and freight aircraft with, 198–99 French forerunner of, 179 German development of, 179, 184, 190–91, 195 hot environment in, 187, 199–201 invention of, 178–94, 179; see also Whittle, Frank keeping blades cool inside, 197–98, 198, 199–203, 204, 206 manufacturing process for single-crystal blades in, 203–6 no tolerance whatsoever in making of, 206–7 power of piston engine vs., 182–83 propulsive jet of air produced by, 182, 187 Quantas Flight 32 and failure of, 174–78, 178, 196, 207–12, 208, 229 revolutionary novelty of idea for, 186 Rolls-Royce, 196–213, 205; see also Rolls-Royce jet engines single moving part in, 180 stress of takeoff and landing cycles on, 210 testing of prototypes, 187–90 turbine blade efficiency and, 198 Whittle’s eureka moment and, 182–83 Whittle’s patent and, 183–84 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL (Pasadena), 247–48, 350 Jo blocks, see gauge blocks, or Jo blocks Johansson, Carl Edvard, 3, 167–71 bought out by Ford, 170–71 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, created by, 167–68 Johns Hopkins University: Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at, 259–62 Space Telescope Science Institute at, 234, 251 Johnson, Claude “CJ,” 148–50, 151 Jones, Alexander, 27 Kai Tak Airport (Hong Kong), 195–96 kelvin, definition of, 346 Kiev, author photographed with Rolls-Royce outside city gates of, 133–34 Kilby, Jack, 288n kilogram, 336–40, 346–47 cast in platinum as étalon (standard), 337, 339–40, 348 now defined in terms of speed of light, 348 relationship of meter to, 336–37 see also metric system Kilogram of the Archives, 336 Klein bottle, 7n Kodak, 237n Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shooting down of, 269 krypton, standard unit of length based on, 344–45 Kyoto, temples of, 308 landscape photography, lenses for, 226 lasers, 351 in LIGO’s measuring instrument, 301, 305, 305–6 in manufacture of microprocessor chips, 293–94, 296 presumed to be precise, 242 lathes, 61–65 for gun stocks, designed by Blanchard, 101–2 invention and evolution of, 61 iron vs. wood, 61, 64 Maudslay’s improvements to, 61–65 screw-making, 63–64 for shoe lasts, designed by Blanchard, 19n, 101 slide rest and, 62–63, 64–65 latitude, determining, 30n leadscrews: of bench micrometers, 77–78 of lathes, 61, 62–63 Leica, 221, 222, 227–28 cameras owned by author, 219–20 lenses made by, 220, 224–25, 227–28 Leitz, Ernst, 222, 227 Leland, Henry, 168 length, standard unit of, 334–40 cast in platinum as étalon (standard), 336, 337, 339–40 mass in relation to, 336–37 meridian of Earth and, 334–36, 337 now defined in terms of time, 348 pendulum swing and, 332–33 redefined as wavelength of light, 342–45 Wilkins’s proposal for, 332–33 see also metric system Lenin, V.

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For more than a century now, the agreed-upon name that Sir Charles and Sir Henry chose has become a universal denominator of excellence, its dominance unchallenged, its reputation sealed—and all based on a renown for accuracy, exactitude, and mechanical perfection machined down to the finest and most unforgiving of tolerances. AT ABOUT THE same time as the Ghost’s birth, but four thousand miles away, at a factory in Detroit, Michigan, quite another kind of car was just establishing itself, though it was as different from the handmade paragons of Cooke Street and Derby as it was possible to be. It was the Ford Model T, and it appeared on the roadways of America in October 1908, shortly after the first Silver Ghosts began their wanderings through England and Scotland. Henry Royce had offered up precision for the few. Henry Ford wanted precision to be available to the many. “I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he declared in 1907.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

By 1900 shipyards in the UK, Germany, and France were routinely launching passenger ships that needed more than 10 000 t steel to make. The third transportation segment that eventually created enormous demand for steel also originated before 1900 – but the age of mass car ownership in the USA only began with Ford's Model T in 1908. Late-nineteenth century industrialization also created enormous new markets for steel in the steelmaking industry itself (due to its massive expansion that required greater numbers of larger blast furnaces and steel mills), in the new electrical industry (starting in the early 1880s, and requiring heavy machinery including boilers and steam turbogenerators, as well as steel for transformers, transmission towers, and electrical wires), in oil and gas extraction and transportation (steel for drilling pipes, drill-bits, well-casings, pipelines and vessels, pipes and storage tanks in refineries), as well as in traditional textile and food-processing industries, where advancing mechanization resulted in the adoption of a greater array of steel-based machines and other processing and storage equipment.

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Additionally, electric arc furnaces, first introduced in 1902, began to be used more frequently to convert the growing stocks of scrap metal into high-quality steel. The first cars of the 1890s created only a small demand for steel because they had simple wooden bodies and were made in small numbers: only once mass-production took hold (with Ford's Model T introduced in 1908) did the auto industry become the leading consumer of steel, with its demand rising from about 70 000 t in 1910 to 1 Mt by 1920 (Hogan, 1971). For many decades the idea of producing noncorroding steel on a mass scale was rejected by nearly all metallurgical experts. Harry Brearley is usually credited with inventing commercial stainless steel (containing nearly13% chromium) in 1913 (an innovation readily embraced by Sheffield's famous steel cutlery makers) but contemporaneous advances were made in Germany and in the USA (Cobb, 2010).

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In 1901 Maybach revealed Mercedes 35, the prototype of all modern vehicles whose four-cylinder engine had power of 26 kW but whose aluminum block and honeycomb radiator lowered its weight to just 230 kg, yielding a mass/power ratio of 8.8 g/W. The second order-of-magnitude improvement came during the twentieth century with the transformation of cars from expensive oddities into affordable machines. The world's first mass-produced car, Henry Ford's Model T launched in 1908, was initially powered by a 2.9-l four-cylinder engine with a mass/power ratio of about 15 g/W but by the time the car's production ended (in 1927, although the production of replacement engines continued until August 1941) the ratio had declined to less than 5 g/W. By the early 1930s, even such powerful engines as Pierce Arrow's powerful V-12 rated less than 4 g/W, and gradual changes before and after World War II eventually brought the mass/power ratio of commonly used automotive engines to less than 2 g/W by the 1950s and to less than 1.5 g/W by the mid 1960s: even Ford's 298 V8 for the 1965 Mustang rated just 1.4 g/W.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design
by Giles Colborne
Published 14 Sep 2010

If you want simplicity, if you want to be seen as an innovator, then it’s the mainstream customers you should be aiming at. The Ford Model T wasn’t the first car ever built, but it was the first one made with the mass market in mind. Henry Ford revolutionized the motor industry because he aimed squarely at the typical person. Simplicity was at the heart of his vision: We will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be…small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed…after the simplest designs 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. — Henry Ford, on the Model T All of Ford’s innovations (his use of production lines, the price point of his car, the easy-to-maintain engine design) came as a result of his desire to focus on creating a simple product that was suitable for the mainstream.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

As bicycles surged in popularity, riders demanded road improvements to make cycling safer, faster, and more enjoyable. In 1904, a national road census found that only 7 percent of roads in the United States were covered in stone or gravel; the other 93 percent were dirt.2 Bicyclists found common cause with motorists when the Ford Model T and other early automobiles came on the market. Even though those paved roads allowed automobiles to go much faster than a bicycle and eventually push the bicyclists, along with the other road users, off the street almost entirely, it was not clear how automobiles might transform mobility in their quest for supremacy.

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Their efforts contributed to an uptick in electric vehicle sales, but it paled in comparison to the growing number of vehicles with internal combustion engines, especially once World War I had begun. The second problem had to do with production. The EVC never produced a standardized vehicle, and none of the other electric vehicle manufacturers succeeded at streamlining their production processes before Henry Ford introduced the gas-powered Model T. As a result, customers could buy an internal combustion vehicle at a much lower price than an electric one, and even though the electric vehicle was quieter, offered a smoother drive, and started more easily (the early internal combustion vehicles needed to be hand cranked), it struggled to compete.

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The electric vehicle’s days were numbered, sales of its internal combustion counterpart were growing every year, and the streetcar remained the most important way for many urban residents to get around. However, due to the recession that year, there were a lot of people left without work who needed to find an alternative income, and they turned to unregulated transportation. Production of the Ford Model T had begun in 1908, so by 1914 it was possible to find cheaper used models. That was especially the case in Los Angeles, where the automobile was more common than anywhere else in the United States. Even as most people kept using streetcars, which typically cost five cents per ride, some people felt there was room for another service that was not restricted to tracks, could take more liberty with routes, and, naturally, could generate a quick source of income for drivers.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Edison with his phonograph photographed by Mathew Brady in April 1878. Photograph from Brady-Handy Collection of the Library of Congress. xv Figure 1.1    Evolution of average male body heights in Western Europe, 1550–1980. Data from Clio Infra (2017). Figure 1.2    The bestselling American car in 1908 was Ford Model T weighing 540 kg. The bestselling vehicle in 2018 was not a car but a truck, Ford’s F-150 weighing 2,000 kg. Images from Ford Motor Company catalogue for 1909 and from Trucktrend. Figure 1.3    Millennium of stalagmite accretion illustrating linear and exponential growth trajectories. Figure 1.4    Graphs of expected height-for-age growth (averages and values within two standard deviations) for boys and girls 2–5 years old.

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As a result, new houses built in 2015 are about 2.6 times larger than was the 1950 average, but for many of them the mass of materials required to build them is four times as large. The increasing mass of American passenger cars has resulted from a combination of desirable improvements and wasteful changes (figure 1.2). The world’s first mass-produced car, Ford’s famous Model T released in October 1908, weighed just 540 kg. Weight gains after World War I (WWI) were due to fully enclosed all-metal bodies, heavier engines, and better seats: by 1938 the mass of Ford’s Model 74 reached 1,090 kg, almost exactly twice that of the Model T (Smil 2014b). These trends (larger cars, heavier engines, more accessories) continued after World War II (WWII) and, after a brief pause and retreat brought by the oil price rises by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s, intensified after the mid-1980s with the introduction of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs, accounting for half of new US vehicle sales in 2019) and the growing popularity of pick-up trucks and vans.

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These trends (larger cars, heavier engines, more accessories) continued after World War II (WWII) and, after a brief pause and retreat brought by the oil price rises by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s, intensified after the mid-1980s with the introduction of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs, accounting for half of new US vehicle sales in 2019) and the growing popularity of pick-up trucks and vans. Figure 1.2 The bestselling American car in 1908 was Ford Model T weighing 540 kg. The bestselling vehicle in 2018 was not a car but a truck, Ford’s F-150 weighing 2,000 kg. Images from Ford Motor Company catalogue for 1909 and from Trucktrend. In 1981 the average mass of American cars and light trucks was 1,452 kg; by the year 2000 it had reached 1,733 kg; and by 2008 it was 1,852 kg (and had hardly changed by 2015), a 3.4-fold increase of average vehicle mass in 100 years (USEPA 2016b).

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

“Designing Smart Vehicles for a Smart World,” Ford Motor Company, http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/677-5-dollar-a-day (accessed June 26, 2019). 4. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 11. 5. “Ford Model T,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T (accessed June 26, 2019). 6. Peter Huber, The Bottomless Well (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 7. Joel A. Tarr, “Urban Pollution—Many Long Years Ago,” American Heritage (October 1971), reproduced by Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages, http://www.banhdc.org/archives/ch-hist-19711000.html (accessed June 26, 2019). 8.

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In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the industrial world when he doubled the pay of his highly productive assembly-line workers to $5 a day.2 Ford reasoned that a higher-paid workforce would be able to buy more cars and thus increase his business.3 Others followed suit. The market for automobiles was elastic. The Model T Ford went on sale in 1908 for $950; due to productivity improvements, its price had dropped to $269 by 1923.4 In 1909, Ford produced 10,666 vehicles; in 1923, the company sold more than 2 million.5 By 1927, the Ford Motor Company had sold 15 million of its Model T “flivvers.” As a spillover from their explosive success, automotive companies also created a large demand for other products and services that employed millions of workers—steel, coal to make the steel, glass, rubber, machine tools, auto dealerships, gas stations, oil fields, mechanics, and so on.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

Fences, railroad tracks, and guarded gates restricted access to the plant, which came to resemble a fortress, in contrast to Highland Park, which was situated in a busy urban neighborhood, with public sidewalks alongside the factory buildings.40 Ironically, while the Rouge was being built out to produce everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and varied models than Ford, which still only sold the Model T (though it offered luxury cars under the Lincoln nameplate). By 1927, as sales diminished, it became evident that something had to be done. Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools and rebuilt 25,000 more. New molds, jigs, dies, fixtures, gauges, and assembly sequences had to be created.

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The steel mill had become the modern sublime.68 CHAPTER 4 “I WORSHIP FACTORIES” Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory IN A 1926 ENTRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Henry Ford (or the publicist who ghostwrote the article) defined “mass production” as “the modern method by which great quantities of a single standardized commodity are manufactured.” If anyone knew about the manufacture of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” it was Ford. His Model T, introduced in 1908, turned the automobile from a luxury plaything into a mass-consumer good. Prior to then, automobile companies typically manufactured at most a few thousand cars a year. By 1914, the Ford Motor Company was rolling out nearly a quarter of a million Model Ts annually. By the time the company stopped selling the iconic model in 1927, fifteen million had been produced.1 Henry Ford’s worldwide fame stemmed as much from the methods his company used to make the Model T as from the car itself.

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He built his first car in 1896, proving his models’ worth by racing them. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with investors who supplied the capital needed to take on the expensive business of making automobiles. In 1907 he wrested control of the firm from his partners. Aiming at rural America, Ford conceived of the Model T as a lightweight vehicle, sturdy enough to withstand the terrible roads that farmers depended on but simple enough for them to repair themselves and for him to produce at a price they could afford.9 Sold through a network of independent distributors, the Model T proved an instant hit.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

World steel production trebled between 1950 and 1970, with plants becoming much larger. In other sectors production increased radically in efficiency, but without necessarily needing increases in scale. Agriculture is a good example. Cars in the long boom The mass production of motor cars was pioneered in the United States by one company and one car, Ford and the Model T. At its peak in the 1920s the Model T was produced at an annual rate of 2 million, and by the time production ceased in 1927 15 million had been built. Ford was at this time easily the largest car manufacturer in the world, and had made America easily the most motorised nation in the world.

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The latter was a factor in the relative decline of the electric car, except in some cases of centrally-controlled fleets.15 The Model T Ford, in production from 1908 to the late 1920s, easily out-produced all other cars in its time, and provides some particularly stark examples of the significance of maintenance. A key feature of the car was that it was made from interchangeable parts. This allowed the assembly to be carried out without fitters, and it also had implications for maintenance. Henry Ford himself noted that the Model T was designed for ease of maintenance; no special skill was required for repair or replacement: I believed then, although I said very little about it because of the novelty of the idea that it ought to be possible to have parts so simple and so inexpensive that the menace of expensive hand repair work would be entirely eliminated.

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Despite some investment in new designs for steam locomotives, prompted by the oil crisis of the 1970s, the move towards diesel and electric traction was too powerful for steam to compete. From maintenance to manufacture and innovation Maintenance sometimes also means a significant remodelling as with battleships and bombers. Similarly, small-scale maintenance workshops could be and were used to change things, sometimes as soon as they were bought. For example, in the 1920s a Ford Model T buyer ‘never regarded his purchase as a complete finished product. When you bought a Ford you figured you had a start – a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware.’45 Many things could be bought by mail order, another great American invention, but the first thing E.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

At the end of the 1880s, the decade that saw the introduction of the first automobiles and adoption of the first streetcars, the total of these large draft animals had reached 17.5 million (Figure 1.4). The first tractors for field work were introduced during the 1890s but the total horse and mule count rose to 20 million by 1900. Large-scale expansion of electric streetcars, the construction of the first subways, the introduction of mass-produced passenger vehicles (starting with Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908), and growing tractor sales took place before World War I—but the horse and mule count peaked only in 1917 at just over 26.6 million, a third above the 1900 level. By 1930 urban horses were almost completely displaced by electricity and internal combustion engines, but the total tractor count was still less than one million and the United States still had 18.9 million horses and mules, more than in the early 1890s.

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Edison’s battery—in commercial production until 1975 (used mainly in underground mining and by railroads)—did nothing to prevent the triumph of internal combustion engines. New York’s Electric Vehicle Company had first reduced its operation to occasional rides in Central Park and went bankrupt in 1907, even before Ford introduced his Model T in October 1908. No major move toward electric road transport took place until the very end of the 20th century. In 1995 the California Energy Commission set the target of 2% of all new vehicles sold in the state to be electric in 1999, but no commercial electrics were actually sold (Lazaroff 2001).

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During the 1860s, the first decade of the modern oil industry, the most important refined product was kerosene for lighting (replacing whale oil) and lubricants; waxes and asphalt were useful non-energy byproducts. By 1880 kerosene was 75% of the total output of US refineries, gasoline just 10% (USBC 1975). After 1882 electricity began to displace kerosene in urban lighting, but by 1908, when Ford Motor Company introduced its mass-produced and affordable Model T, US kerosene output was still three times that of gasoline. The subsequent growth in American car ownership was quite rapid. Annual sales rose from 180,000 in 1910 and 1.5 million in 1916, registrations of all motor vehicles went from more than 1 million in 1913 to more than 10 million in 1921, and by 1929 nearly half of all households owned a vehicle (USBC 1975).

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Published 19 May 2009

And every day vehicles come out with new power-sucking features, such as onboard computers and entertainment systems. All of these energy-using features are just further examples of how the falling cost of consuming energy has led us to consume ever more of it. Add it all up, and the vehicle idling beside you on a North American street is probably less efficient than a 1908 Ford Model T. So much for the great benefits that energy-saving technology has bestowed. From a conservation point of view, the bad news doesn’t end there. America’s gasoline consumption is not just about average fuel mileage per vehicle. It’s also about how many vehicles are on the road. Here, too, we hear the loud echo of the rebound effect.

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Though today’s car manufacturers and regulatory bodies worry that battery-powered cars may be too slow, an electric car was clocked at over 100 kilometers per hour (that’s 62 miles an hour) in 1899. And while we keep hearing that current battery technology just can’t provide electric cars with sufficient range, a Detroit Electric managed to go 211 miles on a single charge back in the days when city trolleys were pulled by horses. Around the time that Ford’s first Model T was rolling off the assembly line, electric cars were more popular than internal combustion models, and it is not hard to see why. They were quiet and clean and reliable, particularly in comparison to the clattering and often dangerous gasoline-powered cars they were competing against for market share.

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Jevons pioneered the concept of the efficiency paradox in his 1865 treatise “The Coal Question,” noting how coal-saving technological change in the production of steel ultimately boosted the demand for coal. The phenomenon was initially known as Jevon’s paradox. p. 91 The fuel efficiency of a 1908 Ford Model T was somewhere between 25 and 17 miles per gallon. Assuming it is the lower figure, many SUVs do worse than their forebears 100 years ago; and if it is the higher figure, even many sleek family vehicles do worse (cbs5.com/local/Model.T.Ford.2.434954.html). p. 95: The story about the threat posed to the British electrical grid by soccer supporters watching their new plasma televisions comes from “Plasma screens threaten eco-crisis,” by David Smith and Juliette Jowit, which appeared in The Observer August 13, 2006 (www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/aug/13/energy.nuclear industry).

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Division of labour explains why workers on a car production line each add some 1. http://www.discovery.org/a/2073 Chapter 1 • Adam Smith21 part to the basic chassis, why busy bankers do not answer the phone themselves but have PAs, and even why we buy pork chops at the shop rather than reliving the BBC sitcom The Good Life and rearing our own pigs. For businesses, division of labour has been central to production systems since the Ford Model-T car became the first automobile to be mass produced on moving assembly lines using pre-manufactured parts. More recently this has led to the growth in outsourcing, which both magnifies the specialisation of the job of making individual parts and also exploits different countries’ absolute advantage in what they do.

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Index A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) 2, 5–6 Adelman, Irma 110 American Economic Association 170 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations see The Wealth of Nations anarchism 156 apartheid system in South Africa 199 Ariely, Dan 234 Arrow, Kenneth 191, 213 AT&T 22 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Austrian School of Economics 121–2 autarky concept 184 bank bailouts in the financial crisis 162 Bank of England 161 Barro, Robert 43 Barro-Ricardo equivalence 43–4 Becker, Gary (1930– ) 193–216 approach to human behaviour 212–15 building human capital 200–2, 210 early life and influences 195–7 economic perspective on discrimination 196–7, 198–9 Economics of Discrimination (1957) 196–7, 198–9 economics of the family 213–15 family decision making 203–6 key economic theories and writings 197–212 long-term impact 212–15 new home economics 203–6 Nobel Prize (1992) 194, 195–6 on crime and punishment 207–10 on drug addiction 210–12, 215 rational choice model 197, 212– 15, 216 verdict 215–16 Becker–Posner Blog 215 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 181 Bergmann, Barbara 206 Bergson, Abram 182 Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function 182–3 Bernanke, Ben 77, 159, 162 Bernoulli, Daniel 229 bias in decision making 222–5 in financial decision making 225–32 Bitcoin currency 138 Black, Fischer 187 Blinder, Alan 215 Bloomsbury Group 94 Blunt, Anthony 94 boom and bust cycles see business cycles Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 Brown, Gordon 3, 42 Burgess, Guy 94 Burns, Arthur F. 147 Bush, George H.W. 139 business cycles 57, 65 Hayek’s explanation 123–6 Samuelson’s oscillator model 174–5 Butler, Eamonn 162 Cambridge School of economics 74, 86 Cambridge spy ring 94 capital flow controls 113 capital-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 capitalism exploitation of the working class (Marx) 56–8, 62–3 Index239 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 seeds of its own downfall (Marx) 56–8, 61–3 capitalist production process (Marx) 54–6 Carlyle, Thomas 33 cartels evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 central banks control of economic activity 161 over-expansion of credit 123–4 central state planning, Hayek’s opposition to 134–6, 140 certainty effect 229, 230 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 Chapman, Bruce 19 Chicago School of economic thought 146, 160, 194 China savings and investment imbalance with the US 113 trade imbalance with the US 45 choice architecture 234 Churchill, Winston 98 classical economics 40, 54 Coase, Ronald 73 cognitive biases (Kahneman) 222–5 communism 19, 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 company bailouts in the financial crisis 162 comparative advantage 35–8, 183–4 complex adaptive systems, science of 138 complex financial products 61–2, 187 computer-games-based money 138 confirmation bias 227 consumer demand marginal rate of substitution 180 revealed preference theory 180–1 consumption smoothing concept 149, 163 Corn Laws, attack by Ricardo 33–5 costs of production, relationship to value 75–7 credit expansion, as a driver of boom and bust cycles 123–4 crime and punishment, views of Becker 207–10 Darling, Alistair 112 Das Kapital (Marx) 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 decision making biases and errors in financial decisions 225–32 heuristics and bias in 222–5 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 under risk 228–32 demand side economics 127 depression Keynesian interventionist view 92–3, 94, 105–6 see also Great Depression (1930s) dialectic style of analysis 52, 54 Diamond, Peter 179 diminishing marginal utility 82 discrimination economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 car production 20–1 in daily life 20–1 divorce rates 205 drug addiction, views of Becker 210–12, 215 Dubner, Stephen 234 Eastern Europe, influence of Hayek 140 Ebenstein, Larry 158 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson, 1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 Economics of Discrimination (Becker, 1957) 196–7, 198–9 Efficient Market theory 111, 112, 187 240Index elasticity of demand 82–4 Elizabeth II, Queen 158 emerging markets, offshoring of jobs to 41 endogenous growth 202 endowment effect 232, 234 Engels, Friedrich 52, 58–61 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 European Central Bank 161 exchange rates, impact of trade on 185–6 expected utility theory (EUT) 228, 229–30, 232 externalities 85 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 Fama, Eugene 160, 187 family decision making economic perspective 183, 203–6, 213–15 welfare decision making 183 fiat currency 152 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 financial decision making, biases and errors in 225–32 financial economics, work of Samuelson 187 First World War 95 Folbre, Nancy 206 Ford Model-T car, assembly-line production system 21 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson, 1947) 168, 169–70 Fox, Charles James 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) 234 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free market system view of Adam Smith 13–14, 16–18 view of Hayek 131–3 view of Friedman 155–7 free rider problem in public goods 177–8 Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman, 1980) 158 free trade, influence of Adam Smith 22–3 Freeman, Richard 201 frictional unemployment 155 Friedman, David 156 Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 94, 110, 145–64, 190–1, 196 advocate of the free market 155–7 belief in individualism 155–7 criticism of Keynesianism 149–50 early life and influences 147–8 economics in action 160–3 fiat currency 152 Free to Choose (1980 ) 158 influence of the Great Depression (1930s) 148 influence on modern economic theory 158–60 limited role of government in the economy 152, 155–7 long-term legacy 157–63 monetarism 151–2 monetarist rule 152 monetary policy 151–2 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment 153–5 new explanation for the Great Depression 150–1 Nobel Prize in economics (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 permanent income hypothesis 148–50 role of money supply in the economy 151–2 verdict 163–4 Friedman, Rose (formerly Rose Director) 147, 148, 157, 158, 160 FTSE-listed plcs 86 Funk, Walter 108 Funk Plan 108 Galbraith, J.K. 159 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 40 Index241 general equilibrium theory 8 genetically modified foods 42 geographical effects in economics 84–6 Giffen goods 84 global financial crisis (2007–8) 92, 174 and Keynesianism 111–13 global stimulus package 113 Marxist view 61–3 global free trade influence of Adam Smith 22–3 influence of Ricardo 40–2 global public goods 177–8 global recession (2009) see Great Recession (2009) gold standard, criticism by Keynes 95, 98, 107 government debt and the Great Recession (2009) 43 taxpayer view of (Ricardo) 38–9 government role in the economy anti-central planning view of Hayek 134–6, 140 Keynesian view 92–3, 94, 105–6 view of Adam Smith 9, 10, 16–18 view of Friedman 152, 155–7 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 19, 22–3, 85, 92 explanation of Friedman and Schwartz 150–1 influence on Friedman 148 influence on Keynes 99–100 role of the Federal Reserve 159 Great Recession (2009) 23 and government debt 43 arguments against protectionism 42 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Greece, sovereign debt crisis 113–14 Greenspan, Alan 111–12, 235 Grossman, Michael 212 Hansen, Lars Peter 160 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 110, 111, 119–42 business cycle theory 123–6 clash with Keynes 120, 126–31 collapse of the Soviet Union 140 early life and influences 120 emphasis on individual freedom 134–6, 140 explanation for boom and bust cycles 123–6 First World War 121 focus on supply side economics 127 influence in Eastern Europe 140 influence on George H.W.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

Roads, previously open to anybody who wanted to use them, whether on a bicycle, on foot, or on a horse, had to be given over exclusively to the gasoline engine. And this process was slow and difficult. Even in the interwar years, many people did not actually welcome this new technology into their lives. They saw it as an invader, a dangerous killer of children and a creator of noise and smoke. Even the Ford Model T, which made up more than half of the cars on America’s roads in the 1920s, was used mostly in rural areas. Urban Americans continued to use public transport. When the 1896 act passed, it was controversial. The railway companies worried that it would take traffic away from them. Others feared that the noisy new vehicles would scare horses.

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Footage of New York City from the early twentieth century shows people walking in the streets—not stuck to sidewalks but right in the middle—with a level of ownership unimaginable today. By the mid-1930s there were already more than 30 million cars on American roads—at a time when the population of the United States was only a little more than a third of what it is today, at around 120 million. Henry Ford’s Model T, constructed on a revolutionary assembly line at Highland Park in Detroit, had brought cheap motoring to a mass market; more than 15 million of the cars were manufactured between 1918 and 1927. At a time when the average salary in America was around $3,000 a year, the Model T sold for just $850, well within the range of affordability for even working-class families.

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Yet from the mid 1920s until the mid 1990s, and later in some poorer countries, gasoline was routinely mixed with tetraethyl lead, a particularly poisonous chemical variant of lead invented by German chemist Carl Jacob Löwig in the 1850s. In the 1920s, GM was trying to beat the enormous success of Henry Ford’s Model T. But the firm needed a competitive edge. In the 1920s, climate change was not a concern, but fuel efficiency was—many feared that America’s oil wells, then being newly exploited, would run out quickly, and gasoline prices were rising. Scientists paid by General Motors discovered that by mixing tetraethyl lead with gasoline, you could increase the “octane,” and so reduce the engine-damaging “knock” that gasoline then on sale inflicted on engines starting up.

Policing the Open Road
by Sarah A. Seo

If at any point during the traffic stop an officer suspected drugs inside the car—or liquor in the early twentieth century—criminal procedures empowered the officer to start investigating; if the officer’s suspicions were confirmed, the individual almost certainly faced arrest, a severe sentencing regime, and an “eternal” criminal record. Confronted with the authority of the police to inspect and to intrude, the automobile was not quite the unmitigated freedom machine it was celebrated to be. In fact, driving, or even just being in a car, was the most policed aspect of everyday life.14 Print advertisement for the 1924 Ford Model T. Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford, THF116860. This automobile paradox offers a sense of how completely cars transformed the conditions of freedom in the twentieth century. Motorized vehicles offered unprecedented mobility, but at the same time their mass adoption created mass chaos that threatened everyone’s safety.

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They also prohibited motorized vehicles on certain roads; determined who among cars, horses, carriages, and pedestrians had the right of way; and specified how fast a car could overtake horse-drawn coaches and trolleys. According to one legal eagle, San Francisco even regulated “the angle at which motorists should make turns from one street into another.” In a short time, the number of regulations multiplied exponentially. In 1905, three years before the introduction of Ford’s Model T, a treatise on municipal corporations mentioned the automobile in just one line: “Bicycles, tricycles and automobiles are ordinarily considered vehicles and entitled to the use of that part of the street or highway set aside for them.” Tellingly, another treatise published just seven years later in 1912 devoted two entire sections to the regulation of “the running of automobiles.”

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This inside-out claim invoked the public / private framework of classical legal thought, and Reich was thinking of the legally constituted private realm when he wrote that the “good society must have its hiding places—its protected crannies for the soul.” Only in these sanctuaries, hidden from the intrusive gaze of the state, could individuals live freely. By “hiding places,” Reich referred not to the sanctity of one’s home but to the automobile. This was an odd claim as a matter of law. Ever since Henry Ford perfected the mass production of the Model T, courts had held that cars fell within the public sphere of regulation and policing, which was why officers could stop and question Reich as they pleased.3 For Reich, who had been struggling in secret with his sexuality at a time when every state but one still had sodomy laws on the books—Illinois was the first to repeal its law in 1961—the private sphere represented suburban domesticity.

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud
by Jack Ewing
Published 22 May 2017

At another meeting, he suggested that the company insist that all newspapers and magazines that wrote about Volkswagen or its cars submit their articles in advance for examination and approval “so that unfriendly articles will no longer be published.” The KdF Wagen, now known as the Volkswagen, went on to be produced in numbers that far surpassed Ford’s Model T and exceeded even the wildest expectations of its prewar planners. Conceived by a totalitarian government bent on military conquest, the people’s car lived up to its name only when there was peace, when Germany was a democracy and Western ally, and the company had access to markets worldwide.

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Decades later, when Volkswagen tried to tap nostalgia for the Beetle with the New Beetle, which evoked the contours of the original Ferdinand Porsche design but featured modern mechanics, the car sold well in the United States but poorly in Germany. On February 17, 1972, a few months before Ferdinand Piëch began work at Audi, Volkswagen passed a historic milestone. Production of the Beetle reached 15,007,034 cars, overtaking Ford’s Model T as the most-produced car ever. It was perhaps the ultimate vindication of Ferdinand Porsche’s original vision. But the vision was running out of road. In 1972, Volkswagen sales declined by 14 percent, to 1.5 million vehicles. Of those, 1.2 million were Beetles, an illustration of how dependent the company was on a single model line.

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CHAPTER 5: CHIEF EXECUTIVE 33 During the 1950s, Volkswagen: Markus Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik: Der Weg zum Global Player (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG, 2008), 46. 34 An early ad by the New York agency: Bob Garfield, “Ad Age Advertising Century: The Top 100 Campaigns,” Advertising Age, March 29, 1999, http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/ad-age-advertising-century-top-100-campaigns/140918/. 34 Hahn liked Bernbach’s lack of pretension: Interview with Carl Hahn, March 31, 2016. 35 Volkswagen exported 330,000: Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik, 60. 36 overtaking Ford’s Model T: Ibid., 90. 36 In 1961, the West German government: Steven Parissien, The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Automobile (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 124. 37 despite his close association with Hitler: Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: ECON Verlag, 1997), 939. 37 Porsche’s attempts to design: Anton Hunger and Dieter Landenberger, Porsche Chronicle, 1931–2008 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2008), 63. 39 Piëch saw the parent company: Ferdinand Piëch, with Herbert Völker, Auto.Biographie (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 2002), 80. 39 Clean Air Act of 1970: “Hearings Set on Automobile Pollution Control,” Environmental Protection Agency press release, March 4, 1971, http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/hearings-set-automobile-pollution-control. 39 The European Union . . . did not have: “Assessment of the Effectiveness of European Air Quality Measures and Policies, Case Study 2: Comparison of the US and EU Air Quality Standards & Planning Requirements” (DG Environment, Oct. 4, 2004), http://ec.europa.eu/environment/archives/cafe/activities/pdf/case_study2.pdf, p. 1. 39 Piëch solved the emissions problem: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 81. 40 Behles was sidelined: Ibid., 86. 41 who were duly astonished: Ibid., 105. 41 By 1984, he had nine children: Ibid., 126. 43 he forbade such duplication: Ibid., 124. 43 Piëch worried about how to get: Ibid., 123. 44 Audi unveiled its first TDI model: Oliver Strohbach, “Das große Wettbrennen: Mit dem TDI Von Malmö nach Kopenhagen,” Dialoge.Online (Audi online magazine), http://audi-dialoge.de/magazin/technologie/01-2015/134-das-grosse-wettbrennen. 44 Piëch was proud of the innovation: Audi website, “TDI Chronicle,” http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/themes/2014/08/Light_my_fire/TDI_chronicle.html. 45 there was even a TDI Club: TDI Club website, https://www.tdiclub.com/. 46 When Böhm celebrated his ninetieth: “Audi Betriebsrat—Fritz Böhm wird 90 Jahre alt,” AutoNewsBlog, Dec. 21, 2014, http://www.auto-news-blog.de/audi-betriebsrat-fritz-bohm-wird-90-jahre-alt/. 46 Hahn commented that Piëch’s ascension: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 135. 46 The manager found another job: Ibid., 110. 46 Piëch saw the man as overly: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 141. 47 the weeping family members: Ibid., 142. 47 The last—the 21,529,464th: Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik, 188. 48 Volkswagen had not kept pace: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 184–87. 48 Volkswagen lacked early warning systems: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 147. 48 Hahn believed that he had been made: Carl H.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

And there was nothing special about American cars: a leading British car expert wrote in 1906 that “progress in the design and manufacture of motor vehicles in America has not been distinguished by any noteworthy advance upon the practice obtaining in either this country or on the Continent” (Beaumont 1906, 268). Two years later all that changed when Henry Ford (1863–1947) introduced his mass-produced, affordable Model T, built to meet the rigors of American driving: his achievement and legacy are explained in the next chapter. And two unlikely pioneers—Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville (1871–1948) Wright, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio—were the first innovators to power the first successful flight by a light internal combustion engine when their airplane lifted briefly above the dunes at North Carolina’s Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 (McCullough 2015).

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Major substitutions resulted in coal getting replaced by fuel oil and diesel oil in shipping (starting before World War I, accelerating during the 1920s) and then in railroads (starting during the 1920s), by fuel oil (and then by natural gas) in industrial, institutional, and household heating, and by liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons as feedstocks for the petrochemical industry (after World War II). The first new large market was created by the introduction of affordable automobiles, starting before World War I with Ford’s Model T, and by the rapid post–World War II rise in car ownership; the second one began with the introduction of jet engines in commercial aviation during the 1950s, an innovation that changed flying from a very expensive and a rare experience to a mass global industry (Smil 2010b). The oil industry could meet this expanding demand because of a multitude of technical advances that have affected every aspect of its operation.

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The most important changes have included an approximate doubling of compression ratios and their lower weight and a rising power, resulting in a falling mass/power ratio: it declined from nearly 40 g/W in 1900 to just around 1g/W a century later. America’s first mass-produced car, Ransom Olds’s Curved Dash, had a single-cylinder, 5.2 kW (7 hp) engine. The engine of Ford’s Model T, whose production ended in 1927 after 19 years and 16 million units, was three times as powerful. An increase in the average power of American cars was interrupted by OPEC’s oil price rises of the 1970s but resumed during the 1980s: the average car power rose from about 90 kW in 1990 to about 175 kW in 2015 (USEPA 2015).

The Great Railroad Revolution
by Christian Wolmar
Published 9 Jun 2014

Inevitably, though, despite the support of its shareholders and the optimism expressed in its own promotional magazine, Air Line News, the company stopped building and went bust in 1915. There was a lot stacked against the interurbans: the hostility of the railroad companies, the limited market they served, the cheapness of the construction (which increased operating costs), and ultimately, after the war, the advent of the Ford Model T and other cheap cars. Yet for a while, the big railroads felt threatened by this crude competitor, not least because many interurbans were backed by powerful electricity companies. Despite the fact that interurbans seemed to cater to a rather limited market and ran, at best, hourly trains with single cars, some railroads were so fearful that they ran concerted campaigns against them and were quick to challenge them in the courts at every available opportunity.

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A few interurbans stuttered on until after the Second World War, but soon succumbed to the automobile, which not only destroyed their remaining customer base but eyed jealously all that extra space next to the highways. Interestingly, the authors of the key history of the interurbans suggest that they could have been as damaging to the conventional railroads as the Ford Model T, whose very invention stymied their development and killed them off: “Both [interurbans and the Model T] threatened the position of the railroad train as the principal means of passenger transportation; by 1960 [when the book was published] the automobile was providing 90 per cent of intercity passenger miles.”

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C., 264–265 Fast Flying Virginian, 265 Fencing, 42, 81–82, 191, 270 Ffestiniog Railway, 174 Field, Ben, 183 Fillmore, Millard, 57 First World War, 261, 269, 270, 288–292, 293–296, 321–322 Fish, Stuyvesant, 249, 250 Fisk, Jim, 157, 241–244, 247 Fitch, John, 5 Fitchburg Railroad, 166 Flagler, Henry Morrison, 35, 225–226, 288, 302 Flewellen Hospital, 116 Florida East Coast Railroad, 225 Florida Railroad, 103 Ford Model T, 283, 284, 306 Fort Laramie, Treaty of, 129 Fort Sumter attack, 97, 98, 119 Fosse Way, 2 Fourth of July specials, 35 Four-Track News, 269 Foxwell, E., 264–265 Franco-Prussian War, 171 Franklin, Benjamin, 220 Freight services, 82–83, 197, 198, 213–214, 300, 306, 307, 315–316, 319, 321–322, 322–323, 326, 327 collapse and turnaround, 345–351, 355, 357–358 competition with passenger services, 350 French Revolution, 233 Fuller, William, 109–111 Fulton, Robert, 7 Fulton Chain Railroad, 224 Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, 69, 70 Galton, Douglas, 47–48 Garfield, James A., 157–158 Garrett, Franklin, 118 Garrett, John, 104 Gas-engine locomotives, 310 General, The, 110–111 General Electric, 286 General Motors, 310, 311, 330–331 George, Henry, 252–253 Georgia Central Railroad, 195 Georgia Railroad, 49, 93 Gettysburg, Battle of, 108 Glacier National Park, 270 Gordon, Sarah H., 19, 30, 78, 79, 89, 99, 163, 165, 217, 355 Gould, George, 259 Gould, Jay, xxv, 188, 234–235, 238, 241–244, 246, 247, 250–251, 259, 278 Grand Canyon, 270 Grand Crossing intersection, 194 Grand Trunk Railroad, 287 Granger movement, 255, 256, 257, 272 Granger railways, 70–71, 168, 346–347 Granite Railroad, 17 Grant, Cary, 266 Grant, Ulysses S., 113, 151 Grasse River Railroad, 224 Grasshoppers, 169 Great Chatsworth Train Wreck, 256 Great Depression, 302, 303, 306, 308–309, 314, 316, 317, 322 Great Northern Railroad, 177, 178, 235, 246, 249–250, 270, 272, 287, 288, 300, 301–302, 316 Great Southern Mail Route, 162 Great Southwest Railroad strike, 234 Great Wall of China, 141 Great Western Railway, 59–60, 219 Greeks, ancient, 2 Greenwood & Augusta Railroad, 164 Greyhound Lines, 303 Grierson, Benjamin, 111 Groundhog Days, 276 Gunpowder, 38, 55, 139, 142, 167 Guns, railway-mounted, 116 Hamilton, Alexander, 62 Harding, Warren, 307 Harnden, William F., 82–83 Harpers Ferry, 94–95, 109 Harriman, Edward, 248–250 Harrison, Benjamin, 200 Hartford & New Haven Railroad, 167 Harvey, Fred, 209 Haupt, Herman, 66, 105–109, 112, 114, 117, 166, 290 Havana Special, 226 Hayes, Rutherford, 234 Hayne, Robert, 91 Hearst, William Randolph, 237 Hell on Wheels towns, 143, 148, 179 Hemingway, Ernest, 226 High-speed rail, 351–352, 359 Hill, James J., 177, 235, 246, 272, 300 Hoboes, 205–206, 317–318 Holbrook, Stewart H., 20, 22, 34, 56, 57, 66–67, 82, 111, 199, 205, 219, 220 Holliday, Doc, 173 Homestead Act, 130 Hood, John, 114 Hoosac Tunnel, 165–167, 287 Hopkins, Mark, 131 Horse Soldiers, The (film), 111 Horseshoe Curve, 66, 105 Hospital trains and ambulance, 115 Housatonic Railroad, 83 Hoxie, Herbert, 137 Hudson River Railroad, 85, 240 Hudson tunnels, 287 Humming Bird, 335 Huntington, Collis P., 131, 151, 250 Huntington, Henry E., 282 Hurricane Agnes, 333–334, 338 ICC.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

A CLASH OF VALUES In the early years of the twenty-firs century, when working cell phones and other IT products are discarded by their owners after eighteen months of use, it is difficul to imagine a massproduced consumer product created without planned obsolescence in mind. But that is exactly the way Henry Ford created his Tin Lizzie. The Model T was a reliable product marketed at the lowest possible price. For this reason, Ford was able to withstand competition for years. But the durability of the Flivver was problematic to its manufacturer because it postponed repetitive consumption. On average, one of Ford’s cars lasted eight years, about two years longer than any other automobile.

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By 1920, 55 percent of all American families—nearly every family that could afford a car—already owned one. That same year, a minor economic depression resulted in a drastic shortfall in sales for all manufactured goods. This “buyers strike” created a crisis at Ford and at General Motors, which were both in the midst of costly expansions. Ford needed the revenue from Model T sales to pay for its new Rouge River plant. In the coming year, Henry Ford (unlike William Durant at General Motors) successfully resisted borrowing money from a J. P. Morgan consortium to cover his operating and expansion costs. This minor financia miracle left him with absolute autonomy over the Ford Motor Company.

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Varnishes that could suspend enough color to finis an automobile had to be applied by hand and dried very slowly; and they were easily damaged by rain. By 1911 Ford switched to spraypainted enamels and force rooms (drying ovens) that baked the finis onto cars. Unfortunately, this process discolored the pigments suspended in the enamel. In 1914 Ford simply stopped offering the Model T in any color except black. This strategy succeeded because no large competitor could offer a comparatively priced alternative. By the 1920s, Dodge and GM also had a blackonly policy for their highest volume models.14 In 1921, when control of GM shifted from William Durant to DuPont,all of this changed.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths
by Steven M. Gorelick
Published 9 Dec 2009

Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. … Without mitigation, the peaking of world oil production will almost certainly cause major economic upheaval.”12 The Oil Panics of 1916 and 1918 One of the first major oil depletion scares occurred near the turn of the last century. The Ford Model T automobile was a novelty in 1908, with sales of just 10,000 cars. By 1914, sales were up to 200,000, with gasoline selling for 16 cents per gallon. Oil was plentiful, and a 1914 oil glut generated a price drop from $1.05 to $0.55 per barrel. But in July, World War I began. Several years before, in 1911, the US Navy, with some foresight, initiated production of nimbler US battleships powered by oil rather than coal.

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Index air quality, 206 Alaska, 65, 128 heavy oil, 166 oil sands, 168 Algeria, 23, 41 aluminum, 105–6, 107 alternatives, oil and energy, 115, 210–2, 214–9 Angola, 23, 142 anticlinal traps, 140 Arab–Israeli war (1973), 63, 115 Arctic region, oil and gas, 146 Association for the Study of Peak Oil, 88, 124 Athabasca sands, 168–9 available oil, 119 Azadegan oil field, 138 Bahrain, 23 Baker Hughes drill-rig count, 141–2 Baku, 160 barrels, origin as measure, 20 batteries, 108, 214–15, 228 battleships, 62 bbl, barrel, origin, 20, 52 bell-shaped curve see logistic curve Berman, Arthur, 144 bets, 103–4 biodiesel, 212–13 biofuels, 210–13 bitumen, 168 Bohai Bay oil field, 138–9 Bolivia, oil reserves, 144 booking of oil reserves, 125–6 BP coal endowment estimate, 180 oil price, 77–8, 115–6, 154 oil production, China and India, 76 oil production decline data, 65 oil reserves, 23, 126 Brazil oil reserves, 144 oil shale, 172 Brent Blend, 41 British Petroleum see BP Brookhart, Maurice, 174 Brown, Harrison, 106 Buffett, Warren, 215 Burgan Greater oil field, 71 CAFE standards, 197–9 effects, 199–205, 223–4 California gold, 156, 157 heavy oil, 166 oil sands, 168 California Energy Commission, 47 Campbell, Colin, 124 Canada oil reserves, 122, 132–3 oil sands, 27, 29, 122, 132, 136, 168–70 232 Index Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 169 Canadian Oil Sands Limited, 169 Cantarell Greater oil field, 71 carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10, 216 carrying capacity, 61 Carter, Jimmy, 64 Cathles, Larry, 128–9 cellular phones, 107, 108–9 central limit theorem (CLT), 94 Charpentier, Ronald, 93, 139–40 Chevron advertising, 16 capital spending, 141 oil discoveries, 139, 144 oil exploration, 22, 141 oil reserves, 23 stock buy-back, 141 China carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10, 217 coal, 180–1, 216, 217 discoveries, 138–9 economic growth, 152–3 GDP, 147 industrial growth, 74–5 liquid fuel from coal, 176–7 oil consumption, 74–6, 147–53 oil imports, 36 oil production, 75–6 oil shale, 172 oil-use intensity, 150–1 vehicle ownership, 204–6 Churchill, Winston, 62 CIA, 64 “clean” coal technology, 216–17 Club of Rome, 59–61 coal combustion in power plants, 216–17 conversion to liquid fuels, 173–4 formation, 180 synthetic fuel from, 176–7 coal reserve-to-production ratio, 180–1 coal resources, 180–1 Colorado, 170, 176 Columbia, oil reserves, 144 commodity prices trends, 103–7 volatility, 105 commodity scarcity, 98–103 communications systems, 109–10 ConocoPhillips, 22, 23 conservation of mass, 10 consumer price index (CPI), 56, 77–8, 83 cooking oil, 213 copper, 103–7 corn, 211–12 Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, 197–9 effects, 199–205, 223–4 corruption, 217 “cracking”, 63, 174 CPI, see consumer price index crude oil, 18 finding and lifting/production costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 crushed stone, 105–6 cumulative production, 28 Cushing oil field, 62 Daimler, 214 Darwin, Charles, 1 Deffeyes, Kenneth, 93 Deming, David, 89–90, 95, 97 dental fillings, 108 developing nations, future oil demand, 146–54, 204–6 discoveries, 29–30, 66–7, 70, 72–4, 127–8, 138–40 Diesel, Rudolf, 175, 212 diesel composition, 19 energy density, 19 importance, 175 as preferred automobile fuel, 181 diesel cars, 175–6 DOE see US Department of Energy Index Drake, Edwin, 1, 160 drilling rigs, 141–3 drilling-to-discovery ratio, 90 dry gas, 18 economic petroleum reserve, 218–19 economic rebound, 199–200 Ecuador OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 efficiency and consumption, 199–204 gains, 196–9, 220 Egypt, 23, 112–13 Ehrlich, Paul, 103–4 EIA see Energy Information Administration El-Badri, Abdalla Salem, 25 electric cars, 213–15 Electric Vehicle Company, 213, 214 electricity, 213 endowment see oil endowment and natural gas endowment end-use services, 109, 213–15 energy density, 19 Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, 199 Energy Information Administration (EIA) oil reserve estimates, 2, 134, 164–5 oil sands estimates, 169 oil statistics, 26 Energy Policy Act of 2005, 212 Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, 197 energy security, 199, 218, 221 enhanced oil recovery (EOR), 162 environment, 220 Estonia, 173 ethanol, 19, 38, 211–12, 214 Europe coal-fired power plants, 217 oil imports, 36 exploration constraints, 222 233 exploration expenditures, 140–1, 143 global distribution, 143 exploratory drilling, success rate, 131 Exxon Mobil advertising, 16 capital spending, 141 discoveries, 144 oil exploration, 141 oil reserves, 23 revenues, 21–2 stock, price and buy-back, 21, 141 field growth, 28, 127, 134–6 finding costs, 42–3, 133–4 Fischer, Franz, 173 Fischer-Tropsch process, 173–4, 176 Fisher, William L., 92 flaxseed, 99–100 Ford Model T, 62 fossil fuels combustion, 209–10 consumption, 3 conversion, 173–5 definition, 17 FRS, DOE Financial Reporting System, 21–2, 52–3, 56, 137, 141, 143, 182 fuel economy, 197–204, 223–4 fuel oils, 19, 167–8 fungible commodity, 36 GAO reports, 2, 12, 65 gas-to-liquid (GTL) process, 174–5 gasohol, 211 gasoline, 41–9 and carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10 composition, 18–19 consumption, 197–8 cost components, 41–3 cost percent of disposable income, 115 energy density, 19 petroleum product, 38 running out, 64 234 Index gasoline consumption, efficiency and, 199–204 gasoline price, 44–9, 51, 117, 201, 217 by country, 45 elasticity, 45–7 factors determining, 41–2 next delivery, 47, 51 oil price and, 44–5, 206, 217 price gouging, 48 spikes, 116 spot price, 47–8 subsidies, 45 tax, 45 trends, 115–17, 201 variability, 47–9 Gaussian distribution, 93–4 Germany, 173 Ghana, 139 Ghawar oil field, 71–2 giant oil fields numbers discovered, 70 oil volume in, 70–1, 138, 140 production decline, 72 gold depletion predicted, 106 in seawater, 159 gold reserves, 158, 192 gold resource pyramid, 156–60 gold rushes, 156 Goldman, Alan, 174 Göring, Hermann, 174 gouging, 48–9 Green River Formation, 170–1 Greene, David L., 208 gross world product (GWP), 148 GTL see gas-to-liquid process Gulf of Mexico, 22, 114, 128–9, 136, 139 Hamilton, James, 117–18 heavy oil, 165–8 global, 166–8 US, 165–6 Hirsch report, 2 Hitler, Adolf, 174 horses, 206–7, 209 “Hotelling” economic theory, 117 Hubbert, M.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

Strutting the stage in a black T-shirt with a microphone clenched in his hand, Musk outlined Tesla’s plan to cut battery costs in half and produce a $25,000 mass market electric car. Honk! Honk! For all the hype and excitement, the electric car was still too expensive to compete with petrol. It was an ambition reminiscent of Henry Ford’s launch of the Model T car over a hundred years earlier, which had ushered in the motoring age by making cars affordable for the working man. Cars at the time had been luxury items but Ford had been determined to get the price below the average yearly wage. Just as Ford had pioneered the moving assembly line to lower costs, Musk needed to scale up battery production.

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It was reminiscent of remarks a hundred years earlier by Ford’s key lieutenant Charles Sorensen: ‘If others would not provide enough steel for our needs, then we would. It was just as simple as that.’4 In the meantime, Musk would have to rely on the green barons – the companies that controlled the emerging clean energy supply chain. A hundred years ago Ford’s Model T had created fortunes for the early oil drillers and refiners, leading to the creation of the global oil industry and some of the world’s largest companies. Now Musk had kickstarted a similar raw material rush. ‘The spice must flow … the new spice,’ Musk said, referring to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune, which detailed the struggle for control of a planet that produced the spice necessary for space navigation and the extension of life.

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‘At last the battery is finished,’ Edison wrote in the summer of that year.19 He had spent over a million dollars of his own money on the venture. But the delay in getting the improved battery to market turned out to be fatal. In the years Edison spent perfecting his battery, the internal combustion engine had gone from strength to strength, raising the bar against which batteries would have to compete. A year earlier Ford had unveiled his Model T, which quickly became a mass-market car. Edison’s grand announcements about his earlier battery had fed a feeling that electric vehicles constantly disappointed people’s expectations. The ‘unwarranted promise by the daily newspapers of a 200-mile battery has proved a serious obstacle to the introduction of electric vehicles’, one electric vehicle enthusiast noted in 1909.20 By the end of the decade the balance of power between Edison and Ford had changed.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Specifications, Prices, Quality Adjustments, and Disposable Income for Selected Best-Selling Auto Models, 1906–1940 Sources: Kimes and Clark (1996). NDI after 1929 from NIPA table 2.1. NDI before 1929 from HSUS 1965 series F9. The automobile revolution began in earnest with the appearance of Henry Ford’s Model T, which began production in late 1908 and continued in production until 1927. The second column of table 5–2 lists the introductory Model T of 1909–10, which was introduced at a price of $950. The genius of Ford’s design combined several elements. The car had relatively high horsepower (22 horsepower) for its weight (1,200 pounds), its gear torque allowed it to pull itself through mud that would have stranded heavier vehicles, its unique two-pedal planetary transmission eliminated the need to shift gears, and it was simple and easy to service by farmers, who had ready access to parts through mail-order catalogs.

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By 1913, the moving assembly line made mass production a reality, breaking up the labor processes into repetitive motions as the cars slowly moved past each worker performing his task. Also by 1913, Ford had established a network of almost 7,000 dealers and reached small towns having as few as 2,000 inhabitants; 65 percent of Ford dealers were in rural areas.89 After the Model T became ubiquitous, its unique network of dealers and service stations selling tires, batteries, spare parts, and the cars themselves created the same sort of networking advantage that Apple and Android enjoy today in their smartphone duopoly. The differences between the quality attributes of the Model T and any post-1925 car are as night and day.

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Throughout the era when the Ford lacked widely desired accessories, a giant after-market developed to sell new steel fenders for safety and streamlined style, as well as tops, radiator hoods, and mundane items such as a gas gauge.94 By the early 1920s, the Sears catalog offered 5,000 different accessory items for the Model T.95 Mass production kept the price of the Model T much lower than that of most competing cars, and its price in both nominal and real terms continued to decline throughout its two-decade production run, during which 15 million Model T Fords were produced. In fact, by 1914, the Model T had taken over 46 percent of the U.S. market for new automobiles, rising to almost 55 percent in its peak year of 1923, when 1.8 million were produced and sold.96 Table 5–2 compares the 1910 and 1923 Model T’s in adjacent columns. There was little change in specification except for an increase in weight owing to the conversion of previously optional features to standard equipment.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 27 Mar 2000

Craftsmen, especially furniture-makers and boatbuilders, appreciated the convenience of screws that were self-centering and could be driven with one hand. Industry liked socket-head screws, too, since they reduced product damage and speeded up production. The Fisher Body Company, which made wood bodies in Canada for Ford cars, became a large Robertson customer; so did the new Ford Model T plant in Windsor, Ontario, which soon accounted for a third of Robertson’s output. Within five years of starting, Robertson built his own wire-drawing plant and powerhouse and employed seventy-five workers. In 1913, Robertson decided to expand his business outside Canada. His father had been a Scottish immigrant, so Robertson set his sights on Britain.

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World
by Anna Crowley Redding
Published 1 Jul 2019

Their target market: high-income people who drove luxury vehicles. Once again, Elon knew failure was a very strong possibility. And again, just like with SpaceX, he felt the stakes were too high not to try at all. NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S CAR COMPANY The auto industry is not known for welcoming newcomers. Ford Motors? Started selling the Model T in 1908. General Motors? Selling cars for more than a century. Honda Motor Company? Founded in 1948. And the list goes on. These companies occupy sprawling campuses, manufacturing facilities, and salesrooms across the United States. One Ford assembly plant alone covers five million square feet.

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ELON MUSK NET WORTH: More than $23 billion TITLES: Tesla (CEO), SpaceX (CEO), The Boring Company (CEO), Neurallink (CEO), Open AI (co-founder) Got an interview with Elon? Better know the answer to this question. Rumor is he wants to know what was the biggest problem you faced, and how you solved it! GARAGE: What’s in Elon’s garage? In addition to driving Teslas, Elon also owns a Jaguar Series 1 1967 E-Type Roadster and a Ford Model T given to him by a friend. Elon Musk, June 14, 2018. (Photo by Kiichiro Sato, AP Photo.) BIBLIOGRAPHY Abramowitz, Rachel. “Robert Downey Jr. Is Ready to Play the Hero in ‘Iron Man.’” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 2008. www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-downey27apr27-story.html. Anderson, Chris.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

In America, it has been associated with openness and opportunity: making it possible for people who were born in obscurity to rise to the top of society and for ordinary people to enjoy goods and services that were once confined to the elites. R. H. Macy, a former whaling skipper with a tattoo on one of his hands, sold “goods suitable for the millionaire at prices in reach of the millions.” Henry Ford, a farmer’s son, trumpeted the Model T as “a car for the common man.” Amadeo Giannini, an Italian immigrant, founded the Bank of America in order to bring banking to “the little guy.” Pierre Omidyar, another immigrant, created an electronic bazaar, eBay, for ordinary people to engage in free exchange. America’s rise to greatness has been marred by numerous disgraces, prime among them the mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of millions of African Americans.

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The first Model T, produced in 1908, was a category killer: powerful for its weight (22 horsepower and 1,200 pounds), easy to drive by the (admittedly challenging) standards of the day, light and strong thanks to the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength of regular steel, and capable of negotiating dirt roads (all America’s hard-surfaced roads in 1900, laid end to end, would not have stretched from New York to Boston, or 215 miles).14 Ford reduced the price of the Model T from $950 in 1910 to $269 in 1923, even as he improved the quality. The number of cars on America’s roads increased to 468,000 in 1910 and 9 million in 1920, and an astonishing proportion of these were Tin Lizzies: 46 percent in 1914 and 55 percent in 1923.15 Motorcars quickly added to the amount of power at the disposal of ordinary people: the horsepower embodied in motorcars surpassed the horsepower embodied in work animals (mostly horses) in 1910 and in railroads by 1915.

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This saved an enormous amount of time and effort: instead of having to unload your produce at the station, reload it onto a horse and cart, and then transport it to its final destination, you could take it all the way from origin to destination in a single journey. The combustion engine arguably transformed the lives of the 44 percent of people who lived in rural areas even more than the 56 percent who lived in cities. Henry Ford made sure that his Model T was capable of surviving rural America’s dismal roads by providing it with independent wheel suspension, rugged parts, easy-to-repair engines, and even kits to help farmers turn their car into a tractor.8 Farmers destroyed some 9 million working animals, particularly horses and mules, during the decade, freeing pastureland for more remunerative uses, and replaced them with motorized vehicles of various sorts.9 The number of tractors increased from about 1,000 in 1910 to 246,000 in 1920 to 920,000 in 1930.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

In 1914, Detroit was the first city to erect a stop sign and in August the same year, Cleveland installed the first electric traffic signals. Only 4,000 cars were sold in the U.S in 1900, representing approximately one car for every 20,000 residents. At this time, it’s fairly safe to say the car was still a niche product. Henry Ford released the iconic Model T in 1908, but there was still less than one car for every 400 residents. It wasn’t until 1914, one year after Ford’s moving assembly line had been in full swing, that the car became part of the average American experience. By 1914, the U.S. boasted 1.7 million cars, or about one car for every 60 residents.

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How can we keep all the good things about cars - something that’s still point to point, on demand, personal and flexible? Something (relatively) affordable and individual. But we need to find ways to tackle the hitherto insoluble: the deaths, the injuries, the pollution, the spiralling costs. The delays. The wasted capacity. We need to reinvent mobility. Today, about a century after Ford introduced the Model T and mass motorisation, nearly a billion cars and trucks move people and goods along the world’s roadways and consumers spend trillions of dollars each year on personally owned vehicles (including the costs of fuel, depreciation, financing, insurance, taxes, parking, and time) to experience the resulting mobility benefits of personal transport.

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Average weight has risen steadily, which means that many of the advances in fuel savings have been offset or reduced by additional safety equipment and crash protection. For model year 2012, U.S. cars averaged 3,482 pounds and light trucks averaged 4,779 pounds, as shown in the graph below, while for comparison, the original Ford Model T only weighed 1,200 pounds. Image Courtesy Rand Corporation As mentioned already, considering the sheer number of journeys and the variables involved, car travel is remarkably safe. Improved brakes, stability and survivability have contributed perhaps as much as they reasonably can, while the one remaining constant is the controller (human driver).

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Nov 2011

Probably nothing summed up their lack of sophistication and the improvised nature of their operation more than the fact that drivers often resorted to finding water for their steam locomotives from the nearest shell hole because of the lack of any consistent supply. Another example of improvisation on these light railways was the use of Ford Model T cars mounted on a rail chassis. The idea according to legend came from a Miss Bowen Cooke, the daughter of Charles Bowen Cooke, the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Western Railway, while listening to an officer on leave in Paris complaining about the inadequacy of front-line transport.

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Davis, Jefferson Dawnay, General de Wet, Christiaan Décauville company Deighton, Len Denikin, General Anton Denmark Department of Military Railways Deraa Derby Deutsche Bank Dien Bien Phu, battle of Dimapur Dinton station Dnieper, river Dniester, river Doctor Zhivago Donetz Dornisoara Dover Dresden Dunanreanu, Nicolae Dunkirk Dunkirk evacuation Dvina, river dynamite East Prussia Eastriggs Eboli Edinburgh Egypt Eisenbahntruppen Elbe, river Elburz mountains elephants Engineer and Railway Volunteer Staff Corps Est railway Estcourt Estonia Eugénie, Empress Fakhri Pasha Farakka Faversham Fayolle, Capitaine Feisal, Prince Feldeisenbahnabteilung Feldmann, Lieutenant Ferdinand I, Emperor ferries Ferro, Marc Festing, General Francis Finland First World War Arab Revolt battle of Passchendaele Brusilov offensive defence of Verdun Eastern Front and evacuation of wounded German spring offensive Marne battles and Middle East preparatory phase and diplomacy ‘Race to the Sea’ and railway safety and railway timetables Schlieffen Plan Somme battles supply operations US entry Western Front Flanders Fleming, Peter Flensburg Fliegende Hamburger train Folkestone Fontenoy Ford Model T cars Fort Sumter France allied invasion and ambulance trains colonial interests and Crimean War and Italian wars and Plan XVII railway accidents railway system railways and First World War railways and Second World War size of armed forces and Vietnam War Franco, General Francisco Franco-Prussian War and subsequent wars francs-tireurs Frankfurt Franz Ferdinand, Archduke Franz Joseph, Emperor Fratesti Fredericksburg, Virginia French Resistance French secret services Fuller, William Fusan Gabel, Christopher Galatz Galicia Gallieni, General Joseph-Simon Gallipoli Ganges, river gares régulatrices Garland, Herbert Garrett, John Gaza Geddes, Sir Eric Geneva Genoa George V, King German South-West Africa German-Danish War Germany and air raids and ambulance trains colonial interests railways and First World War railways and Second World War size of armed forces unification see also Prussia Gettysburg, battle of Ghazala Gibraltar Gilinsky, General Girard (engine driver) Girouard, Edouard (Sir Percy) Glasgow Glubb Pasha gold Gordon, General Charles George Gorgopotamus Viaduct Göring, Hermann Görlitz Granson, battle of Grant, General Ulysses Great Central Railway Great Eastern Railway Greece Gretna Junction Grey, Sir Edward Grierson, Colonel Benjamin guerrilla attacks see also sabotage gunpowder torpedoes Gurlt, Dr Hagenau Haifa Haldane, Captain Hamburg Hamilton, J.

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World
by Dominic Chinea
Published 5 Oct 2022

Johansson’s spanner became the inspiration for another design that became so popular in the USA and Canada that the brand name Crescent is now forever associated with the tool. Another Swedish toolmaker was involved, this time a chap called Karl Peterson, who set up the Crescent Tool Company in 1907 in Jamestown, New York. He definitely got something right because the next year, its Crescent adjustable spanner, or wrench, was being supplied along with each new Ford Model T, the first affordable assembly-line-produced car. The Model T car went on to become the biggest-selling car of all time, a record that stood until the 1970s. Nearly 20 years later, Charles Lindbergh gave Crescent a big helping hand by stating that on his famous solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927 from New York to Paris, all he took with him was “gasoline, sandwiches, a bottle of water and a Crescent wrench and pliers”.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

But all these different approaches to marketing motor cars came from similar roots: they all offered the promise of escape. And nothing looked like escape quite like the original Model T Ford first produced in 1908, driving up mountains or hiking around the countryside with Ford, Edison and Firestone.9 In fact, when production of the Model T finally stopped in 1927, there may have been vastly fewer cars than today, but as many as 68 per cent of the world’s cars were Model Ts. So much car advertising between the wars on both sides of the Atlantic was designed to imply effortless superiority. As in ‘Let it pass … it’s an Alvis’ (UK, 1920s).

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Ford Fiesta, SUVs Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) 144 carbon offsets 102−4, 142−4 Carmichael Coal Mine, Australia 166 Carnegie Mellon University, Decision Sciences Department 52 Carter, Jimmy 111 CCTV (closed circuit television) 36 Champions for Earth initiative 101 Channel One (US tv programme) 39−40 Chelsea FC 98 Chesterfield cigarettes 57, 63 Chevrolet Blazer cars 113, 118 Chevron Airline 155 children 8−9, 15, 17, 33, 39, 74 China 40 Cho, J.H. 46 Cho, Su Myat 48 chocolate cigarettes 63 cigarette advertising bans on 63, 71−82 bans on television advertising 56−7, 59 campaigns against 56−7, 185−7 cigarette coupons 63 cigarette smoking 31, 54−82 depiction in films 25, 48−9 and nicotine 77 substitutes for 64 Cipollone family: case against tobacco industry by 70 Citroen cars 129 Civil Aeronautics Board (US) 149 Civil Rights Act (US 1964) 148 Clarke, Kenneth 68, 72 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 142, 143 Clear Channel Outdoor Company 10 Clement-Jones, Lord Tim 78, 80 climate change 5, 15−16, 41, 83, 94−5, 101 Climate Change Act (2008) 151 Climate Change Committee 138, 151 Climeworks Company 143 Coca-Cola Company 22, 23 Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP) 158 Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising and Direct and Promotional Marketing (CAP) 158 colour 20−2 Columbus, Christopher 57 Committee on Public Information (CPI) 30 Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) 154−5, 157, 159, 178 Conservative government (Major) 72 (Thatcher) 65, 69 Conservative Party conference 22 consumer credit 3, 43−4 Consumer Federation of America 35 consumer neuroscience 52−3 consumer psychology 53, 121 consumerism 2−9, 44 Convention on International Civil Aviation 149 cookies 34 third-party cookies 36 Coolidge, Calvin 188 COP26 Conference 97, 165 Council for Tobacco Research (US) 61 Covid-19 pandemic 48, 91, 109, 125−6, 182, 193−4 impact on airline industry 152, 154 Cowling, Keith 45 Craigie, Jill 54−5 cricket 69, 84 Cruise, Tom 25 Culture Declares Emergency (group) 100 Culture Unstained (organisation) 99 Curtis, Adam 30 cycling 87−8, 89 Daedalus (myth) 135 Daily Mail 198 Daily Mile fitness programme 88 Daily Telegraph 198 Dawson, John 54, 66, 67 Dennison, Mary-Ann 148 Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) 67, 72 Dobson, Frank 76 Doctors for Tobacco Law (organisation) 71 Dodge Durango cars 119 Dodge Ram trucks 114 Doll, Richard 55−6, 58 Doria, João 8 Dorrell, Stephen 73 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 59 Dreiser, Theodore A Hoosier Holiday 115−6 Drope, Jeffrey 74 drought 94 DuckDuckGo (search engine) 196 e-fuels 137−8 Earth Overshoot Day 3−4 Easyjet Airline 150−1, 154, 163−4 advertisement 163ill slogan 13 Easyjet Future Flying programme 163−4 eavesdropping devices 36 Ecclestone, Bernie 76 Eddington, Paul 69 Edell, Marc 70 Edinburgh International Festival 195 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 109 electric vehicles 92, 129−30, 131 Emirates Airline 84−5, 96 slogan of 134 energy drinks 19 Ennals, David 64 Eshel, Gidon 46 Etihad Airline 155 European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) 167 European Commission 103 European Court of Justice 76 European Economic Community: dispute with US 111 European Parliament 104 European Union 79 Clean Claims Directive 155 Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition 155 Evangelical Environmental Network 129 Evening Standard 151 Exxon Valdez oil spill 128 ExxonMobil 77 Facebook 27, 32, 33 content moderators for 33 facial expressions 22 Febiac Federation 173 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 24 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 33−4, 49 Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) 77 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 98, 102, 103 Ferrari Formula 1 cars 24 Fiat Chrysler Company 129 films: depiction of smoking in 25, 48−9 Financial Conduct Authority 178 Financial Times 75 fingerprinting 35, 36 Finland 93, 190 ban on tobacco advertising in 65, 75 Finnair airline 63 FIRES research programme 138 Fletcher, Charles 58−9 floods 94 food advertising: use of colour in 21 Foot, Michael 54−5, 58, 59−60, 67, 69 Forbes (magazine) 11 Ford, Bill 118 Ford, Edsell II: 112 Ford Explorer cars 112, 113, 117, 118, 124, 128 Ford Fiesta cars 107 Ford Model T cars 110, 118 Ford Motor Company: No Boundaries campaign 117−8 FOREST (campaign group) 62 Forest Green Rovers FC 104 Formula One racing 76, 77, 88 fossil fuels 77, 80−1, 97−8, 99−105 Foxley-Norris, Sir Christopher 62 fracking 88−9 France 173, 198 Jury de Déontologie Publicitaire 173 Résistance à l’Aggression (tv network) 11, 189 smoking ban in 79 Freiburg FC 104 Freud, Sigmund 29, 30 Frick, Vivian 51 Gahagan, Fritz 54 Galbraith, John Kenneth 160 The Affluent Society 16 The Great Crash 157 Gazprom Company 84, 97−9 football sponsorship by 98−9 General Motors Company 95−6 Geneva 193 George, Susan 192 Germany 11, 189 Deutsche Umwelthilfe (NGO) 11 Nazi era 30, 58, 116 smoking ban in 79 Werbefrei (organisation) 11, 189 Gillett, Lizzie xii Glantz, Stanton 49 Goebbels, Joseph 30 Global Financial Crisis (2008) 151 Global Footprint Network 3−4 Google 26, 27, 32 Gore, Al 24 graffiti art 7−8 Grahame, Kenneth The Wind in the Willows 116 Greenberg, Bradley 39−40 Greenpeace 99, 140, 172 greenwashing 85, 103, 155 Greenwood, Tony x Grenoble 194 Guardian 11, 144, 161 Gulf War (1990−91) 113 Gunster, Shane 123−4 Haarlem 189 Harris, Ralph, Baron of High Cross 62 Hauer, Ezra 121−2 Havard, John 66, 67 health campaigns 6, 60 Health Education Council 63, 68, 69 Red Book 68 Health Security Agency 131 Hidalgo, Anne 83, 102 High, Hugh 73−4 Hill, Austin Bradford 58 Hillary, Sir Edmund 127 Hind, Dan The Return of the Public 199, 200 Honda cars 120 House of Lords 176 Environment Committee 180 HSBC 71, 158, 165−7 advertisement 165ill Hubbard, Diane 125 Hühne, Matthias Airline Visual Identity 149 Hum Vee cars 113 Hummer cars 113, 114, 118, 126−7 hybrid vehicles 92 mild hybrid vehicles 130 Icarus (myth) 134ill, 135 Imperial Airways 146 advertisement 145ill Imperial Oil Company 81 ‘Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1978-79’ 80 Impossible Hamster (film) xii India 194 Indian Premier League 94 induced demand 117 Ineos Company 84, 87−91, 97−8 Ineos Grenadiers cycling team 87, 89−90 Ineos Team UK 87, 105 Ineos Upstream Ltd 88 Infiniti QX4 cars 123 Inflation Reduction Act (US 2022) 5 Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) 73, 75 internal combustion engine (ICE) 4−5, 92, 96 International Air Transport Association (IATA) 85−6, 142, 152 International Civil Aviation Organization 135, 144 Icarus mural 134ill International Energy Agency 138 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 93 International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) 101 International Travel Association 142 Iran 194 Iraq war 151, 199 Ireland: smoking ban in 79 Jacobi, Derek 69 James I, King Counterblaste to Tobacco 57 Japanese car market 93, 114 Jardine Glanville Company 66 J.C.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

It is noteworthy that we are still regulating some aspects of cars more than one hundred years after they were invented, for example, by requiring lights to be turned on during the day, mandating seat belts, or limiting carbon dioxide emission levels. These regulations were certainly not part of the initial years of the automobile industry, but they were thought of after years of observation and experience. Imagine if regulators demanded automatic daylight sensors or inflatable air bags in 1910, two years following the Ford Model T introduction. Not only were these needs not thought of; even the basic technology behind these capabilities wasn’t yet invented. The lesson here is that we do not really know what we need to regulate when a new technology is in its infancy of adoption. Government Interferences Targeting Bitcoin primarily, several governments did not feel comfortable with a currency that was not backed by a sovereign country’s institutions.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

Following a blueprint of his past successes, Edison arranged for the batteries to be used in vehicles for a number of high-profile companies, including Montgomery Ward, the Central Brewing Co., and Tiffany & Company. Unfortunately, the battery had a flaw that sent Edison and his team back to the drawing board again. In the end, the alkaline storage battery Edison finally perfected had virtually no chance of gaining popularity among consumers no matter how reliable it may have been. Ford’s Model T, introduced in 1909 along with its reliable internal combustion engine, had become the standard for consumer autos. Henry Ford, who had once worked for the Edison Illuminating Company’s generating stations, had beat Edison at his own game. He had even come up with the pithy quote, “The customer can have any color he wants so long as it’s black,” he was reported to have said about the Model T.

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See specific countries and inventions Evans, Mathew, 148 Ever Ready, 182, 183 Eveready, 179, 183, 214–15, 220, 229, 231, 249, 252, 272 Eveready Hour, The, 220 experimentation, 6, 11–38, 78, 186 early–mid nineteenth century, 46–50, 51–68, 69–96, 97–131 early–mid twentieth century, 198–212, 213–50 human, 53–56 mid–late nineteenth century, 108–130, 131–40, 141–68, 169–94 trial-and-error, 149 See also science; specific inventors Fairchild Semiconductor, 264 Faraday, Michael, ix, 69–78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 120, 121, 126, 149, 176, 177, 186, 210, 223 Experimental Researches in Electricity, 149 First Law of Electrolysis, 239, 249, 271, 272 motor, 75, 75, 76–77, 92 “farm radios,” 224 Fessenden, Reginald, 209–240 Field, Cyrus, 118–21, 123, 126 financial industries, 106, 116, 219 speculation, 134–39 telegraph and, 133, 134–39 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1–2 The Great Gatsby, 156 fix-it shops, 238 flashlights, 181–82, 182, 183, 214, 215, 235, 243, 255 flat film battery, 277–78 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 165 Fleming, Sir John Ambrose, 208–209 Ford Model T, 175 France, 23, 27, 29, 33, 35–36, 46, 58–60, 72, 98–99, 112, 120, 129, 147, 260 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 28, 29–38, 43, 88, 101, 186 electrical experiments, 30–38 Experiments and observations on electricity, 33–34 Franklin chimes, 21, 29 frauds, 210–11, 259 electrical devices, 161–63, 163, 164–68 French telegraph, 112 frog experiment, 39–40, 40, 41–44 fuel cell, 67–68 future, battery, 279–82 Gale, Leonard, 105 Galileo, 14, 15, 17 Gallows telephone, 159 Galvani, Luigi, 39–46, 53, 162, 186 battery, 39–46 galvanism, 52–56, 63 galvanometer, 74 mirror, 124–25, 125, 126, 127 Galvin, Paul, 230–33 Gassner, Carl, 179 Gassner battery, 179–81 Gates, Bill, 202–203 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 101, 132 General Electric, 206, 209, 210, 217, 248 generators, electric, 76, 146, 148–53 dynamos, 151, 156, 211 germanium, 244, 245, 251, 259–60 Germany, 17, 19, 28, 95, 101, 176, 228, 260 Gernsback, Hugo, 199–204, 204, 205–206, 222, 223, 243 GI Bill, 236 Gibson, William J., Lectures on Natural Philosophy by Professor Henry, 87 Gilbert, William, 10–15, 19, 23 De Magnete, 11–15, 16 Gisborne, F.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
by A. J. Baime
Published 2 Jun 2014

To another, he said, “I have not worked out for myself anything in the nature of a business philosophy. I see no reason why I should for I cannot imagine a better one than my father has held.” Privately, like his father, Edsel felt the tug of ambition and a need for public accomplishments that would push his World War I embarrassment permanently into the shadows. The legacy of Ford Motor Company—Fordism and the Model T—belonged to Henry. So, at the age of twenty-eight, Edsel went in search of a legacy of his own. It was the Roaring Twenties, a time when science was king and anything felt possible. When it came to the Fords, not even the sky was the limit. Years earlier, when Edsel was fourteen years old, he had set out to build Detroit’s first airplane, in a barn on Woodward Avenue.

…

He made the first flight across the English Channel in the summer of 1909, moving the London Daily Express to declare that “Great Britain is no longer an island.” That same year, in Dearborn, Edsel and Van Auken modeled their flying machine after Blériot’s. It had a single fabric wing, a wooden skeleton, and a tricycle landing gear, the parts machined at the Highland Park Ford factory. For power, they mounted a Model T engine, drilled full of holes to lighten the weight, in the plane’s nose. On the day of the maiden flight, Edsel and Van Auken towed the airplane to a field behind a Ford car. Van Auken agreed to pilot the thing (Edsel was forbidden by his father). As Edsel stood by holding his breath, Van Auken motored along the grass and lifted off, sailing six feet over the earth as the Model T engine buzzed like a gnat.

…

If the Air Corps was willing to spend $200 million—an unfathomable gamble at the turn of 1941—“we will build and equip a plant capable of turning out one Liberator bomber an hour,” Sorensen said. Edsel smiled at the audacity of it all. Sorensen looked at him. Then he glanced over at Edsel’s son, Henry II, who was following the meeting silently. He saw something in young Henry’s eyes—the same look he could recall seeing so many years ago in Henry Ford’s eyes, back when they were building the first Model T at Highland Park. It was a look of excitement and determination, the knowledge that something great was about to happen. On January 8, 1941, without any official approval from Washington, Edsel Ford announced that his family would begin immediately with plans to build a new type of factory.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

To solve the problem of the length of time needed for the car’s paint to dry, Ford used his own special recipe for japan black, a lacquer that dried in forty-eight hours, much faster than any other formula or color he tested. Ford’s approach to production slashed the price tag of one of his company’s cars to an affordable $825 when it was introduced in the market in 1909; by the mid-1920s, Ford’s Model T sold for less than $300. Ford maintained strict rules, both on the factory floor and in his workers’ homes. When high employee turnover was threatening efficiency, he increased wages, implementing the “five-dollar day”—but the rate was only granted to those who met the standards of Ford’s “sociological department,” which gathered details about the character of employees and monitored their drinking, spending, and even their household tidiness.

…

By 1920, GM was a conglomerate to which company after company had been added with little consideration for how they might all fit together or how information might flow to key decision makers other than through Billy Durant himself. Yet despite the company’s size and scope, GM’s car lines were getting beaten by Ford’s ubiquitous Model T. Durant was ignominiously forced out by his investors after they hired an outside consultant to “evaluate the efficiency of General Motors’ management” and found that the buck stopped with Durant—all information, decisions, and financial resources flowed through him, leaving the company paralyzed during the severe economic downturn of 1920.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

Capitalism’s future was contingent upon the democratic ability to correct for excesses, with regulatory oversight being the price of consent of the governed. And as this balance became refined in the unfolding century, the American’s stake in capitalism as a consumer would grow to become as important as his citizenship in its democracy. PART THREE An early Ford Model T advertisement, 1908. Twenty-one AUTOMOBILES While the Progressive era introduced government intervention across a wide range of commercial activity and in regulating market behavior, including activism in areas like conservation and land management, the free market emphasized that it was private hands that made the useful and transformative things, the ingredients of modern society and ease of living.

…

At a trial in future years battling the Dodge Brothers in a shareholder suit, one that prompted him to buy everyone out, he even disputed the notion that a company was primarily in business to make money. He expressed the inverse: Profits were the fuel of the industrial artist to make the products that he chose to; money was an ingredient, not the purpose. This rise of the Ford Motor Company, powered by the Model T’s profits, into a de facto sole proprietorship, stood in stark contrast to another automotive entity that embodied exactly what it meant to be a corporation. In the same year of the Model T’s launch, Billy Durant of Buick mapped out his vision of an automotive corporation. After Durant became involved with Buick, it grew from producing a few dozen cars in 1904 to over eight thousand per year by 1908.

…

It was light and strong: The Model T pioneered the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength and greater flexibility than the traditional steel used in automobile bodies. Ford introduced a new gearing system for his transmission. According to the account of Ford’s most trusted engineer, Charles Sorensen, the Model T had been a four-year, secretive project in development from the company’s founding, an unprecedented level of research and development spent on a car that was designed to retail for less than $1,000. But the Model T, upon its launch, was not particularly cheap. Ford’s vision had not been to build an inexpensive car but to build an advanced, reliable, easy-to-use car and then lower its price.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

Capitalism’s future was contingent upon the democratic ability to correct for excesses, with regulatory oversight being the price of consent of the governed. And as this balance became refined in the unfolding century, the American’s stake in capitalism as a consumer would grow to become as important as his citizenship in its democracy. PART THREE An early Ford Model T advertisement, 1908. Twenty-one AUTOMOBILES While the Progressive era introduced government intervention across a wide range of commercial activity and in regulating market behavior, including activism in areas like conservation and land management, the free market emphasized that it was private hands that made the useful and transformative things, the ingredients of modern society and ease of living.

…

At a trial in future years battling the Dodge Brothers in a shareholder suit, one that prompted him to buy everyone out, he even disputed the notion that a company was primarily in business to make money. He expressed the inverse: Profits were the fuel of the industrial artist to make the products that he chose to; money was an ingredient, not the purpose. This rise of the Ford Motor Company, powered by the Model T’s profits, into a de facto sole proprietorship, stood in stark contrast to another automotive entity that embodied exactly what it meant to be a corporation. In the same year of the Model T’s launch, Billy Durant of Buick mapped out his vision of an automotive corporation. After Durant became involved with Buick, it grew from producing a few dozen cars in 1904 to over eight thousand per year by 1908.

…

It was light and strong: The Model T pioneered the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength and greater flexibility than the traditional steel used in automobile bodies. Ford introduced a new gearing system for his transmission. According to the account of Ford’s most trusted engineer, Charles Sorensen, the Model T had been a four-year, secretive project in development from the company’s founding, an unprecedented level of research and development spent on a car that was designed to retail for less than $1,000. But the Model T, upon its launch, was not particularly cheap. Ford’s vision had not been to build an inexpensive car but to build an advanced, reliable, easy-to-use car and then lower its price.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

After learning that no steelmaker in America could produce it, Ford Motor Company hired an English metallurgist to design methods for producing it commercially. Because vanadium steel required a hotter furnace than typical steel, Ford worked with a specialized steel company in Canton, Ohio, to test and produce the alloy. Vanadium steel would become, in the words of Ford, “our principal steel.”20 In 1908, Ford finally had his universal car. The Model T was the culmination of all his years of tinkering and designing and testing. It had a twenty-horsepower engine, weighed twelve hundred pounds, and could reach forty-five miles an hour. It had an entirely new design: the Model T was the first production car that had its steering wheel on the left (the better to see oncoming traffic) rather than the right (the better to see rural ditches).

…

Ford had put a rudimentary assembly line in place in 1906, when manager Walter Flanders had had the idea of giving each worker a specific task to perform in the assembly of the Model N and placed the chassis on a truck to be pushed from station to station. But the real breakthrough came in 1912, when William Klann, a foreman at the Ford Motor Company, visited the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Chicago and saw how quickly the packers could “disassemble” pigs placed on a moving trolley overhead. In 1913, Ford introduced the moving assembly line for one part of the Model T, the flywheel magneto that formed the ignition system for the vehicle. Previously, individual workers would assemble entire magnetos from a pile of materials located next to them. A skilled worker could, on average, complete a magneto in twenty minutes. But Klann broke down the assembly process into twenty-nine different tasks and had each worker perform just one of them, with twenty-nine men located along a moving belt in the order in which assembly typically took place.

…

This may have been good for production numbers, but it was decidedly unpleasant for the man. And it turned out that morale had a greater effect on efficiency than Ford had bargained for. Frederick Winslow Taylor had predicted that the assembly line would roughly double production, but in fact, the differential was much less. In 1909, the first full year that Ford manufactured the Model T and before the assembly line had been introduced, the 1,548 workers in the factory produced on average 1,059 cars a month, or 0.68 cars per worker. In 1913, after the introduction of the assembly line, the 13,667 workers in the factory manufactured on average 15,284 automobiles a month, or 1.12 cars per worker.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

By the 1920s, despite the inflation caused by the First World War, the price tag of a Model T was only $265, and Ford was still finding ways to lower labor costs by an average of 7.4 percent a year. The result of Henry Ford’s relentless drive to lower costs in manufacturing the Model T was one of the most astonishing economic success stories in world history. Over the nineteen years that the Ford Motor Company produced the Model T, it manufactured fifteen million of them. By the end of the model run, the company had more than $700 million in undistributed profits. In 1920 Ford was producing half the cars built in the world.

…

In 1896 he built his first automobile in a carriage house behind where he was living. In the next few years he built several racing automobiles, which broke speed records, and, with the help of several backers, opened the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The company was moderately successful at first. Then in 1908 Ford introduced the Model T. It was designed to be both rugged, to handle the often ghastly roads then in existence (there were fewer than two hundred miles of paved roads in the entire country in 1900, outside of cities) and cheap to manufacture. Its initial price was $850, a fraction of what most automobiles then cost, and its running expenses were equally modest, by some estimates only a penny a mile.

…

Henry Ford asked, explaining his business philosophy of pursuing the mass market. “Get costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.” But there was more to this new mass market than just cheap prices, and some companies were better at understanding it than others. Henry Ford, obsessed with the idea that the Model T was perfect, refused to change the design after 1908, concentrating instead on making it cheaper and cheaper. He even refused to add an electric starter after they became available in 1912, because of the weight of the battery. The starter became standard on other cars almost immediately because it was far safer to use than hand cranking (the crank could, and not infrequently did, break the arm of an unlucky user).

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness
Published 28 Mar 2010

For the first few decades of the twentieth century, urban driving was often viewed as a nuisance and motorists were frequently seen as both a danger to public safety and a threat to the normal flows of everyday urban mobility.3 peter norton offers a compelling history of the transition in urban driving from the 1900s to the 1930s, noting that both accidents and confrontations between pedestrians and motorists were common. and while courts tended to rule against city regulations impeding automobility, judges and juries took a favorable view of pedestrians’ implicit right to the streets, almost always siding with them in cases stemming from car accidents in the 1910s and 1920s.4 indeed, norton quotes a Chicago municipal judge from 1913 who ruled against a driver with the justification that “the streets of Chicago belong to the city, not to the automobilists.”5 nevertheless, the economic opportunities seen in Ford’s Model T and the burgeoning auto industry prompted financial/ political elites to push for the inclusion of cars in major U.S. cities by the end of the 1910s—a clear indication that public opinion and public transportation were largely deemed irrelevant when weighed against their own desires for luxury goods and exhilarating hobbies (nearly 90 percent of urbanites did not own automobiles at the time).

…

Within these narrow parameters, corporations and other “green” capitalists prove themselves adept at reframing and repackaging environmentalism not as a radical political movement or a struggle for social justice, but rather, a feel-good lifestyle for a new demographic of consumers who are supposed to be satiated by the eco-friendliness of new automotive interior fabrics, or somehow impressed by the “green” features of new hybrid SUvs—vehicles capable of achieving the futuristic efficiency of Ford’s 1908 Model-T (up to twenty-one miles per gallon).10 in the United States, where the longevity of automobility is firmly secured by the country’s populist support for passive environmental goals and free market capitalism, it is likely that an affordable electric car will make the illusion of never-ending automobility that much more tenable, just as critiques of driving will seem all the more grouchy and unfounded if oil ceases to become the issue. yet buried within the burgeoning love affair with the electric car— or at least the idea of the electric car—is a much dirtier love affair with the invisible protagonist of the impending electric car drama: coal.

…

(Thousand Oaks, Ca: pine Forge press, 2004), 226. nearly half of the hybrid model SUvs scheduled for production in 2009 boasted roughly the same maximum fuel efficiency rating as the Model T (up to twenty-one miles per gallon). See Holly reich, “Eco-friendly interiors,” New York Daily News, March 21, 2008; Ford Motor Company, “Model T Facts,” available at http://media.ford.com/article_ display.cfm?article_id=858; U.S. Department of Energy, “2009 Hybrid vehicles,” in Fuel Economy Guide (2008); Mazda, “Mazda Develops World’s First Biofabric Made with 100 percent plant-Derived Fiber for vehicle interiors,” Mazda press release no. 26889, 2007.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

At one point on their trip, with the Winton stranded, Crocker had to bike twenty-six miles to get gasoline from the nearest town—and then walk back after one of the bike’s tires was punctured. The first drive-up gas station in the United States didn’t arrive until ten years after the men made their journey, and five years after the introduction of Henry Ford’s Model T. On their transcontinental crossing, Jackson and Crocker had to drive through streams and over mountain roads that weren’t designed for cars. They moved boulders by hand, endured thirty-six hours without food after getting lost in Wyoming’s badlands, and got stuck in a swamp that buried the car up to its floorboards.

…

The Renaissance leaders embraced the idea that the public sphere should be beautiful, refined, and appealing so that a society’s richer citizens would never be tempted to withdraw into their private estates, closed off from the world around them. All citizens could then be “uplifted by a pleasing vision of communal life.” It was 1908 when Henry Ford unveiled the first Model T, a product that would reorient the infrastructure of civilization, and around which civilization would reorient itself. Just over a century later, Elon Musk unveiled the Model S at a time when civilization is more than ready for a cultural rebirth—one that could be catalyzed by something as innocuous as a beautiful car that drives itself.

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G., 55 Faraday, Michael, 88 Faraday Future, 82–86, 87, 91, 93, 98, 120, 241–246 Federal Trade Commission, 48 Fein, Bruce, 227 Feng, Changge, 238–239 FF 91 (Faraday Future), 118, 243 FFZERO1 (Faraday Future), 87, 91, 93, 98, 120 Fiat Chrysler, 161, 266 Fields, Mark, 179–180, 266 Filipovic, Robert, 242 financial issues arguments against electric cars, 15, 16 autonomous vehicles and loss of jobs/revenue, 271–272 dot-com crash (2000), 108 problems affecting technology/auto companies, 242–244 Tesla Motors, during and following Great Recession (2007–2008), 6–7, 26, 37, 68, 70, 74–76 Tesla Motors’ investors, 24, 67–68, 76–81 Fisker, Henrik, 33, 71 Fisker Automotive, 71 500E (Fiat), 161 Fletcher, Pam, 162–164, 168 Flexport, 271 Ford, Henry, 28–29, 37, 99, 194, 275 Ford Motor Company Aston Martin and, 156 automobile sales, during Great Depression, 47 electric vehicle plans, 185 Fields and, 179–180 Focus, 54 Ford Smart Mobility, 266 Leach and, 99–100 Model T, 194, 275 Tucker and, 35 Formula E, 97 Formula E Sustainability Committee, 100 Fortune, on Tesla accident, 207–213, 230, 231 fossil fuel industry, 205–234 carbon tax and, 210, 223, 232–234 classic cars and, 193–194 diesel motors, 167–170 displacement issues of, 213–226 electric cars vs. gasoline cars, 14–17, 32, 170–172 hybrid cars and gasoline, 131–132 propaganda of, 203 Tesla criticism and, 205–213, 226–231 Foxconn, 150, 236 Fueling U.S.

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All
by Clarence L. Johnson
Published 1 Jan 1985

“Kid, you’re a coach’s assistant.” He repeated, “You’re a coach’s assistant. Take it or leave it.” “Not me.” And that was that. My next move was to phone the University of Michigan about athletic scholarships. They offered them, and my grades were good enough for admission, so I got in my trusty Ford Model T roadster and drove up to Ann Arbor to try for a scholarship there. My $300 would do no more than pay the tuition. Just about the second thing I found out was that an undergraduate was not allowed to have a car on campus. So I decided to take my car home and then come back to try out for football.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

Yet scientific advances over the preceding decades had made it possible to artificially produce temperatures that were positively Labradorian. By the early 1920s, Birdseye had developed a flash-freezing process using stacked cartons of fish frozen at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inspired by the new industrial model of Henry Ford’s Model T factory, he created a “double-belt freezer” that ran the freezing process along a more efficient production line. He formed a company called General Seafood using these new production techniques. Birdseye found that just about anything he froze with this method—fruit, meat, vegetables—would be remarkably fresh after thawing.

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Hamlin, Christopher. Cholera: The Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009. Hecht, Jeff. Beam: The Race to Make the Laser. Oxford University Press, 2005. Hecht, Jeff. Understanding Fiber Optics. Prentice Hall, 2005. Heilbron, John L. Galileo. Oxford University Press, 2012. “Henry Ford and the Model T: A Case Study in Productivity” (Part 1). http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.php?lid=668&type=student. Herman, L. M., Pack, A. A., and Hoffmann-Kuhnt, M. “Seeing Through Sound: Dolphins Perceive the Spatial Structure of Objects Through Echolocation,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 112 (1998): 292–305.

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood
Published 3 Jul 2012

Stability is critical; depending how adventurous your cats are, they may physically attack the feeders and try to push them over, or hit them hard enough to trigger a trickle of food dispensing. A flared base isn’t the final solution, but it’s a big step in the right direction. It’s a heck of a lot tougher to knock over a feeder with a bigger “foot” on the ground. It’s off-white. The old feeder, like the Ford Model T, was available in any color customers wanted, so long as it was black. Which meant it did a great job of not blending in with almost any decor, and also showed off its dust collection like a champ. Thank goodness the new model comes in “linen.” These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

Gradually, Ford’s cars became cheaper and faster. In 1906, Ford produced his Model N, a 1,050-pound car that he sold for the bargain price of $500, and he sold so many of them (over 8,500) that he leaped into the front ranks of the automotive industry. In 1908, Ford introduced his Model T at the bargain price of $825 (about $19,000 in 2010 currency). Five years later, Ford started producing the Model T on a moving assembly line, which increased his factory’s speed and efficiency. Of course, the process of mass industrialization—dividing complicated manufacturing processes into small, straightforward tasks—long predated Ford. In 1776, Adam Smith was extolling the efficiencies created by the division of labor in a pin factory.

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Chicago’s stockyards switched from pigs to beef when Gustavus Swift introduced a refrigerated railcar that could keep slaughtered beef from spoiling in transit. Like many important innovations, Swift’s great idea now seems blindingly obvious. He put the ice on top, instead of on the bottom, so it melted down onto the sides of beef and kept them cool. Like Chicago, Detroit grew as a node of the great rail and water network long before Henry Ford made his first Model T. Between 1850 and 1890, the city’s population increased tenfold, from 21,000 to 206,000 people. Detroit’s growth was again intimately tied to its waterway, the Detroit River, which was part of the path from Iowa’s farmland to New York’s tables. By 1907, 67 million tons of goods were moving along the Detroit River, more than three times as much as the total amount going through the ports of New York or London.

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While Germans were responsible for the key innovations in producing the automobile, Americans, especially Henry Ford, deserve the credit for mass-producing cars. By the end of the 1920s, Americans had 23 million cars on the road. Cars, unlike trains, functioned reasonably well on the existing roads, which were already being converted to asphalt in the nineteenth century. Henry Ford’s Model T’s were sturdy vehicles, simple enough to be repaired by ordinary people, and they traveled easily at modest speeds even on dirt. But drivers soon realized that cars could run much more quickly on limited-access highways with smooth asphalt paving. America began building a highway network to accommodate the new form of transportation.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head
Published 14 Aug 2003

In 1904, for example, there were no automatic machines at Ford. In that year Ford made 1,745 automobiles with a workforce of less than 500. Nine years later, at his Highland Park Factory, Ford was employing 14,000 workers and turning out his first mass-produced car, the Model T, at a rate of 189,000 a year. By 1916 Ford employed 40,000 workers and was turning out 585,000 Model T's a year.22 This THE ROOTS OF MASS PRODUCTION stupendous increase in production was made possible by a record of innovation that makes the rise of Ford perhaps the pivotal event in the history of mass production. Ford deployed the automatic machinery of the American System on a scale far surpassing anything seen in the nineteenth century.

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But from the early 1860s onward there was already a trend toward using moving lines to "disassemble" pork and beef carcasses in midwestern slaughter houses, and in his memoir My Life and Work, Henry Ford himself refers to this squeamish precedent. According to Ford, the concept of the assembly line came "in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers used in dressing beef."29 Whatever the exact origins of the assembly line, its first use at Ford dates from April 1913, when the Model T's magnetos were first put together using this novel method. An engine assembly line was in operation by November 1913, and an assembly line for the Model T's chassis by April 1914. In early experiments with the new methods, Ford achieved spectacular increases in worker productivity.

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In the post-war world, American consumers had become more demanding and were beginning to tire of what Emma Rothschild has called the "functional and uncomfortable" Model T.36 Ford's U.S. market share fell from 55 percent in 1921 to 30 percent in 1926, and to 25 percent in the first half of 1927, when Henry Ford announced the discontinuation of the Model T.37 Those months in 1927 were significant for another reason. It was then that production at General Motors' mass market division, Chevrolet, exceeded Ford's for the first time. Chevrolet's production rose from 280,000 in 1924 to 732,000 in 1926, and to over a million in 1927.38 The technical architect of Chevrolet's success was William S.

Wonders of the Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
Published 12 Jul 2011

The interesting thing about the static was that it seemed to rise and fall once a day, which suggested to Jansky that it consisted of radio waves being generated from the Sun, but then over a period of weeks the rise and fall of the static deviated from a 24-hour cycle. Jansky could rotate his antennae on a set of Ford Model T tyres to follow the mysterious signal, and he soon realised the brightest point was not coming from the direction of the Sun, but from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. Coinciding with the economic impact of the Great Depression, Jansky’s pioneering work did not immediately lead to an expansion in the new science of radio astronomy, but ultimately exploring the radio sky has become one of the most powerful techniques used in understanding the Universe beyond our solar system COLLISION COURSE Of the six thousand or so stars we can see from Earth with the naked eye, only one object lies beyond the gravitational pull of our galaxy.

The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley
Published 18 Oct 2010

Some teachers handled him well and some did not, but however they handled him, his pronounced eagerness to learn persisted—he eagerly explored both the countryside and whatever books he could get hold of. In 1913, when he was not quite ten, John helped his father wire their home for electricity (subsequently, they wired the homes of some of their neighbors, too). In 1914, John mastered the owner’s manual of his father’s new Ford Model T, and at eleven he was driving it. John read his mother’s books, including Ruskin and Spenser, and he read his father’s books—including a manual on radiotelephony (wireless sound transmission). When his father ordered an up-to-date slide rule, then decided that he didn’t really need it, John mastered it within a couple of weeks and thereupon became, in his own mind, a nascent mathematician.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.1 Thanks to New York City, the average resident of New York state uses less gasoline than the average resident of any other state, and uses less than half as much as the average resident of Wyoming. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot.

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This same effect operated in the opposite direction beginning in late 2008, when the plunging cost of oil softened the impact, for American consumers, of the spreading global recession. Rising oil prices after 1999 were also responsible for America’s misguided decision to promote the production of ethanol as a gasoline substitute and extender. Ethanol has been viewed as the motor fuel of the future for more than a century—Henry Ford, anticipating eventual petroleum shortages, designed the Model T to run also on alcohol—but it has many disadvantages, both economically and environmentally, and it is not the energy panacea it is often presented to be. U.S. ethanol production is still minuscule, relatively speaking. In 2006, it amounted to less than 5.5 billion gallons.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

Oil and its derivatives, such as gasoline or diesel, could hold much more energy for a given volume or weight than could any contemporary battery. Additionally, gasoline-powered cars could be refueled quickly, and that fuel was fairly easy to transport—though it was certainly dangerous. By the 1910 model year, Ford was producing nearly 20,000 Model T’s annually.3 By 1927 that number had skyrocketed so that there was one car for every five Americans, and more than 50 percent of American families owned an automobile.4 Even during the depths of the Great Depression, automotive sales fluctuated between about one and three million units a year.5 With growth came consolidation, and by the 1930s the international auto industry was dominated by three giants: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.

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In a very real sense, the tragedy was also the origin of Japan’s auto manufacturing sector. Just as in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the automobile played a critical role in rescue and reconstruction. Unlike horses, cars could work around the clock. After the earthquake, an enormous number of Ford Model T’s were imported. And as the immediate demands of recovery eased, many of these trucks were converted into public buses.5 They were excellent at navigating the ruins of the city, durable and cheap. From the standpoint of both economics and utility these vehicles held a commanding advantage over the alternatives—mostly pack animals or domestically produced cars and trucks.

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

As long as the early luxury market lasted, most automobile manufacturers, who were able to sell all the high-priced cars 223 E N D O F U R B A N I S M they could produce, spurned the idea of making lower-priced cars at lower unit profits.14 As already recounted in Chapter 1, the Ford Model T changed that. Radically improved assembly techniques allowed management to reduce the retail price of a Model T from $850 to $360 in seven years—while at the same time increasing wages and profit margins.15 From a 1907–8 base of about 7,000 cars, Ford thus achieved more than 110:1 expansion of sales. In the 1916–17 season, Ford rolled out 785,000 Model T’s, each of which required only about 25 percent of the manhours that had gone into the same vehicle a decade earlier.

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The regimes of “automobility” and electrification now spread across the wide world, defining a dramatic turn toward modernity in places as different from the United States and each other as Brazil, Zimbabwe, Egypt, China, and Russia. CITY HALL AND ITS FRAILTIES Just as Henry Ford’s industrial managers were rolling out the Model T, Frank Rice (mayor of New Haven from 1910–17; figure 1.3) busied himself with more pedestrian issues: “There should be uniformity in the construction of our side22 C R E AT I V E D E S T R U C T I O N Figure 1.3. Mayor Frank Rice, c. 1910. NHCHS. walks. Absolute uniformity of materials should prevail in the construction of the walks in a single block, and strong efforts should be made to effect the construction of uniform walks the entire length of the streets of the city.

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On the following Sunday, the Register ran another big ad offering “free motor cars” leaving the corner of Church and Chapel by the downtown Green every hour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to visit Racebrook Estates, boldly described as “New Haven’s Next Big Restricted Suburb.”34 As John Stilgoe asks, “If the Irish were right to desert an island struck by famine and misrule rather than rebelling against the English, why should they not have begun deserting eastern American cities in the 1920s, when a number of complex issues seemingly defied solution?”35 At just about the same moment, one might have asked rhetorically whether Henry Ford might be expected to limit production of his Model T, once sales passed 700,000 per year, so as not to pose intractable problems for those very cities. Or whether Westinghouse Electric should forgo the opportunity to wrap the continent in a grid of alternating current that would change the economics of energy distribution, and of land development, irrevocably.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz
Published 17 Aug 2015

Children played in the middle of those roads, and adults met one another there. The one thing Bedford Avenue wouldn’t have seen frequently was the automobile. Even during the first years of the twentieth century, cars were so rare that seeing one was still newsworthy. All that changed in 1908, when the first Model T rolled out the doors of Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. The Model T didn’t just change America’s street culture. It’s one of the few machines in history that actually deserves to be called world changing. Before the T, cars were a novelty item for the upper classes and, occasionally, a genuinely useful aid for farmers. Still, the revolution that Ford’s “car for everyone” ignited wasn’t immediate.

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The choice wasn’t especially difficult: Penn offered me a full fellowship, plus a stipend of $75 a week. I promptly went out and bought a “new” 1970 Chevelle. Ten-plus years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I did the same, and headed south on Interstate 95. Destination: Philadelphia. Fifty years after Henry Ford’s Model T had transformed cars from luxury items to necessities, the victory of the automobile looked complete. It also looked, to a lot of people, inevitable: a historical tidal wave that could have taken no other form than the one it did. But it wasn’t really inevitable at all. The revolution that transformed America’s roads, the one that really got under way in the 1950s, was the result of a sequence of decisions—to draft the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, to pass the Rayburn-Wheeler Act, to collude in the National City Lines conspiracy, to build the Interstate Highway System, and to fund the suburbanization of America through the GI Bill—that pushed an entire country in one automobile-rich direction.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
Published 4 Apr 2023

In this decade of change, she could vote for a president. She could run for office. She could own property without needing a man’s permission. She could order a drink at an underground club. She could even choose when to have children (a primitive cervical cap had been available for a decade). In 1923, Madge bought a Ford Model T coupe and taught herself how to drive. The car gave her real independence. She gave up her job and talked her friend Ermina Moore into joining her on an adventure—a slow drive across the United States to California. There was no guarantee of following asphalt all the way. The new Lincoln Highway, stitching one coast to the other for the touring motorist, was continuously paved only from New York to Iowa.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

And that effort to increase the power density of our engines, turbines, and motors has resulted in the production of ever-greater amounts of power from smaller and smaller spaces. The evolution of power density can be visualized by comparing the engine in the Model T with that of a modern vehicle. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, which had a 2.9-liter engine that produced 22 horsepower, or about 7.6 horsepower per liter of displacement.11 A century later, Ford Motor Company was selling the 2010 Ford Fusion. It was equipped with a 2.5-liter engine that produced 175 horsepower, which works out to 70 horsepower per liter.12 Thus, even though the displacement of the Fusion’s engine is about 14 percent less than the one in the Model T, it produces more than nine times as much power per liter.13 In other words, over the past century, Ford’s engineers have made a nine-fold improvement in the engine’s power density.

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Power Equivalencies of Various Engines, Motors, and Appliances, in Horsepower (and Watts) Saturn V rocket: 160,000,000 (120 billion W)19 Boeing 757: 86,000 (64.1 million W)20 Top fuel dragster: 7,500 (5.6 million W)21 M1A1 tank: 1,500 (1.1 million W)22 Formula 1 race car: 750 (560,000 W)23 2009 Ferrari F430: 490 (365,000 W)24 1999 Acura 3.2 TL sedan: 225 (168,000 W)25 2010 Ford Fusion: 175 (130,000 W)26 1908 Ford Model T: 22 (16,000 W)27 Average home air-conditioning compressor: 5.6 (4,200 W)28 Honda Cub motorbike: 4 (3,000 W)29 Average lawnmower: 3.5 (2,600 W)30 Dyson vacuum cleaner: 1.68 (1,250 W)31 Toaster: 1.67 (1,250 W)32 Lance Armstrong, pedaling at maximum output: 1.34 (1,000 W)33 Coffeemaker: 1.08 (800 W)34 Cuisinart: 0.16 (117 W)35 Human walking at a brisk pace: 0.14 (106 W)36 20-inch iMac computer: 0.11 (80 W)37 Ryobi 3/8-inch cordless drill battery charger: 0.07 (49 W)38 60-watt lamp: 0.07 (54 W)39 Table fan: 0.03 (25 W)40 Recharging an Apple iPhone: 0.0013 (1 W)41 CHAPTER 4 Wood to Coal to Oil The Slow Pace of Energy Transitions GIVEN OUR CURRENT OBSESSION with Big Oil and Big Coal, it’s worth noting that the fuel source that has had the longest reign in the American energy business is plain old firewood.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

Nowadays almost every establishment sports the red-and-white-striped shield that is the Union Pacific logo. If ever there existed a railway company town, this is it, and as the railroad’s fortune goes, so goes that of North Platte, Nebraska. Trains take passengers—and freight, for that matter—only so far: they travel from station to station, not from house to house. And when Henry Ford created a machine, his Model T, a flivver, that for a few hundred dollars and some stoicism on the driver’s part would indeed allow a rider to drive himself and his passengers to and from his very home, that changed everything, once again. So far as human cargo was concerned, the brief supremacy of the train was brought suddenly low by the motor car.

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But it didn’t break (it didn’t brake, either, for the first model was not so equipped), and the Duryea Motor Wagon Company was swiftly founded, made fifteen cars, raced one of them creditably against a German Benz in a contest held on Thanksgiving Day in 1895, and helped spawn a new American business: making and selling automobiles. Ransom Olds and his Oldsmobile came next, then Henry Ford, the Model T, and mass production, and soon the sound of lobbying by the two-wheelers faded to a dull roar while that from the four-wheelers of the new automobile industry rose in a crescendo and became deafening. In 1894, the American government seemed to be listening. Officials were sensitive enough to make the connection between roads and the needs of men like old Mr.

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The bureau got it in 1919, when Thomas Harris MacDonald was plucked out of Iowa, and made its chief, a post he would hold on to like a limpet for the next thirty-four years. His appointment came at a propitious moment in the nation’s history. The Great War was over and the troops were home. A period of prosperity had settled on the country; cars were being bought, and Henry Ford’s Model T began to be available. Dwight Eisenhower’s cross-country expedition had been concluded, its reports were out, and suggestions for road improvement were on every official table. Men had been crossing the country by car since a Vermont doctor improbably named Horatio Nelson Jackson had done so on a bet in 1903.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

“The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid–nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.”

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

In reality, our educational system operates largely according to the dictates of an industrial system: a consistent drive toward greater standardization and measurement, an overt promotion of a utilitarian STEM-focused curriculum, and even a physical synchronization through the use of bells to signal changes and breaks—all as if kids are little Ford Model T’s rolling off a Frederick Taylor–designed assembly line. To most people, this sounds ridiculous. It’s common knowledge that we all learn in different ways. Learning is a cumulative process that involves neurological, physiological, and emotional development. This means we all absorb, incorporate, and apply knowledge at different paces.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

After all, should we refuse to use antibiotics, X-rays, microwave ovens or pacemakers because the scientific discoveries which led to their creation were the product of lucky accidents?* You would have to be a deranged purist to adopt this view – and you would also end up hungry, bored and quite possibly dead. As with scientific progress, so too with business. The iPhone, perhaps the most successful product since the Ford Model T, was developed not in response to consumer demand or after iterative consultation with focus groups; it was the monomaniacal conception of one slightly deranged man.* And yet, in the search for public policy and business solutions, we are in the grip of an obsession with rational quantification.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

In her model (see Chart 1.2 overleaf), technological revolutions have two consecutive lives. The first, which she calls the “installation period”, is one of exploration and exuberance. Engineers, entrepreneurs and investors all try to find the best opportunities created by a technological big bang, such as Ford’s Model T in 1908 and Intel’s first microprocessor in 1971. Spectacular financial successes attract more and more capital, which leads to a bubble. This is the “gilded age” of any given technology, “a great surge of development”, as Ms Perez calls technological revolutions. 5 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY 1.2 2.1 The life and times of a technology Recurring phases of each great surge INSTALLATION PERIOD Turning point DEPLOYMENT PERIOD Degree of diffusion of the technological revolution Previous great surge MATURITY SYNERGY (Golden age) FRENZY (gilded age) Next great surge IRRUPTION Big bang Crash Institutional adjustment Next big bang Time Source: Carlota Perez The second, or “deployment”, period is a much more boring affair.

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What agitates worriers in the West is the movement of work abroad, regardless of whether it is then outsourced or performed in-house. But the reality is more complicated than they acknowledge. A well-established model The age of mass mechanisation began with the rise of large, integrated assembly lines, such as the one Henry Ford built in 1913 at Dearborn, Michigan, to make the Model t. Over the course of the 20th century, companies reorganised industrial production into ever more intricate layers of designers, subcontractors, assemblers and logistics specialists, but by and large companies have mostly continued to manufacture close to where their goods are consumed.

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They have then grown internationally by producing overseas, for new customers, the same goods they produce and sell to their customers at home: 87% of foreign direct investment is made in search of local markets, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. Products and brands have become global, but production has not. Conversely, white-collar work continues to be produced in the same way that Ford produced the Model t: at home and in-house. Bruce 113 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY 4.1 2.1 Distance no object Transport costs Telecom costs Revenue per ton mile, cents* $’000 per year† for two Mbps fibre leased line, half circuit‡ 8 India Air freight 80 Rail Philippines 60 6 4 1,000 100 10 Barge 500 40 (inland waterways) 20 2 United States 0 0 1980 85 Source: McKinsey Global Institute 90 95 99 750 1996 97 98 250 Ireland 99 2000 0 01 *Revenue used as a proxy for prices; adjusted for inflation †January figures ‡International leased line for India; long-distance domestic leased line in the US Harreld, the head of strategy at ibm, reckons that the world’s companies between them spend about $19 trillion each year on sales, general and administrative expenses.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

Update Did you know that an original, 1976 VW Golf GTi weighed 830 kg? Don’t care? You might, if you owned a 2009 VW Golf GTi: it weighs 1,330 kg. That’s about 60 percent heavier. 176 FUTURE FILES Or how about the fact that in 2007 Ford’s US automobile range averaged 18.7 mpg? Seems low. Especially if you consider that a 1908 Ford Model T could return 25 mpg. Things are changing in the automobile world — but clearly not very fast. GM and Chrysler still look like dinosaurs (they may be extinct by the time you read this). Indian company Tata has launched a very cheap car, and I’d expect a couple of Chinese car companies to make significant inroads into western markets very soon.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 15 Apr 2014

Brazil is the world leader in booze-fueled vehicles: every car on its roads runs on an ethanol blend, from 20 percent mixed with gasoline up to 100 percent ethanol-fueled. Even in the United States, many states require that all gasoline contain up to 10 percent alcohol, a blend that can be used without modification to the engine. Indeed, the very first mass-produced car, the Ford Model T, was designed to run on either fossil-fuel gasoline or alcohol, and several distilleries in the US converted crops into car fuel until Prohibition killed the practice. The problem with large-scale production of ethanol for fueling the transport system of a recovering civilization is sourcing enough refined sugar to feed the fermenting microbes.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia Chapter 6 Utopia Reconsidered The Growing Retreat from Space Exploration and Other Megaprojects Nothing is more indicative of the fading of scientific and technological utopian fantasies from the sensibilities of ordinary Americans (and most other people) than the relatively muted response on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first moon landing of 1969. In 1994 there was hardly the euphoria that had characterized similar major anniversary celebrations involving New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, the first coast-to-coast telephone hookup, or the first Ford Motor Model T automobile (though the 2007 Model T centennial was severely reduced from original plans because of the threat of bankruptcy facing Ford Motor Company and, for that matter, the possible collapse of the entire American auto industry). By 1994 it had become painfully clear to most people that, contrary to centuries of utopian dreams, the moon landing had not changed the world.

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The possibility of accidents and deaths became one of the automobile’s thrills.70 Speed rewarded citizens depending upon their geographical location, income, and, being a predominantly male province, gender. Speed also necessitated governmental controls in the form of highway construction, traffic regulations, and drivers’ licenses. Yet Duffy fails to appreciate the inability of many auto and other workers, including those in Detroit, to afford Henry Ford’s Model T, the cheapest American car through to the early 1920s. These workers presumably never experienced speed first-hand. Meanwhile, for many twentieth-century workers, speed remained associated primarily with Taylor’s stopwatches and other nonpleasurable methods of control. This qualification has parallels with those contemporary claims of the supposed universality of high-tech’s transforming effects—a very dubious stance.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt
by Louis Hyman
Published 24 Jan 2012

In the United States the story was largely the same as in Europe. In the 1890s, there were already about thirty companies building cars. By 1909, the low-volume, high-price model of automobile production was standard for the nearly three hundred American automobile companies. All except for one: Ford Motor Company. The introduction of the Model T in 1908 changed U.S. industry forever. But the Model T was not the first car Ford worked on. The company had started in 1903. What happened in those first five years? Models A, B, C, F, K, N, R, and S all came and went as Ford struggled to find the right car for the American market.

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He wrote in 1906 that “the greatest need today is a light low-priced car with an up-to-date engine of ample horsepower, and built of the very best material.”2 Ford sold the initial Model Ts for $850 but by 1924 dropped the price to only $290, which is amazing considering the rising inflation of the period. Quality was key, but so was price. How to reconcile the two? Working alongside a small group of other mechanics, Henry Ford built the first Model T simply. The engine could be cast in one piece, out of a relatively inexpensive but light vanadium-steel alloy. The process of production of the Model T, as well as the product itself, was novel. The young mechanics Ford arrayed about him drew on the organizational techniques of many different industries, from meatpacking to gun manufacturing, to invent a new way of building cars.

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Four models—the runabout, the touring car, the town car, and the delivery car—would all be based on the same interchangeable chassis. The car was brought to the worker, not the worker to the car. A complete Model T emerged from the factory every forty seconds. By merging production techniques from a variety of industries, as well as pushing the limits of machining, Ford dropped the production time of a Model T from twelve and half hours in 1908 to less than thirty minutes by 1914. The car stayed the same while the machines used to produce the cars constantly improved. In 1915, Ford Motor Company celebrated its millionth sale. Though Henry Ford loved building cars, he hated business, especially finance.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
by Scott Patterson
Published 11 Jun 2012

ATD had placed its computers right beside Island’s baker’s racks of Dell computers in the basement of 50 Broad, giving it a huge advantage over Cummings’s firm, based more than a thousand miles away in North Kansas City. Those miles meant money. In the world of automated speed trading, it was like racing a Ford Model T against a Lamborghini Testarossa. Because Tradebot often popped in and out of stocks in seconds, a fleeting sliver of time could mean the difference between a profit and a loss. Just as floor traders had an advantage by being at the heart of the action, proximity to a trading network’s computer systems gave certain firms an edge over competitors in the race to grab a trade.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

In the same way, armory practice in machining laid down a substrate of technologies—including gauging, pattern making, profiling, and milling—that were seized on later and taken in many different directions by private companies. The apotheosis of armory practice—machine production lines with special purpose machinery turning out fully interchangeable parts with little or no manual intervention—came only with the first Ford Model T assembly line in 1913. That production model dominated much of American manufacturing in the twentieth century. For most of the nineteenth century, however, highly organized production lines using precision special-purpose machines accounted for a very modest share of national output. The mass-production industries that drove American growth through the nineteenth century were those in which the United States had a massive comparative advantage, and they sprang primarily from the crops, husbandry, and natural resources of the West.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel
by David Metz
Published 21 Jan 2014

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by David J. Leinweber
Published 31 Dec 2008

Since then, efficiency has improved by nearly a factor of five, and prices have dropped by a factor of four. They became bigger better and cheaper. The unregulated fridge market was only doing bigger. Source: Lawrence Berkeley Lab. The U.S. automobile industry provides a marked contrast to the remarkable and rapid improvements seen in refrigerators and other appliances. The 1908 Ford Model T traveled 25 miles on a gallon of gas. Fuel efficiency subsequently declined for decades until energy and environmental concerns prompted an interest in fuel conservation. The average EPA miles per gallon for all cars sold in the United States peaked at 22.1 mpg in 1998, but dropped backed to 20.8 mpg in 2004.5 This is a grim testimonial to the successful lobbying efforts of the auto industry and the influence of their friends in Congress, particularly John Dingell,6 to relax the types of regulations that proved so effective for other products, and to exempt small trucks and fuel-hog SUVs from the already weak standards.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

It was a method that even its biggest evangelist, the mall developer–turned–downtown savior Victor Gruen, would come to bitterly regret. You could draw a direct line from the crowded curbs of the start of the twentieth century to the volcanic wastelands that constituted many American downtowns by its end. The arrival of Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908, along with the subsequent improvements in durability and reliability that permitted year-round outdoor car storage, established parking as a major urban issue. Not only did merchants and country folk quickly abandon horsepower in the first few decades of the century; wealthy commuters could drive themselves, ditching the unwashed, the pickpockets, and the bustle pinchers on the trolleys.

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This switch would be accelerated by the arrival of indoor enjoyments like television and air-conditioning, as well as appliances like washers and dryers, which freed the backyard from its workaday purpose, but it began with the automobile. Prior to widespread car ownership, streets were multifunctional public places suitable for hawkers and markets, stickball games and snowball fights, the storage of construction materials, and waste disposal. The roaring car traffic associated with Henry Ford’s Model T cemented the street’s sole purpose as a thoroughfare. The children’s book series Frog and Toad offers an early glimpse of the way drivers navigated the terrain. Behind the wheel emerges “Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, Toad the traffic queller, the lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.”

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
by Emanuel Derman
Published 13 Oct 2011

Model airplanes are another. We also refer to the Model T, fashion models, artists’ models, a weather model, an economic model, the Black-Scholes Model, the Standard Model. What do we mean when we call something a model? The Model T The Model T is a type of Ford, one of a class of things belonging to the Ford category. The Model T is an instance, not everything a Ford can be. Fashion Models A fashion model displays clothing or cosmetics. What’s important about a fashion model is the exterior: looks, physique, aura. The rest is more or less irrelevant, except insofar as auras and exteriors reflect interior qualities.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

In China, despite rapid demand growth, oil is only 20 percent of total energy use, and the largest part of that oil is used as fuel in industry or as diesel in trucks and farm equipment. But that is changing swiftly. As the Chinese automobile industry moves into the fast lane, the impact will be felt not only across the nation but globally. In 1924 Henry Ford, already known worldwide for his Model T, received an unexpected letter. “I have . . . read of your remarkable work in America,” wrote China’s president Sun Yat-sen. “And I think you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale.” He continued: “In China you have an opportunity to express your mind and ideals in the enduring form of a new industrial system.”

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One congressman (and a future Speaker of the House) predicted that alcohol “made from cornstalks” would soon be one of the “most pertinent factors in modern civilization.”2 With the tax eliminated, demand shot up, and ethanol was once again locked in a great race with gasoline as to which would be the “fuel of the future.” Making good on his social contract with America’s farmers, Ford ensured that the Model T, at least when he introduced it, could run on either ethanol or gasoline. It was the first flex-fuel vehicle. Later he introduced Fordson tractors that could run on alcohol as well as gasoline. With all that, however, gasoline was the dominant fuel because it cost only a third as much.

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One citizen wrote to the Los Angeles Times in shock: “We have created one of the finest networks of freeways in the country, and suddenly wake up to discover that we have also created a monster.”3 Haagen-Smit’s discovery in 1948 would eventually lead to what some believe could be the most important development in transportation since Henry Ford’s Model T—the massive effort in the twenty-first century to bring back something that had disappeared from the roads at the beginning of the twentieth century: An automobile with no tailpipe at all. The electric car. THE RACE RESUMES Oil had held its seemingly impregnable position as king of the realm of transportation for almost a century.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Raised on a farm outside Detroit, he had absorbed the farmer’s obsession for any tool or technique that let you get more bushels or other outputs from the same hour of labor, and he made that principle the centerpiece of his new company. Where rival carmakers were handcrafting luxury sedans for the scions of the Gilded Age, Ford created his Model T to be cheap enough “for the multitudes.” To do this, he not only designed a simple, durable vehicle, but he also created a new system, centered on the world’s first moving assembly line, that let him produce that car in enormous volumes and thus exploit the very powerful efficiencies of scale.

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As Ford churned out more cars every month, each car’s share of the “fixed” cost of Ford’s factories became proportionately smaller. As Ford’s costs fell, he was able to cut his selling price, thereby attracting more buyers and generating even more volume, leading to even lower prices, and so on. By 1923, Ford had lowered the price of a Model T from $850 (around $21,000 today) to just $290 ($4,000), or around a third of the average workingman’s annual salary and, as crucially, around half the price of a horse and buggy, then the standard in personal mobility. Put another way, a citizen of even modest means could now afford an unprecedented upgrade in personal power.

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class
by Edward McClelland
Published 2 Feb 2021

The ambitious Durant quickly acquired a third auto company, located in Pontiac; then, feeling he had to add a Detroit automaker to his portfolio, he paid $3.5 million for the Cadillac Motor Company. The classic GM five-brand lineup became complete in 1917, when Durant brought in a model founded by a mustachioed Swiss auto racer named Louis Chevrolet. The Chevrolet Royal Mail, a $750 four-cylinder roadster, was neither as cheap nor as popular as Ford’s Model T, but the masses bought it nonetheless, and it established Chevrolet’s future position as the bottom rung of GM’s “price for every purse” brand ladder. Flint, which had begun the first decade of the century with a single hand-assembled motorcar, was by that decade’s end the Second City of the auto industry, behind only Detroit.

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His rise to the chairmanship begins in 1920, when GM’s exuberant founder, Billy Durant, is fired after his final bout of overexpansion and financial adventurism nearly bankrupts the company. Under Sloan’s leadership, General Motors surpasses Ford as the world’s leading auto manufacturer. While Ford persistently produces his black Model T, the vehicle that dominated the twentieth century’s early agrarian decades, GM rolls out a variety of automobiles that appeal to the new urban middle classes: the “car for every purse” brand ladder that will come to define the company’s offerings, from the plebian Chevrolet to the aristocratic Cadillac.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
by Robert Bryce
Published 16 Mar 2011

Well, one key reason is obvious: The U.S. can import those commodities from lots of different countries. And the U.S. has been doing just that for nearly a century. The U.S. was a net crude oil importer way back in 1913. In fact, between 1913 and 2007, the U.S. was a net crude exporter in just nine of those years.10 In 1913—just five years after Henry Ford began selling his Model T—America was importing 36,000 barrels of crude oil per day.11 Nine decades later, in 2005, with George W. Bush in the White House, the U.S. was importing almost 300 times as much oil as it did when Woodrow Wilson was living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.12 But once again, those numbers must be put in perspective.

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Toyota officials say they may begin marketing a pickup truck in the U.S. in 2008 that will be capable The Impossibility of Independence 197 The Ethanol Timeline 1862—The Union Congress places a $2 excise tax on each gallon of ethanol to help pay for the Civil War. Before the war, ethanol was a major illumination oil. After the tax is imposed, its lighting use declines. 1896—Henry Ford’s first automobile, the quadricycle, is built to run on 100 percent ethanol. 1906—Congress removes taxes on ethanol. 1908—Ford produces the first Model T, which can run on ethanol or gasoline, or a mix of the two. 1978—The Energy Tax Act of 1978 defines gasohol for the first time: a blend of gasoline with at least 10 percent alcohol by volume. It excludes alcohol made from petroleum, natural gas, or coal and provides a subsidy of $0.40 for each gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline. 1980–1984—Congress enacts a series of tax benefits for ethanol producers and blenders.

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Note that the $2.75 is the nominal price, not inflation-adjusted. 9. EIA data. Available: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real _prices.html. 10. EIA data. Available: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrntus2a.htm. Note that no data are available for 1916 through 1919. 11. It’s worth noting that Ford’s Model T got 25 miles per gallon. That’s better than the current fleet of vehicles and higher than current Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. 12. EIA data. Available: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrntus2a.htm. 13. For 1913 GDP data see: http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/gdp_answer.php?CHK nominalGDP=on&year1=1913&year2=. 14.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
by Earl Swift
Published 8 Jun 2011

A college laid out on an axis defined by its railroad station, in a town that took its name from the depot, was reorienting itself to the automobile. A quarter century later, Turner had worked virtually every sort of engineering job the bureau had to offer. Days out of college, he'd reported for duty with the bureau's Division of Management, and an assignment as an observer and analyst. Issued a 1927 Ford Model T touring car, he'd studied road-building jobs all through the West. " We would sit on the side of the bank there with a clipboard and a pencil and a stopwatch," he recalled late in life, " and time the movement of [a] shovel, digging, swinging, loading it in the truck and then back. What did he do there?

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

He worked as a hospital technician administering anaesthetics in a surgical ward in Syria, fleeing when he was conscripted by the army to work in a military hospital. His ‘Rolls-Royce’ is a huge contraption made from the frames of multiple bicycles. It is the size and shape of a car; it looks a little like a Ford Model T, and is painted gold. The car is pedal powered, with an extended chain that powers the front wheels as the driver pedals. Look closely and you can see the skeletons of other bikes that make up the axles and frame. But stand back and focus on the red leather seating, adjustable wing mirrors and sun shade, and you can see why they call it a Rolls.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle. But two things killed that first generation of electric cars. One was Henry Ford’s Model T and the mass production of the assembly line. The other, though less well known, was the electric starter, invented by Charles Kettering in 1911 for Cadillac after a person died from cranking a car. Kettering’s invention eliminated the need for someone to stand in front and crank. Over the next several years, electric cars faded away.

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Burns worried about GM’s future—in particular, what could make the automobile obsolete. Once, GM’s then-CEO Rick Wagoner and Burns had got to talking about the fact that while many other industries had changed over a hundred years, the basic model of the auto industry was the same as it had been since Henry Ford’s Model T—“gas-fueled, run by an internal combustion engine, rolling on four wheels.” “What’s the car of the next hundred years going to look like?” Wagoner asked Burns. “If the automobile were being invented today, then what form would it take?” Burns reflected that “there haven’t really been any disruptive innovations in that time.”

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“The first time ever,” said Thrun, “that the machine made all the decisions.” Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick rode up the Eiffel Tower during a Paris snowstorm and hammered out the idea for a “better cab”—a ride-hailing company based on the smartphone. It would become Uber. Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, stands next to a Model T built by his great-grandfather at the one-hundredth anniversary of the company. “I’d like Ford to be around another one hundred years,” he says. “You’ll live in a world where you’ll have internal combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, and pure electrics. Over time, the shift will take place.”

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Contrast this with traditional industrial design, which has been informed by price and engineering concerns. A popular story that illustrates this approach is that Henry Ford mandated black paint for the Model T because it dried faster. While recent research by Professor Trent E. Boggess at Plymouth State College has called this anecdote into question, his alternative explanation also suggests that Ford took an object-based view of the Model T. Boggess says, “The Model T was a most practical car. No doubt Henry Ford was convinced that black was simply the most practical color for the job. Model Ts were not painted black because black dried faster.

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In Henry Ford’s industrial age, this might have been fatal, but modern digital and manufacturing technology has made it increasingly affordable to customize products and software for small numbers of users. One of the advantages of this approach is that it creates highly resilient systems, which can respond quickly when their users need change. Rather than completely retooling, as Ford needed to do when it replaced the Model T with the Model A, an engaged community can redesign its solutions in real time, or something close to it. Of course, codesign is not the only way of creating systems-oriented solutions, nor is the Media Lab the only organization working toward incorporating this principle into its work.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

The advertisers pitched the telephone as if it were a more convenient telegraph. None of them suggested having a conversation. The automobile today, embedded in its matrix of superhighways, drive-through restaurants, seat belts, navigation tools, and digital hypermiling dashboards, is a different technology from the Ford Model T of 100 years ago. And most of those differences are due to secondary inventions rather than the enduring internal combustion engine. In the same way, aspirin today is not the aspirin of yesteryear. Put into the context of other drugs in the body, changes in our longevity and pill-popping habits (one per day!)

After the Flood: What the Dambusters Did Next
by John Nichol
Published 1 Jul 2015

His parents were originally struggling small shopkeepers, and so poor that Barney and his brother slept in a tent behind the shop, except in the coldest weather when they would take refuge in the attic. However, in the early 1930s they set up a mobile motion-picture business, touring small towns and villages in rural areas of the South Island with a film projector mounted on the back of a Ford Model-T truck. They persuaded the townsfolk and villagers to cut a hole in the rear wall of their community halls and then reversed the truck up to the wall, pushed the lens of the projector through the hole and projected their movies onto a portable screen inside. Gumbley’s brother painted posters of the movies on show, Gumbley himself manned the projector and his sister sold the tickets.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Automobiles might complete what railways, trams and omnibuses had only partially achieved, and extend the benefits of the separation of work and home even to manual workers: ‘Imagine a healthier race of workingmen, toiling in cheerful and sanitary factories… who, in the late afternoon, glide away in their own comfortable vehicles to their little farms or houses in the country or by the sea twenty or thirty miles distant! They will be healthier, happier, more intelligent and self-respecting citizens because of the chance to live among the meadows and the flowers of the country instead of in crowded city streets.’ The only problem was the expense. Enter Henry Ford and his Model T. Ford wanted to build a car that was technically advanced, reliable, and which could be sold at so low a 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’. He pioneered production-line assembly and standardized parts, and the first Model T was completed in August 1908.

The Fundamentals of Interior Design
by Dodsworth, Simon and Anderson, Stephen
Published 29 Jan 2015

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Later, GM’s Alfred Sloan expounded on that principle: “By the time we have a product to show them [consumers], we are necessarily committed to selling that product because of the tremendous investment involved in bringing it to market.”4 The music industry’s business model was built on telling its consumers what they would buy, just like Ford and Sloan. Executives invested in the production and distribution of CDs, and it was the CD that customers would have to purchase. Henry Ford was among the first to strike gold by tapping into the new mass consumption with the Model T. As in the case of the iPod, Ford’s Model T factory was pressed to meet the immediate explosion of demand. Mass production could be applied to anything, and it was. It changed the framework of production as it diffused throughout the economy and around the world, and it established the dominance of a new mass-production capitalism as the basis for wealth creation in the twentieth century.

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Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.”8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place. When we look through this lens, we can see that those eager customers for Ford’s incredible Model T and the new consumers of iPods and iPhones are expressions of the conditions of existence that characterized their era. In fact, each is the fruit of distinct phases of a centuries-long process known as “individualization” that is the human signature of the modern era. Ford’s mass consumers were members of what has been called the “first modernity,”9 but the new conditions of the “second modernity” produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential.

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It is the systematic result of a “pathological” division of learning in society in which surveillance capitalism knows, decides, and decides who decides. Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or asking a giraffe to shorten its neck. Such demands are existential threats. They violate the basic mechanisms and laws of motion that produce this market leviathan’s concentrations of knowledge, power, and wealth. So here is what is at stake: surveillance capitalism is profoundly antidemocratic, but its remarkable power does not originate in the state, as has historically been the case.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Morgan and Andrew Carnegie created U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. In 1903 the Wright Brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk. That same year Edwin S. Porter filmed The Great Train Robbery, thereby creating a U.S. industry in narrative motion pictures. In 1908 Henry Ford produced the first Model T. In 1909 Leo Baekeland introduced Bakelite, thereby inventing an industry in synthetic plastics. Around 1915 David Sarnoff dreamed up the “radio music box.” Allen might also have mentioned that in 1915 Alexander Graham Bell (who of course had invented the telephone four decades earlier) participated in a public demonstration of the first transcontinental telephone line—telecommunications’ equivalent of the golden spike.

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Later Victor recalled it was the only time he ever saw his father weep. Walter dropped out of high school at sixteen and apprenticed as a tool and die worker. He lost his big right toe at seventeen when a four-hundred-pound die that he and two co-workers were trying to move slipped and crashed down on his foot. At nineteen, Walter heard that Henry Ford—then phasing out the Model T and preparing to introduce the Model A—was paying tool and die workers a princely $1.25 an hour. He made a beeline for Detroit. Victor joined him three years later. Thriving at Ford, Walter was able, at night, to acquire his high school diploma and to enroll in college. He even considered law school.

Big Bang
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 2004

Gradually, it emerged that the hiss came from a particular region of the sky and that it peaked every 24 hours. Actually, when Jansky looked at his data more carefully, he found that the peak came every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Almost a full day between peaks, but not quite. Figure 92 Karl Jansky makes adjustments to the antenna that was designed to detect natural sources of radio waves. The Ford Model T wheels are part of the turntable that allowed the antenna to rotate. Jansky mentioned the curious time interval to his colleague Melvin Skellet, who had a Ph.D. in astronomy and who was able to point out the significance of the missing four minutes. Each year the Earth spins on its axis 3651/4 times, and each day lasts 24 hours, so one year consists of 3651/4 × 24 = 8,766 hours.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

Artisans and designers of the nineteenth century had struggled to make enough stuff to meet the growing demand of consumers. But modern factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of identical cheap goods by the 1920s. It was an era of mass production, yielding an abundance of selfsame products. Henry Ford’s Model T was a symbol of its age, and from 1914 to 1925 it was available only in black. Companies did not yet worship at the altars of style, choice, and design. The era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their one true god. But in the 1920s, art made a comeback, albeit for commercial reasons.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

See: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101765/. Put it this way, in “The Law of Accelerating Returns,”: ibid. More Transportation Options Model T: History.com editors, “Ford Motor Company Unveils the Model T,” History, August 27, 2009. See: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-motor-company-unveils-the-model-t. Just four years later: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Hosed,” New Yorker, November 8, 2009. radio-controlled “American wonder”: Fabian Kroger, “Automated Driving in Its Social, Historical and Cultural Contexts,” Autonomous Driving, May 22, 2016, pp. 41–68.

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The triple threat convergence of the internal combustion engine, the moving assembly line and the emerging petroleum industry was together driving—pardon the pun—the horse-and-buggy business out of business. The first bespoke cars hit the roads around the tail end of the nineteenth century, but Ford’s 1908 introduction of the mass-produced Model T marked the real tipping point. Just four years later, New York traffic surveys counted more cars than horses on the road. And while the speed of this shift was breathtaking, in retrospect it wasn’t unexpected. Whenever a new technology offers a tenfold increase in value—cheaper, faster and better—there’s little that can slow it down.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

Certainly we are not implying that a car plant requires a number of personbytes that is equal to the number of people employed in a car factory or to the number of tasks that are executed by all workers. Rather, we can say that the number of people employed in a car factory is a generous upper limit of the number of personbytes needed to make a car. Henry Ford divided the production of the Model T into increasingly smaller tasks—7,882, to be precise.1 The number of tasks needed to make a Model T is larger than the number of tasks required to produce a pin, but that does not mean that making a Model T requires 7,882 personbytes of knowhow. A simple interpretation is that 7,882 personbytes of knowhow is a very generous upper bound for the amount of knowhow needed to produce a car from its basic ingredients: iron, soybeans, rubber, and imagination.2 The number of tasks involved in creating a car in the Rouge is an upper bound for the number of personbytes needed to make a car because many of these tasks are simple enough that the same individual can be an expert in a number of them.

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The personbyte theory implies that larger networks are needed to accumulate larger volumes of knowledge and knowhow, but it does not explicitly tell us why our world is not filled with megafactories that are ten to twenty times larger than River Rouge. After all, hasn’t the complexity of products increased vastly since Ford introduced the Model T? The limited proliferation of megafactories like the Rouge implies that there must be mechanisms that limit the size of the networks we call firms and make it preferable to disaggregate production into networks of firms. This also suggests the existence of a second quantization limit, which we will call the firmbyte.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

Spurred by technological innovation, this new vision invoked a radical process to restructure streets, cities, and society. Governments, consumers, and auto-makers sighted prospects of a peak in the distance. Atop it supposedly contained wealth, freedom, happiness, and everything in between. Henry Ford started rolling a Model T off the assembly line in 1908 in the US at an unprecedented rate: 1911 saw one every fifteen-minutes, 1923 saw one every 15 seconds (off of multiple assembly lines). Mass automobility spawned new strategies to reach that peak. The commoner could now acquire a car with four months of work.

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Observers believed each would find niches, a "sphere of action" they would dominate: electrics for the wealthy wives of businessmen and professionals who wanted to travel in town, gasoline for the longer distance trips, and so on. Yet by 1905 electrics comprised fewer than 10 percent of all vehicle sales. By 1918 Henry Ford’s gasoline-powered Model T was dominating automobile sales.117 The rest, was, as they say, history. EV sales, even when growing slightly, comprised a smaller and smaller share of the market. Interest in electric vehicles waned for decades. It wasn't until 1969 that General Motors restarted experiments with hybrids, following on a technological path abandoned soon after Ferdinand Porsche built a hybrid in 1901.

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
by David Prerau
Published 1 Jan 2005

Among other means of persuasion the group undertook, it tried to get the backing of prominent local citizens, including those related to two of the passions of Detroiters, automobiles and baseball. Detroit was the “Motor City,” the automobile manufacturing capital of the country. The number of automobiles in use was surging, as the popularity of Henry Ford’s Model T made them more available to the average person, who was coming to see the ability to take a drive in a car as part of the American way of life. Auto enthusiasts appreciated that an extra hour of daylight allowed more time for sunlit evening drives in the country, and Detroit car manufacturers valued the savings on lighting for their plants.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

“And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, ‘No, no, we’re definitely going to use it.’

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We had the Roadster, but there was no good word for a sedan. You can’t call it the Tesla Sedan. That’s boring as hell. In the U.K., they say ‘saloon,’ but then it’s sort of like, ‘What are you? A cowboy or something?’ We went through a bunch of iterations, and the Model S sounded the best. And it was like a vague nod to Ford being the Model T in that electric cars preceded the Model T, and in a way we’re coming full circle and the thing that proceeded the Model T is now going into production in the twenty-first century, hence the Model S. But that’s sort of more like reversing the logic.” *A handful of lawsuits have been filed against Tesla with auto dealers arguing that the company should not be able to sell its cars directly.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
by Richard Dawkins
Published 28 Feb 1995

"It is said" that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. His inspectors came hack with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons-all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification. You may, like me, be a little vague about what kingpins are, but it doesn't matter. They are something that a motor car needs, and Ford's alleged ruthlessness was, indeed, entirely logical.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

His time-saving approach was based on optimizing human behavior to suit the capabilities of the machines before them and to minimize human error. 1915: FORD ASSEMBLY LINE, Henry Ford The Ford assembly line was the definitive application of Taylor’s principles of scientific management. Ford optimized his assembly line to make the Model T as cheaply and uniformly as possible, with no room for customization or consumer taste, thereby reducing the cost of an automobile from $825 to $260 by 1924. 1920s: HOME ECONOMICS, Christine Frederick Home economics attempted to free up leisure time for women so that they might pursue their own betterment.

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The pursuit of efficiency in the home laid the groundwork for a wave of appliances, such as washing machines, that became a sustaining source of work for Behrens, Dreyfuss, Loewy, and many other early industrial designers. 1921: MODERN ETHNOGRAPHY, Franz Boas In the 1920s, during his studies of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the anthropologist Franz Boas developed detailed methods for observing daily life and practices that provided the foundation for modern ethnography as practiced by Alphonse Chapanis, Henry Dreyfuss, Jane Fulton Suri, Donald Norman, Jan Chipchase, and others. 1925: “L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU,” Le Corbusier Le Corbusier introduced a modernist lifestyle aesthetic that stripped away decorative and ornamental touches in favor of simplified, mass-produced products to create a “machine to inhabit.” His groundbreaking exhibition embodied the Bauhaus belief that beauty can be found at the intersection of aesthetics and engineering. 1927: MODEL A, Henry Ford Henry Ford, who for years resisted offering variations on the Model T, was finally forced by rising competition from General Motors and others to introduce the Model A, which offered a range of options and colors in a Ford automobile for the first time. 1927: MASCHINENMENSCH ROBOT FROM METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang and Walter Schulze-Mittendorff Fritz Lang’s dystopian vision for the societal impact of technology took iconic form in the character of a female robot who served as the ambassador for a more advanced world—brought to life by the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff. 1930: RKO THEATER, SIOUX CITY, IOWA, Henry Dreyfuss Henry Dreyfuss spent three days observing the behavior of patrons of RKO’s new but unpopular movie house in Sioux City.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

In the case of the third revolution, for example, it was by no means clear in the 1870s that England would fall behind and that it would be the USA and Germany that would fully exploit the new wealth-generating potential to catch up and forge ahead. In fact, it could be argued that two big-bang events, one for each of the countries involved in propelling that surge, should perhaps be identified. Other choices are less controversial. Ford’s Model-T is an obvious choice for the Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass-Production. Nevertheless, the precise dating could be an issue. The truly mass-produced Model-T, from a full moving assembly line, only came out in 1913. However, even without a complete line, the first Model-T in 1908 was already the clear prototype of the standardized, identical products that were to characterize future production patterns.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

Combined with the rise of the chemical industries, petroleum refining, and the internal combustion engine and electrification, this next phase of manufacturing transformation is called by many historians the “Second Industrial Revolution.” They place it from 1850 to around the end of World War I, which includes Henry Ford’s Model-T assembly line, with its innovations of stockpiles of interchangeable parts and the use of conveyer belts, where products being produced moved to stationary workers (who each did a single task), rather than the other way around. Today, in a fully industrialized economy, we forget just how much the First and Second Industrial Revolutions changed society.

An Island to Oneself: The Story of Six Years on a Desert Island
by Tom Neale and Noel Barber
Published 31 Aug 1990

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

Smart Grid Standards
by Takuro Sato
Published 17 Nov 2015

The advantages of EVs over other types of vehicles are that the electric car was quicker to start up, cleaner, and doing better in the snow. However, by the late 1920s, EVs had nearly gone from the market and were mostly used for specialist roles, for example, platform trucks, forklift trucks, tow tractors, and urban delivery vehicles. Compared to ICE, the EV was very expensive for consumers. Henry Ford sold the popular Model T in 1908 for $850, while the price of EVs at the same time was around $2000. The Model T was later sold for as little as $260, due to the production savings of assembly lines. Another primary reason for the downfall of personal EVs was the limited range. Electric cars in the early 1900s would last about 35 miles per charge, while Model T could get 13–21 miles per gallon of gasoline and could hold 9–10 gallons of gasoline [24].

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Energy Information Administration (2012) US Emissions of Greenhouse Cases Report, www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html#transportation. (accessed 15 December 2012). Ipakchi, A. and Albuyeh, F. (2009) Grid of the future. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 7 (2), 52–62. Vojdani, A.F. (2008) Smart integration. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 6 (6), 72–79. Ford (2012) Model T Facts, http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=858 (accessed 15 December 2012). Accenture (2011) Plug-in Electric Vehicles: Charging Perceptions, Hedging Bets. Deloitte Global Services Ltd (2011) Gaining Traction: Will Consumers Ride the Electric Vehicle Wave? Produced for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (2010) 10-K: Annual Report Pursuant to Section 13 and 15 (d), Enerl, Inc., New York.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

He became the leading automobile manufacturer in the early twentieth century by pioneering mass production methods in his factories, revolutionizing not only his own company but businesses throughout the economy, which followed the mass production principles that he introduced. The time required to produce a Ford Model T chassis shrank from 12 man-hours to an hour and a half.{202} With a mass market for automobiles, it paid to invest in expensive but labor-saving mass production machinery, whose cost per car would turn out to be modest when spread out over a huge number of automobiles. But, if there were only half as many cars sold as expected, then the cost of that machinery per car would be twice as much.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Published 4 Mar 2014

By 1901, Peugeot (originally a bicycle company) had taken over. Louis Renault took another step forward with the invention of the drive shaft, and the Michelin brothers developed pneumatic tires. The most famous innovation in manufacturing occurred in December 1913 in Detroit, Michigan: Henry Ford’s assembly line for the Model T. Ford was already producing the Model T before the assembly line, but the line’s efficiency allowed him to cut the car’s price from $825 to $345 (only $8,000 in today’s dollars). The global auto market would be dominated by Americans for quite a while. The United States produced 73 percent of the world’s cars in 1933, while the former market leaders of Germany and France produced 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Frommer's Cuba
by Claire Boobbyer
Published 2 Jan 2004

F énix ( & 7/866-6666) is the most expensive cab ser vice in Havana and is the only one (in addition to the G ran Car service, see below) that continues to operate under its o wn name. Other options include horse-drawn carriages; the so-called Coco Taxis (& 7/8731411), round open-air two seaters powered by a motorcycle; and antique cars that range from a Ford Model T to a 1957 Chevy. Both the horse-drawn carriages and Coco Taxis cost from CUC$5 to CUC$10 (US$5.40–US$11/£2.70–£5.40) per hour , with a minimum of ar ound CUC$3 (US$3.25/£1.60). Gran C ar (& 7/881-0992) is the most reputable agent for antique-car r entals. G ran Car rates, with a driv er, r un CUC$25 (US$27/£14) per hour or CUC$125 (US$135/£68) per day, or CUC$30 (US$32/£16) per hour and CUC$150 (US$162/£81) per day for conv ertibles.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

The new farmers were serviced by a spidery railroad system designed to connect nodes, reinforcing the centralized movement of goods from remote locations to big cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis. But traveling from small town to small town remained difficult, which kept communities isolated from one another, strengthening the “bootstrapping” myth that Americans succeeded by their wits alone, independent of larger political and economic forces. Henry Ford’s Model T would change all that. Once Ford mastered vertical integration and the assembly line, he put the automobile within reach for most Americans, albeit without the lush interiors of a Packard. Over a single decade, the number of cars on the road skyrocketed from 180,000 in 1908 to more than 17 million in 1920.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Published 13 Sep 2011

This is the story of search keyword advertising, Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fail.3 When you see a startup that has found a fit with a large market, it’s exhilarating. It leaves no room for doubt. It is Ford’s Model T flying out of the factory as fast as it could be made, Facebook sweeping college campuses practically overnight, or Lotus taking the business world by storm, selling $54 million worth of Lotus 1-2-3 in its first year of operation. Startups occasionally ask me to help them evaluate whether they have achieved product/market fit.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

The prospect of more toll roads is probably unsettling to those concerned about the consequences for low- and middle-income citizens. Such worries could ease if oil prices continue to march higher. If we stand back and let the market find its own equilibrium, then rising pump prices will ration demand for roadways. Something of a return to the days of Henry Ford’s Model T could unfold. Back then, only the rich could afford to drive and everyone else found another mode of transportation. Does it make sense for everyone to pay for roads and bridges they won’t be using? As the number of people on the roads shrinks, public officials will feel less pressure to spend scarce tax dollars maintaining highways.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Think of the value that automation creates by increasing the productivity in Amazon’s warehouses, or by making it easier to keep Google’s server farms running 24/7. UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE #3: ADAPTATION, NOT OPTIMIZATION At a higher level of abstraction, successful scale-ups place more emphasis on adaptation than optimization. Rather than the giant assembly lines of Detroit automakers, which trace their origins to Henry Ford’s Model T, the current generation of Silicon Valley companies practice continuous improvement, whether through an emphasis on speed or the constant experiments and A/B testing of growth hacking. This emphasis makes sense in an environment where companies need to seek product/market fit for new and rapidly changing products and markets.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

His motor company pioneered the form of manufacture termed “Fordism.” Mass production with repeatable parts made by machines was taken to its most efficient conclusion with Ford’s moving assembly lines, in which the product moves, and the workers stay still. It had taken a long time to get to the stage of Ford’s Model T, the car that motorized the masses in the first decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1760s, the Scottish historian and philosopher Adam Ferguson had written, “Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”25 The automotive historian Andrew Nahum has commented that this could be a “perfect description” of Ford’s factory.26 Yet it took the convulsive developments in manufacturing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, heavily influenced by clock- and watchmaking culture and championed by the likes of John Bennett, before the dream of the perfect assembly line could be realized.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

The internal combustion engine was integral to revolutionary forms of transport, touching every corner of life from tanks and armoured cars to lorries and tractors. The world of out-of-town shopping centres, abundant food and dispersed families exists thanks to this engine. From an extortionately expensive curiosity, cars quickly became a mass-produced necessity, manufactured (thanks to Henry Ford's 1907 Model T) by the million. Even as it became normal for American and then European families to own a car, so plane travel went mainstream. By the mid-1930s flying was a viable if expensive mode of public transportation. Aircraft like the Douglas DC-3 could carry twenty-one passengers and cover a thousand miles on a single fuel load, crossing the continental US in three stops and fifteen hours.37 Improvements in existing systems like roads and shipping, coupled with the dramatic effect of new technologies like railways, motor vehicles and airplanes, gave us a new sensation: acceleration!

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Such barriers are not insuperable, but they are exacting and omnipresent compared with the early days of the car or the plane: Stephenson, Benz and the Wrights didn't worry (so much) about insurance, or licensing, or safety regulations, or litigation, or infrastructure, or impatient venture capitalists, although they might have had to grapple with a sceptical public, protectionist governments or a hostile media. As J. Storrs Hall points out, if Henry Ford had been sued every time someone crashed their Model T, we likely wouldn't have cars and highways at all.101 New forms of transport or medicine bump up against tight economic and policy limits. Concorde ceased flying not just over safety fears, but because it made a loss. It's possible to build hyperloop trains, hypersonic aircraft or lunar-orbiting bases, or send a mission to Mars, but the delicate balance of risk, regulation and return on investment may make them infeasible.

Frommer's Los Angeles 2010
by Matthew Richard Poole
Published 28 Sep 2009

Although the first “horseless carriages” emerged fr om the M idwest, it ’s been Hollywood’s influence that has defined the entire nation’s passion for the car. During the early 1920s, movie comedians Laur el and H ardy and the K eystone Cops began to blend their brand of physical humor with the popular Ford Model T. 2 L . A . I N P O P U L A R C U LT U R E : B O O K S & AU TO S FROM HORSELESS CARRIAGES TO HOT RODS LO S A N G E L E S I N D E P T H NONFICTION In vivid detail, E dward Jay E pstein’s The B ig P icture: The N ew Logic of M oney and P ower in H ollywood (Random H ouse, 2005) delv es deep into the modern moviemaking machine with a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the “ sexopoly”: the six mega-media companies that control motion picture entertainment (it’s a r eal myth-buster).

The Pentagon: A History
by Steve Vogel
Published 26 May 2008

When Jim declined, the father asked his only other son, John, then twenty, who quietly said, “I’ll try.” With a modest inheritance, McShain oversaw the firm from a one-room office over a garage at 1610 North Street in Philadelphia, surviving some lean years and slowly building up business. He was a familiar sight in his raccoon coat and derby hat, dashing around the countryside in his Ford Model T roadster to check on the progress of his jobs. He earned a reputation as a highly competitive builder who delivered projects on schedule and on budget. By the time he won his first federal contact in 1932 to build the twelve-story Philadelphia Naval Hospital, McShain had become a force in the city’s building industry.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge
by Brian Bagnall
Published 13 Sep 2005

Only the Commodore 64 allowed the company to continue. Thankfully, 1984 was one of its strongest years. It won awards as home computer of the year and dominated sales of every other system. Eventually, it became perhaps the most important system for colonizing homes with computers. Wired magazine compares the C64 to the Ford Model T, as the first home computer for the masses. The designer of the C64, Bob Yannes, witnessed the success of his creation from afar. “I felt good about it because it was something I designed and obviously a lot of people really liked,” he says. “Over the years, there’s been a lot of people who say, ‘That was my first computer and I really learned a lot.’

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
by Leander Kahney
Published 14 Nov 2013

“They sell personal computers as data-processing machines, not as tools for individuals.”7 Jobs and his chief designer, Jerry Manock, went to work on the Mac, with three design constraints. To keep it cheap and make it easy to manufacture, Jobs insisted on just one configuration, an echo of his hero Henry Ford’s Model T. Jobs’s new machine had to be a “crankless computer”: A new owner should just be able to plug the machine into the wall, press a button and it would work. The Macintosh would be the world’s first all-in-one PC, with the screen, disk drives and circuitry all housed in the same case, with a detachable keyboard and mouse that plugged in the back.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

Following the emerging pattern in Musk’s leadership style, his plan to achieve this goal was rooted in a breathtakingly ambitious challenge to his team. The Model 3, which at that point still only existed in prototype form, would reach half a million units of production by 2018, two years sooner than originally planned. Not since Ford’s Model T had an automaker ramped production of a car so far so fast. To achieve this historic feat, Tesla was breaking from its practice with Model S and X: Model 3 would be “designed for production,” said Musk. “With Model 3 we are being incredibly rigorous about ensuring that we don’t have anything that isn’t really necessary to make a very compelling version one of the car,” he explained.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
Published 16 Oct 2017

By the sixteenth century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds.21 This abstract time came to shape everything—work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the sixteenth century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks.22 In the twentieth century, as assembly lines in Detroit churned out Henry Ford’s Model T, “scientific managers” were measuring units of work called therbligs (an anagram of their developers’ last name, Gilbreth): each one a mere one-thousandth of a second.23 The conquest of the Americas therefore involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the “lazy” native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

They spent it as fast as they could in order to improve themselves.’4 This attitude caused uproar, but it also made Ford the richest man in the world. In order to achieve his aim of cheap cars for all, between 1908 and 1927 Ford offered only one ultra-standardised product, the Model T, which, he famously remarked, was available in ‘any colour, as long as it’s black’. Upton Sinclair, author of a tendentious novella about Ford called The Flivver King (flivver was one of the Model T’s many nicknames), shared the popular disdain for the car’s looks: It was an ugly enough little creation he had decided upon; with its top raised it looked like a little black box on wheels.

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There was no way GM could out-rationalise Ford, so instead they decided to offer consumers a wider range of more attractively designed products, putting sensual pleasure back into the sphere of consumption although not addressing the parallel problem of the denial of pleasure in labour. Nonetheless by the mid-1920s GM was outselling Ford for the first time, and after resisting the entreaties of his executives for years, in 1927 Ford was finally convinced to discontinue the Model T in favour of the more seductively styled Model A – now available in several colours besides black. But Ford had lost his advantage, and he would never regain his position as the world’s greatest manufacturer. Sex in the Rouge: Martha and the Vandellas perform their 1965 hit ‘Nowhere to Run’.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
by W. Bernard Carlson
Published 11 May 2013

In other words, if they were going to take advantage of the economies of scale that came with mass production, industrialists would have to create products that would be desired and used by millions of consumers. A classic example of a mass-produced product for this new consumer culture was the Model T; as Henry Ford explained, the Model T was intended to be “a motor car for the great multitude … large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for … so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”22 Just as Ford envisioned everyone having a Model T, so Tesla believed that everyone would soon have one of his wireless receivers. Viewed from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it may seem obvious that a consumer culture would grow out of mass production and that a significant portion of the global economy would depend on the mass consumption of products like cell phones, iPods, and laptop computers.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

At around the same time, Gottlieb Daimler, another German, created a motorcycle by attaching a petrol engine to a purpose-built frame.24 The early vehicles were rudimentary but the idea was quickly developed by other pioneers such as Armand Peugeot and Emile Levassor of France. Initially, cars were the playthings of aristocrats and rich businessmen. They only became a mass market when Henry Ford of Michigan launched the Model T. Ford was, like many other early auto leaders, both a visionary businessman and a thoroughly nasty person. In 1920 he published a series of pamphlets with the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which earned him a citation in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As late as 1939 Ford sent Hitler a cheque for $50,000 on his birthday and, in the following year, claimed that “international Jewish bankers” had caused the outbreak of war.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

Top Technological Inventions, 1900–1909 and 2000–2009 1900–1909 2000–2009 Airplane (1903) Theory of relativity (1905) Air conditioning (1901) Ford Model T (1908) Radio broadcasting (1906) Plastics (1907) Vacuum cleaner (1901) Electrocardiograph (1901) Safety razor (1903) Hamburger (1904 or earlier) iPhone (2007) Facebook (2004) mRNA vaccines (2005) Human Genome Project (2003) Blockchain/Bitcoin (2008) USB drive (2000) YouTube (2005) Google Maps (2005) Cloud computing (2002) Tesla (2008) At first this might look like a rout for the 1900s—it has airplanes and Einstein!

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

The ironies of this attachment are inescapable, given that quick obsolescence has been a design criterion from early in the history of the automobile, part of the business model. This is generally credited to General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan. The idea was to offer not just one model of car (as did Ford with its Model T) but an array of models for different market niches: men, women, and people of varied income levels, with varying styles to mark these differences. The idea of the “model year” was introduced, and each of these would promise some improvement. At the heart of this marketing strategy was an idiom of technological progress that found easy resonance with Americans, however superficial or nonexistent the underlying technical innovations sometimes were.

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At the heart of this marketing strategy was an idiom of technological progress that found easy resonance with Americans, however superficial or nonexistent the underlying technical innovations sometimes were. The push-button transmissions that were introduced from 1956 to 1958 by Chrysler, Packard, Ford, and Edsel on their high-end models weren’t very good at shifting gears, but they had buttons. Against such a cultural backdrop, in which old is bad and new is good, salvage yards “were guilty not only of being unsightly but also of undermining the logic of obsolescence by making it possible for older machines to stay on the road,” Lucsko writes.8 Combined with the beautification efforts of the 1960s and a sometimes soft-headed environmental sensibility that emerged in the 1970s, this prejudice against the old imparted a forward-thinking glow to the throwaway mentality.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

Many aspects of Val-speak would have been exotic to a ‘flapper’ of the 1920s, but some of its vocabulary, for example max and barf, jive and vicious, derived from black street talk, would not have been so strange or unfamiliar. 2 In the early days, when American mass culture first arrived, it often rolled into view on four Firestone tyres. Henry Ford’s Model T had been launched in 1909, designed and manufactured with a mass market in mind. By 1915 the millionth car was rolling off the production line, and some 28 million cars were produced by the end of the 1930s. The inter-war motor car inspired a network of national freeways, unifying the country and intensifying an American identity that was now ready for export.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

At about the same time, Pennsylvania gave birth to the global petroleum industry, when drillers of salt wells found their work hampered by thick, viscous upwellings of black “rock oil.” The first petroleum refinery was built in Pittsburgh in 1853, and the first oil well in the United States was drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Petroleum found its killer app in Henry Ford’s Model T, which first rolled off a Michigan assembly line in 1908. The U.S. natural gas industry was actually birthed just north of the Pennsylvania state line, with a well drilled in Fredonia, New York, but the black shale deposit from which it came proved to have its bulk in Pennsylvania territory. Riding on the surge of ancient carbon, Pennsylvania’s economy boomed.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Then, from 1875, the age of steel and heavy engineering (electrical, chemical, civil and naval) saw the proliferation of transnational railways and transcontinental steamships, enabling an intense development of international trade and the first ‘globalisation’. That period witnessed the emergence of Germany and the US as challengers to British hegemony. In 1908, with the launch of Ford’s Model-T, the age of the automobile and highways, of oil and plastics and of universal electricity and mass production shook up patterns of working and living once more. In this instance, the US led the way, harnessing the interrelated technologies and infrastructures to produce the great surge of development that created the mass-produced, suburban American dream.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

One study coined the term “frustrated achievers” to describe those who felt that even if they are doing well, someone else is always doing even better.35 Deng Xiaopin, the leader of the Communist Party of China, who led the country to a market economy, (supposedly) famously said, “To get rich is glorious!”36 Not so much, it turns out. Buying goods is never going to make us happy. Not in the late 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution gave us a middle class and the beginnings of mass consumerism, not in the early 1900s with Henry Ford’s Model T, not in the 1950s with dishwashers, fridges, and A/C for all, and not in the twenty-first century’s mass luxury business. In some respects, our constant quest for the meaning of life (which becomes more possible in a post-scarcity society where we have time to ponder and pursue more existential questions because we know we have food for dinner) has confused matters even more.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

By 1893, Benz had sold a measly 69 vehicles; by 1900, just 1,709. Twenty years after Benz’s patent, there were still only 35,000 vehicles on German roads. The turning point was Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T. His simple but effective vehicle was built using a revolutionary approach: the moving assembly line. An efficient, linear, and repetitive process enabled him to slash the price of personal vehicles, and the buyers followed. Most cars at the time cost around $2,000. Ford priced his at $850. In the early years Model T sales numbered in the thousands. Ford kept ramping up production and further lowering prices, arguing, “Every time I reduce the charge for our car by one dollar, I get a thousand new buyers.”

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

These are not asset-less companies – far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.15 Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. This tendency involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection. For the most part, the strategy has been to collect data, then apologise and roll back programs if there is an uproar, rather than consulting with users beforehand.16 This is why we will continue to see frequent uproars over the collection of data by these companies.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

The automation of factories took away the need for those specialised skills, and in doing so dramatically changed the nature and make-up of employment in the largest industry of the time. The Luddites weren’t against technology; they were simply against losing their jobs, their livelihood. Unfortunately, they were fighting the inevitable. The era of mass production accelerated globally in 1913, with the opening of Henry Ford’s Model T Assembly Line in Highland Park, Michigan. In the early days, Ford built cars the same way as everyone else—one vehicle at a time, by hand, assembling the car from the chassis up. Ford’s innovation was the development of an assembly line where a car was moved from station to station on a track, and at each station a new component of the car was fitted.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

The difference is that even incremental advances are now able to leverage that extraordinary accumulated account balance. In a sense, the successful innovators of today are a bit like the Boston Marathon runner who in 1980 famously snuck into the race only half a mile from the finish line. Of course, all innovators stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. This was certainly true when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. However, as we have seen, information technology is fundamentally different. IT’s unique ability to scale machine intelligence across organizations in ways that will substitute for workers and its propensity to everywhere create winner-take-all scenarios will have dramatic implications for both the economy and society.

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While that conversation probably never actually took place, the anecdote nonetheless captures a key concern about the ultimate impact of widespread automation: workers are also consumers, and they rely on their wages to purchase the products and services produced by the economy. Perhaps more than any other economic sector, the automotive industry has showcased the importance of this dual role. When the original Henry Ford ramped up production of the Model T in 1914, he famously doubled wages to $5 per day—and, in so doing, ensured that his workers would be able to afford to buy the cars they were building. From that genesis, the rise of the automotive industry would go on to become inextricably intertwined with the creation of a massive American middle class.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

Just 40 years earlier, Darwin had suggested that competition was the engine of evolution. But Triplett was the first to measure its effect, rather than just theorize about it. Triplett’s hobby was long-distance bicycling, at a time when cycling had captured the national imagination. Chain-driven bicycles with pneumatic tires had been invented, but Ford’s Model-T was still a few years away. There was spectacular press coverage on every lowering of a cycling world record—over distances from 20 miles to 100 miles. Some cyclists attempted to go faster in an individual time trial by employing a series of pacers—usually skilled tandem teams that alternated—putting the trailing solo rider on a record pace.

How the Post Office Created America: A History
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 7 Jan 2016

“Here I lay me down to sleep”: Quoted in Frederick Nolan, The Wild West: History, Myth & the Making of America (London: Arcturus, 2003), p. 131. 9: THE MAIL MUST GO THROUGH The Pony’s most important tools: The horse played a role in America’s rural life—and in the popular mind and heart—well into the modern age. Just as Henry Ford’s Model T’s were rolling off the assembly line in Detroit, Bud and Temple Abernathy, ages nine and five, rode their horses from their home in Oklahoma to New York City. During their month-long trip, Orville Wright offered them a plane ride, and President William Howard Taft greeted them at the White House.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

The advances of the First Industrial Revolution were in mechanical production, beginning in Britain around 1780 with mechanized spinning and later iron manufacturing, fueled by coal and steam power. The Second Industrial Revolution was marked by advances in science and the mass production of goods (think of Ford’s Model T). Around 1870, transportation and communication networks (railroad, telegraph) were expanded and utilities (gas, water, and electrical power) established. Major inventions included the telephone, fertilizer, and internal combustion engines. The Third Industrial Revolution was the Digital Revolution: semi-conductors (1950s), then mainframe computers, personal computers, and the internet.

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

An electric car was the first to break the 100 km/h barrier, while some, as early as the 1890s, featured hydraulic brakes and four-wheel steering decades before either of these was offered on internal combustion cars. The early electric car’s fate, however, was effectively sealed for several generations by a combination of Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T of 1908, the invention of the electric starter motor by Charles Kettering in 1912, and in the United States, by a glut of cheap Texas oil. From then on, and where they existed, electric cars were seen as dull machines. When we came to designing our electric car, we knew it had to be special, but not a “petrol head’s” car by any stretch of the imagination.

On Thermonuclear War
by Herman Kahn
Published 16 Jul 2007

Partly the decision reflects budgeting opposition to the cost of the needed changes, partly it reflects a seeming change in the Soviet threat from bombers to missiles, but mostly the decision reflects the growing influence of the Finite Deterrence philosophy and the waning of the Counterforce as Insurance and Credible First Strike positions. By 1961 there should be in the stockpiles of both the United States and the Soviet Union inexpensive and versatile bombs. These will have about the same relationship to the bombs of the mid-1950's as the modern motor car has to Henry Ford's Model T. The bombs will be available for any use, in such forms as ICBM warheads, air-to-air rockets, tactical fighter bombers, atomic cannons, depth bombs, suitcases, and so forth. However, for the first time the developments in weapons will be outclassed by developments in other areas. All countries will realize that the crucial element in making a nation a nuclear power is possessing a weapon system and not just some warheads.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
by Scott Anderson
Published 5 Aug 2013

Striding into a general’s office, he announced that he was on his way to breakfast, and that if there wasn’t a car waiting for him when he emerged, he would send a cable to Washington announcing that he was being held captive by the British. His Italian counterpart was aghast at his temerity, but when the pair emerged from the mess hall a short time later, they found a Ford Model T awaiting them with a former London cabdriver at the wheel. They made that morning for a bluff overlooking the Plain of Sharon, from which, they were told, they could view one section of the battlefield. Finding a group of British officers already ensconced in the ruins of an old Crusader castle, the two attachés joined them, training their binoculars on the action two or three miles to the north.

Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
by Frances Stroh
Published 2 May 2016

In 1850 he established the Lion Brewing Company in Detroit because the local water tasted so good. Bernhard made a Bohemian-style brew in his basement and sold the barrels door-to-door out of a wheelbarrow, saving every spare penny to buy a horse-drawn carriage. Later, thanks in no small part to Henry Ford and his Model T trucks, Bernhard’s sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., expanded the company’s distribution throughout the entire Midwest, renaming it the Stroh Brewing Company. By the 1970s, the third and fourth generation of Strohs were running the family-owned brewery. They made a regional beer brand—Stroh’s Beer—that went national in the early 1980s after the purchase of the Schlitz and Schaefer breweries, a consolidation of the industry that landed thirty beer brands in our portfolio, making the family company the third-largest beer maker in the United States, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller.

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 22 Aug 2016

Michael Thonet died in 1871; he was seventy-five. Photographs of him in later life show a handsome man with longish hair and a full white beard; he resembles Karl Marx, another Rhineland Palatinate native. The resemblance ends there, for Thonet was an early example of the capitalist-entrepreneur. Fifty years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile assembly line in Highland Park, Thonet had already put in place the basic elements of mass production: division of labor, interchangeable parts, mechanization. As Ford would later do, he integrated his business vertically, buying forest land, laying railroad track, operating his own sawmills, and building his own machine saws, steam retorts, and iron molds.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

He sought personal control and oversight over what had become a massive company, with hundreds of thousands of employees and sales in the millions, yet ran it “as if it were a mom and pop shop.”12 The company reached its peak in 1923, when it produced two million cars as well as many tractors and trucks. But by then competition was developing from General Motors and Chrysler. While Ford stuck with the Model T, the others set the pace with a greater range of new cars. By 1926, Ford’s production barely reached 1.5 million vehicles. The competitors also offered new forms of payment, accepting credit and installments. With his horror of debt, Ford was unwilling to offer similar terms. Convinced that price was all that mattered, he put pressure on his workforce to increase productivity and on his dealers to accept the risk of unsold cars.

…

As things turned out, Ford was the ideal adversary, complacent and stubborn. But even if Sloan suspected this he could not rely upon Ford failing to respond to the challenge he intended to pose. His script for General Motors dared not assume complete stupidity on Ford’s part. Sloan could, however, assume that he had some time. Ford was under no pressure in 1921 to abandon the Model T when it had served him so handsomely. Moreover, Ford’s eventual likely response was also predictable, as he had the financial clout to push the price of the Model T lower to see off any direct competition. Through the summer of 1921, Sloan headed a task force charged to address this conundrum.

…

He was not so much relating to the external environment; he was completely reshaping it. The test of the approach would be at the lower end of the market where a revamped Chevrolet, then with barely 4 percent of the market, would be pitched against the mighty Model T. Sloan saw this competition taking place within the price category of $450–$600. Ford took pride in the position of the Model T at the bottom end of this price range. Sloan judged it “suicidal” to compete with Ford head on. “The strategy we devised,” he later explained, “was to take a bite from the top of his position, conceived as a price class, and in this way build up Chevrolet volume on a profitable basis.”18 This meant aiming for higher quality in order to justify a higher price.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

Business and Industry Council; Ron Hira of the Rochester Institute of Technology; Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information; and the researchers who track money in politics for the Center for Responsive Politics. APPENDIX Stolen Dream Timeline: Key Events, Trends, and Turning Points, 1948–2012 JANUARY 1914—Henry Ford announces the $5 day—reckoning that if workers are well paid, they can afford to buy Ford’s Model T cars, and Ford could move into mass production. Ford’s strategy sparks a trend. 1948 “TREATY OF DETROIT”—Labor agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers union gives GM labor peace and autoworkers annual pay increases, health benefits, and monthly pensions, setting a pattern for other industries, ensuring that gains from U.S. economic growth are shared between labor and management. 1950—Top CEO salary in America: GM chairman Charlie Wilson is paid $663,000, roughly $5 million in today’s dollars, and about 40 times the annual wage of his average assembly line worker.

Lonely Planet Pocket Bruges & Brussels
by Lonely Planet and Helena Smith
Published 1 Nov 2012

Pocket Bruges & Brussels Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Without this invention, without his acquisition of such a watch in Switzerland, industry may have waited longer for his “time and motion” studies involving the systematic breaking down of work in to its constituent parts, a practice he called scientific management. Taken in isolation, these insights produced relatively modest gains. Only when scientific management was applied to the moving assembly devised by Henry Ford’s engineers for the Model T automotive workshop, did Ford achieve the dramatic production economies that helped to define the consumer society. The cheaply made and cheaply available yet innovative Model T, made so much profit in its first year of production, that Ford was not only able to return a huge dividend to his investors, he was also able to distribute some of that profit to employees in better wages.

The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Published 10 Oct 2007

The Engineer had the technological training and disinterested will needed to put into practice effective industrial procedures; his kind would replace the businessman who knelt down (in the words of William James) before ‘the bitch goddess success’. After all, Veblen was there to witness the advent of the telephone (1876), the light bulb (1879), the Wright brothers’ experiments in aviation (1903), and Henry Ford’s Model T (1909), as well as the winning of a woman’s right to vote in 1920. But only time could tell whether the trust Veblen put in the two potent cultural forces of the Engineer and the New Woman would prove that he possessed uncommon sagacity or was done in by rare moments of naïveté.25 Veblen and the Novelists Novelists prefer to tell stories that revolve around conflict, betrayals, self-deception, and the unholy drive to win the social race against all competitors.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

How about a blacksmith or a farrier? Do you have among your acquaintances any makers of bridles, saddles, chaises, coaches, or buggy whips? All of these once-booming forms of remunerative employment are either extinct or occupy tiny niches in today’s economy. Their doom was sealed on October 1, 1908, when Henry Ford introduced the Model T—the culmination of a long period of experimentation and advance in automobile technology involving many inventors across many countries. All of these professions were tied to what had been to that point a primary means of land transportation over short distances (and over long, until the introduction of the railroad)—namely, the horse.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

When gasoline prices rose in the late 1970s, the industry produced more fuel-efficient vehicles. Later, after gas prices fell in the 1980s, average fuel efficiency declined.5 Some of this learning occurred when individual hierarchically organized companies improved with experience. For instance, when Ford introduced the Model T, in 1908, it sold for $850, but by 1925, Ford reduced its costs enough to sell a Model T for less than $300.6 Some of the learning occurred when different companies tried lots of different things and then other companies adopted the ideas that worked well (like assembly lines). Some learning was a simple result of the forces of supply and demand in markets: when customers didn’t want to buy gas-guzzling cars, companies produced fewer of them.

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth
by Juan Enriquez
Published 15 Feb 2001

In 1840, just as the Industrial Revolution was beginning, two great states, China and India, accounted for 40 percent of world trade. These two countries continued producing the best and most luxurious handmade goods in the world … Silks, jewels, jade. Meanwhile, Europe and the United States began producing far more products. And each product was getting cheaper. When Henry Ford built his first Model T in 1908, he sold it for $900 … There were cars that were more luxurious, better made, or cheaper … But Ford industrialized and standardized mass production … (“The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it’s black,” he said.) Four years after starting production, a Model T cost $690, one-quarter less than when it was launched.

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism
by Jeff Gramm
Published 23 Feb 2016

He was dubious of “horseless carriages,” which were loud, unreliable, and dangerous in the hands of most drivers. But unlike most of his competitors, Durant embraced the future.12 He became general manager of Buick, and then formed General Motors in 1908 to acquire other automakers. While Henry Ford centralized his operations around the Model T, Durant believed in diversification. General Motors owned dozens of companies that made cars, car parts, and accessories. Each one was effectively autonomous, and Durant kept only loose financial control over the whole operation. Durant believed that automobiles would soon gain mass acceptance and sell over a million units a year—an extreme view at the time—but he wasn’t sure which approaches to automotive engineering and design would win out.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

In a 2010 report on the future of the French nuclear industry François Roussely, a former head of EDF, warned that the EPR was too complex and needed a redesign. He said customers should be offered a smaller, simpler reactor called the ATMEA. The previous year, taking over as EDF’s new boss, Henri Proglio mocked Areva for pushing the EPR abroad. ‘Do you know how many companies have just one product in their catalogue?’ he sneered. ‘There was Ford and his Model T. But that was a hundred years ago, and at least he knew how to make and sell it.’ Proglio now wants to build EPRs in Britain. His comments were widely interpreted in France as a power play within the febrile world of French industrial politics, and it is this world – a world over which the British electorate has no control – to which the British public is being shackled.

Capitalism: the unknown ideal
by Ayn Rand
Published 15 Aug 1966

Thus it constitutes the mechanism that generates greater incentives to increased productivity and leads, as a consequence, to a rising standard of living.” The free market does not permit inefficiency or stagnation—with economic impunity—in any field of production. Consider, for instance, a well-known incident in the history of the American automobile industry. There was a period when Henry Ford’s Model-T held an enormous part of the automobile market. But when Ford’s company attempted to stagnate and to resist stylistic changes—“You can have any color of the Model-T you want, so long as it’s black”—General Motors, with its more attractively styled Chevrolet, cut into a major segment of Ford’s market.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
by Randall E. Stross
Published 13 Mar 2007

Edison would receive from him a birthday telegram; Mina, a birdhouse. The adult children were not neglected, either. In 1914, thirty-eight-year-old Tom Edison Jr., now living on a farm his father had bought for him in Burlington, New Jersey, and tinkering with carburetors, received from Henry Ford a Model T engine that he had requested for experimenting, followed by a new car. Twenty-four-year-old Charles Edison received one of Ford’s prized rifles in a custom-built case. When Theodore Edison, the youngest of Edison’s six children, turned sixteen in 1914, he found a new car waiting for him, sent by Ford.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

He refashioned industrial methods using ‘scientific management’: detailed classifications of cost, time, materials and output. ‘Taylorism’ would be credited with innovations such as the production-line system, with each worker performing a small part repetitively. Its brutal efficiency was satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, but it enabled Henry Ford’s workers to make a Model T in a couple of hours, compared to half a day beforehand. Frederick Taylor’s own business card read: ‘Consulting Engineer – Systemizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Speciality’ (more informative if a little more wordy than today’s slogans, like Accenture’s ‘High performance.

Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West
Published 1 Jan 1939

Curation Nation
by Rosenbaum, Steven
Published 27 Jan 2011

They’re right, pretty much, but that doesn’t make the transition any less painful or the folks who are forced out of a job any less pissed off. If you were the best darn buggy-whip maker around when the horse-drawn carriage was replaced by the automobile, chances are you weren’t terribly excited about Henry Ford and his newfangled Model T. For me, the moment that everything changed happened in a pretty unlikely place, and with a very unusual cast of characters. The location was the principality of Monaco, a tiny bit of remarkably privileged earth on the north-central coast of the Mediterranean Sea, bounded on three sides by France.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
by Isabel Wilkerson
Published 6 Sep 2010

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

In 2001, it was to be the European Union, not the U.S. government, that checked the expansionist ambitions of General Electric, America's largest business. 10 But it was not simply government action that prevented indefinite specialization. The division of labor, taken too far, produced organizational disadvantages. The epitome of specialization was the Ford Motor Company. Between 1908 and 1927, 15 million Model T Fords rolled off the company's production lines near Detroit. Adam Smith's pin factory found its apogee in an assembly line on which each individual worker might undertake only a single operation. But Ford had taken mass production too far. The company was overtaken by General Motors, which offered its customers a choice of color and a variety of models.

…

He was rabidly antiSemitic, was pathologically averse to alcohol and tobacco, disapproved of eyeglasses, and plastered his hair with kerosene, which he believed was the cause of the healthy appearance of oil-field workers. As his commercial success grew, he became ever more convinced of his own rightness and was interested only in opinions that conformed to his prejudices. Bill Knudsen, who had been Ford's right-hand man in the development of the Model T assembly line, was forced out of the company. "I can't stay and keep my self-respect," he said. Knudsen joined General Motors, which steadily gained market share as it responded to more demanding customer requirements. Ford's customers could have any color they wanted so long as it was black; the proprietor explained, "The only trouble with the Ford car is that we can't make them fast enough."

The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways
by Michael Williams
Published 6 May 2015

Still, the colonel did his utmost to bring prosperity to the line. He invented ‘Support your local line’ long before it became a national slogan in the Beeching era. He was also decades ahead of his time in introducing the internal combustion engine in the form of two sets of Ford railcars. They each consisted of two wheezing Model T Ford buses coupled back to back, equipped with a steering wheel at each end with no function (it was there only because the engine controls were mounted on the steering column). At each terminus the driver had to switch off the engine at one end before moving seats and starting the motor at the other.

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss
by Ron Adner
Published 1 Mar 2012

An 1897 editorial captured the sentiment when professing, “There is every reason to believe that the electric vehicle industry is well established on a sure foundation and that it will grow rapidly.” Figure 7.1: An American Electric Vehicle Company electric car from 1900. (© Top Foto / The Image Works.) But by the early 1900s, confronted by efficiency improvements in gasoline engines, the discovery of cheap oil in Texas, and Henry Ford’s mass-manufacturing triumph of the Model T, the electric vehicle had definitively lost the race. In 1914, there were 568,000 automobiles manufactured in the United States; 99 percent of these contained gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the electric car enjoyed a small renaissance due to a combination of technology improvements and government mandates.

…

Unlike other EV pilot projects, Better Place guaranteed volume: the company placed an order for 100,000 Fluence Z.E. cars back in 2009—four years before it had a single customer. The implication, however, is that, at launch, customers who want to partake of the Better Place offer can drive only a Renault Fluence Z.E. This is a real constraint but not necessarily a fatal flaw. Keep in mind Henry Ford’s policy on variety for the Model T: “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.” The New Proposition for Utilities Because Better Place owns the battery, buys the electricity, manages the charging infrastructure, and runs the operating system inside the car, it has a rare view into the charging needs of any EV in its network and a unique ability to manage the charging process.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

In his masterful Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, he explains how most innovation takes place in diverse, densely populated cities, where people are forever interacting with each other and experiencing new things.599 “We are a social species and we learn by being around clever people,” he observes.600 “Cities have long sped this flow of ideas. Eighteenth-century Birmingham saw textile innovators borrow each other’s insights – and gave us the industrial revolution… Physical proximity allows the free flow of goods, services and ideas – and this powers the collaboration that creates everything from Ford’s Model T to Facebook, and economic growth too.” Even most advances in agricultural technology have been developed in cities. Denser cities are more inventive. Patent rates (patents per person) tend to rise by 20–30 per cent for each doubling of the number of employed people per square kilometre, according to Gerald Carlino of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Chief Engineer
by Erica Wagner

When he had written to Swan of the investment the engine business would require, his letter had ended on a plaintive note. “The trouble with me is, that I have no money of my own to do anything on the matter myself—” Yours affectionately, he’d signed off to Swan. In later years, when the automobile came into wide use—Henry Ford’s Model T appeared in 1908—it was always said that Washington Roebling disliked them. He refused ever to ride in one, preferring the Trenton trolley cars, even when he was a very old man. Washington—and Emily, and now with baby John in tow—returned to the United States early in 1868. Winter weather wouldn’t allow an earlier return.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

It was a gamble in the form of a four-door compact car: that Tesla could generate the sales volume and cash to take on the biggest of the big boys in the century-old automotive industry: Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and, of course, General Motors. The Model 3 would determine if Tesla was a real car company. Musk, just a year younger than Henry Ford when the Model T was introduced 108 years earlier, stood onstage that night, greeted by the pounding bass of techno music and screams of his fans, to rewrite history. He came to usher in a new era. It was his mission to change the world and maybe even save it (and presumably get rich while doing so) that had helped him attract a team of executives to put his vision into reality.

…

The financial burden of selling that car to consumers was solely on the dealership. It was a system born out of the notion that a factory was most profitable when it was churning out as many cars as possible, allowing it to gain benefits of scale. But Ford Motor Co. didn’t have the funds or the organization to open stores in every city in America. So Ford grew his empire not just on the wheels of the Model T, an affordable sedan, but on the backs of small business owners across the country, who aimed to make their own fortunes selling the iPhone of its day. Dealerships at first flourished as the new industry exploded, but they ran into trouble during the Great Depression. Ford couldn’t have his factory idling; it would starve him of cash.

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production
by Taiichi Ohno and Norman Bodek
Published 1 Jan 1978

This second Toyota pillar did not have the same objective as the auto-activated loom that prompted the idea of autonomation. It posed different sorts of difficulties. Toyoda Sakichi went to America for the first time in 1910 when the automobile industry was just beginning. The popularity of cars was rising and many companies were attempting to produce them. Ford had been selling the Model T for two years when Toyoda Sakichi saw them in the marketplace. Looking back, it must have been tremendously stimulating, especially to an inventor like Toyoda Sakichi. During his four months in America, he must have grasped what an automobile was and how it could become the feet of the people.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects
by Glenn Adamson
Published 6 Aug 2018

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources
by Geoff Hiscock
Published 23 Apr 2012

Brazil has a thriving sugarcane-based ethanol industry to fuel its automobiles, with at least 12 global makers—VW, Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, and Kia—offering flex-fuel models for the Brazilian market that are capable of running on any blend of gasoline and ethanol. In the United States, pioneering automaker Henry Ford was an early advocate of biofuel, with some of his Model T Fords capable of running on ethanol as well as petrol or kerosene. Under U.S. energy security legislation, by 2022 at least 36 billion gallons (136 billion litres) of fuel used in the United States must come from renewable sources. Although the United States produces more ethanol than Brazil, it mainly uses corn as its feedstock rather than sugarcane.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

And they could be taught to one’s children: this was ‘vertical’ transmission. Rhythm was the driver of cultural evolution. You could say, then, that tradition was a frozen lump of muscle memory.23 And it was embodied in the sheer repetition of hand-axe manufacture across much of the world, as standardised in its way as Henry Ford’s Model T cars in the twentieth century. Starting in Ethiopia, the skill to make Acheulean bifaces spread to Asia (the Zhoukoudian hand-axes of ‘Peking Man’), the Middle East (in the Levantine Corridor, including the Dead Sea), to Europe (the French district of Saint-Acheul that gave the tool its name).

The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman
Published 14 Oct 2023

Unable to grow their markets enough to turn a profit, by 1971 both left the mainframe computer business.12 A vast new industry grew directly out of the System/360. The noted business author Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, ranks the System/360 as one of the top three products of all time, along with Ford’s Model T and Boeing’s first jetliner, the 707.13 Each machine set an entire new and socially transformative industry in motion. By 1970, an estimated eighty firms launched more than two hundred products compatible with the System/360 architecture and its peripheral devices.14 Among the most successful were Telex (tape drives) and Memorex (disk storage units).

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives
by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Published 5 Jan 2010

“Insist on yourself; never imitate,” urged Emerson in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.” This sentiment could easily appear today as a car advertising tagline, given how strongly America has since embraced the idea of itself as a land of individuals and the car as an expression of self. When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, opening the car door to the middle class, he was not interested in producing a variety of models and he insisted that every car that rolled off his assembly line be painted basic black.16 Consumer choices were limited and personal tastes were not to be indulged. Today, the American consumer has hundreds of models from dozens of makers to choose from.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success
by Scott Davis , Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer
Published 13 Jul 2020

So unless the product differentiation is rather large, manufacturing cost and quality will reign supreme. This was a hard-learned lesson for industrials during their darker era, when globalization began to expose flaws. The ones that failed usually learned this lesson too late. Lean manufacturing is the most common system on the factory floor. The principles of Lean originated with Henry Ford’s revolutionary Model T assembly line in the early 1900s, but it was honed and popularized by Toyota in the 1980s. At its core, Lean seeks to eliminate waste in the production process. Done right, the result is faster production times to meet hard-to-predict customer demand, lower inventory levels, and higher product quality (fewer defects)—all of which lead to higher cash flow and profit margins.

Working
by Robert A. Caro
Published 8 Apr 2019

In Patagonia:
by Bruce Chatwin
Published 5 Jun 2019

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Published 31 May 1993

Trolleys hogged the major thoroughfares, which were further clogged by horse-drawn ve­ hicles. Traffic control meant an occasional cop at the busiest intersec­ tions. ( t' O F 8 8 ... J O Y R I DE Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but with the Model T he developed a very reliable machine that "the great multitude" could afford to buy, and he dreamed up a means of production-the assembly line-that made his machine cheaper every year for two decades, even while wages, and the prices of other things, climbed. Ford offered the first Model T in the fall of 1908 at $825 for the "runabout" and $25 more for the "touring car. " This was a time when $1200 was an ex­ cellent yearly salary.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

Henry Ford, it is said,*26 commissioned a survey of the car scrap yards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons – all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception: the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification…Nature is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford. Humphrey applied his lesson to the evolution of intelligence, but it can equally be applied to bones or anything else.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

It is also known as scientific management for this reason. Combining the moving assembly line with the Taylorist principle, the mass production system was born in the early years of the twentieth century. It is often called Fordism because it was first perfected – but not ‘invented’, as the folklore goes – by Henry Ford in his Model-T car factory in 1908. The idea is that production costs can be cut by producing a large volume of standardized products, using standardized parts, dedicated machinery and a moving assembly line. This would also make workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control, because, performing standardized tasks, they need to have relatively few skills.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

Most suburban residents not only worked in the cities but socialized, shopped, and dined there. So while a natural village life did emerge in new residential areas, the city was still the heart of the community; the suburbs were its limbs. It wasn’t until Henry Ford gave the middle class wheels that everything changed. The first Model T rolled off the line in 1908 for $850 ($22,000 in today’s dollars); four years later its price dropped to less than $700. This newfound mobility was like a drug; once people tried it, they were hooked. Automobile registrations went from eight thousand in 1905 to more than seventeen million by 1925.

…

“The suburbs as we knew them were a petroleum-derived derivative,” says Victor Dover, a leading New Urbanism architect and planner. George Washington University’s Christopher Leinberger puts it another way: “We social engineered the system to where you only have one choice to get around. It’s your car. You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black,” he says, suggesting an alternate meaning to Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T. Americans are, of course, a car-loving country. Transportation planners like to talk about “mode split,” the breakdown of the type of transportation people use in a society. In the United States, 83 percent of our trips are taken by car, more than in any other country (in Europe, by contrast, transportation by automobile represents only around half of trips taken).

Alistair Cooke's America
by Alistair Cooke
Published 1 Oct 2008

Ford made his radical breakthrough by thinking first of the needs of hundreds of thousands of consumers. His original labor policies made him the American god to employees, and his volcanic flow of productivity made him a terrible titan to his competitors. In 1914 the national average wage was $2.40 a day. Ford paid a minimum of $5.00. His first touring Model T cost $850. By 1926, when he had quadrupled the average wage to nearly $10, the Model T sold for only $350 and had a self-starter. It must have been a galling day for old J. P. Morgan when, as early as 1915, Ford drove his one millionth car off the assembly line. By the end of the 1930s Ford had produced twenty-eight million cars.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Well aware of the assembly problems associated with interchangeable parts not being identical, Ford’s engineers made accuracy the prime machine-tool requirement. Special machines were built for this purpose. “Ford’s machinery was the best in the world, everybody knew it,” one contemporary authority on the subject remarked.11 No hand labor for fitting was required in any of Ford’s assembly departments. In 1908, when the Model T left the factory, it was the first product to meet these standards. The remaining challenge was assembling the parts. The solution was found in continuous flow production, which allowed workers to remain stationary as parts were moved to them. A prerequisite for the moving assembly line was the diffusion of electric power throughout the factory to provide light and power machines.

…

The 1901 Mercedes—the “first modern car in all essentials” and the holder of the world speed record, having reached 40.2 miles per hour—was sold on the American market at a price of $12,450, roughly twelve times the annual per capita income at the time.61 Consequently, automobile ownership was at first only attainable for a fraction of the population. Things changed markedly only with the appearance of Henry Ford’s revolutionary Model T. When its production began in 1908, it was priced at $950; by the time production ceased in 1927, its price had fallen to $263. Expressed as a ratio to annual disposable income per person, its purchase price fell from 316 percent in 1910 to 43 percent in 1923. That year, the dominance of the Model T reached its peak: over half of the cars sold in America were Model Ts.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

General Motors was soon besting Ford at its game, investing more in machinery and developing a more flexible production structure. Mass production meant mass market, but mass market did not necessarily mean everybody buying the same car in the same color. GM understood this ahead of Ford, and while Ford persisted in offering the Model T to everybody, regardless of their tastes and needs, GM started using its flexible production structure to offer more versatile models. An Incomplete New Vision The vision of the middling-sort entrepreneurs that powered the early phase of the British industrial revolution was one based on increasing efficiency in order to reduce costs so that they could generate more profits.

…

This passage is also quoted in Hounshell (1984, 229); on 228, Colvin is described as a “well-known technical journalist.” Hounshell (1984) also makes the important point that Colvin’s in-depth observations were made immediately before assembly-line production was adopted by Ford. “The provision of…” and “Also high-speed tools…” are from Ford (1930, 33); parts are also quoted in Nye (1998, 143). Model T prices are from Hounshell (1984, Table 6.1, 224); conversion to prices today uses the Consumer Price Index calculator in www.measuringworth.com/calculators/us compare for 1908‒2021. “Mass production is not merely…” was published in Ford (1926, 821). The article is signed with the initials “H.F.,” but Henry Ford’s authorship is confirmed here: www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclo paedia-Britannica-English-language-reference-work/Thirteenth-edition.

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
by Adam Tooze
Published 13 Nov 2014

Occupying a commanding position on the coastline of the two largest oceans, it had a unique claim and capacity to exert global influence. To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain’s hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford’s Model T as a ‘horseless carriage’. The label was not so much wrong, as vainly anachronistic. This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift, which coincided with the espousal by the United States of a distinctive vision of world order. This book will have much to say about Woodrow Wilson and his successors.

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The globetrotting engineer and philanthropist Herbert Hoover was the first great ambassador of American abundance. His food-relief organization operated first in occupied Belgium and then across all of war-torn Europe. Meanwhile, Henry Ford’s rise to global prominence as the prophet of a new era of mass-produced prosperity coincided almost exactly with the war. Ford introduced his legendary $5 per-day wage on his Model T production lines in January 1914.8 Following Wilson’s declaration of war, Ford outdid himself in his extraordinary promises: 1,000 two-man tanks per day, 1,000 midget submarines, 3,000 aero engines per day, 150,000 complete aircraft. None of these ever materialized. Europeans, notably the British, the Germans, the French and the Italians, were the great mass- producers of aircraft in the early twentieth century.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean
by Les Standiford
Published 4 Aug 2003

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

INTEGRATION AND DEINTEGRATION Integration concerns activities where an “upstream” stage supplies inputs to a “downstream” stage, like trees to mills and then mills to lumber, notebooks, and paper towels. There is an array of challenges wherein the crux points to actions of integration or deintegration. Between 1909 and 1916 the Ford Motor Company reduced the selling price of a Model T automobile from $950 to $360, thereby hugely broadening its base of potential customers. This success was not, as many believe, due to the moving assembly line. There was no more than $100 of labor cost in a 1909 Ford. The greater savings was reducing the cost of materials from $550 per car down to $220 per car.4 This came from a unique setting for industrial engineering that integrated backward into making the automobile’s components.

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Karl Popper, “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind,” speech delivered at Darwin College, November 8, 1977. 2. Thomas McCraw, American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000), 51. 3. “How Intuit Reinvents Itself,” part of “The Future 50,” Fortune.com, November 1, 2017, 81. 4. Karel Williams et al., “The Myth of the Line: Ford’s Production of the Model T at Highland Park, 1909–16,” Business History 35, no. 3 (1993): 66–87. 5. Armen Alchian, “Reliability of Progress Curves in Airframe Production,” Econometrica 31 (1963): 679–694. 6. Grace Dobush, “How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul,” Wired, February 19, 2015, www.wired.com/2015/02/etsy-not-good-for-crafters/.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefèvre and William J. O'Neil
Published 14 May 1923

At the end of the trading day, Haight & Freese would send over a list of trading activity; insiders used those lists to forge the exchange’s official documents to make it appear as if those orders had been taken to the trading floor.19 4.9 The early 1900s were an exciting period for young men with a fancy for speed. It was the dawn of the motoring era. In 1902, Ransom E. Olds—founder of the now-defunct Oldsmobile brand—made his Curved Dash model (which cost $650 at the time), the first mass-produced automobile. Henry Ford’s Model T would not arrive until 1908. This was a considerable achievement since the first American-made self-propelled vehicle had been created just nine years earlier, in 1893, by the Duryea brothers.20 Livermore would have had the opportunity to select from the three different propulsion types that were in use at the time: steam, electric, and gasoline.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

Power alcohol reentered the marketplace in 1906 when the federal government lifted the old Civil War alcohol tax that had made it uncompetitive with kerosene. It competed with gasoline as a source of automotive fuel across the first three decades of the twentieth century. Henry Ford designed his first production car, the Model T, with a flex-fuel system: it could run on either gasoline or alcohol, a feature that Ford continued to offer until 1931.20 A brass knob to the right of the Model T steering wheel allowed the driver to adjust the carburetor to accommodate either fuel. A spark-advance lever on the left side of the steering wheel then adjusted the timing of the spark plugs, which needed to fire at a different point in the engine cycle, depending on the fuel.21 Farmers, Ford thought, could make their own alcohol.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia could have scaled past 100,000 articles 106_The_Wikipedia_Revolution without the assistance of bots automating the tasks of filtering and sorting, and assisting the human editors. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine today’s massive auto industry still requiring hand-assembly of autos as Ford did with the Model T. Repetitive tasks left to robots (or software robots in this case) allow human beings to do what they’re good at—decision making, redesigning, and adding new features. The side effect, or piranha effect, was that Rambot’s additions did not just sit there gathering digital dust, entertaining occasional visitors.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
by Paul A. Offit
Published 1 Jan 2007

The Vitamix Cookbook: 250 Delicious Whole Food Recipes to Make in Your Blender
by Jodi Berg
Published 12 Oct 2015

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
by Carlton Reid
Published 14 Jun 2017

Dinosaurs Rediscovered
by Michael J. Benton
Published 14 Sep 2019

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

In a far less spiritual vein, marketers have come to realize the power of creation myths and narratives. The notion that a particular business was born out of the brilliant idea of someone working against the odds helps to personalize the product and boost appeal. Such allusions are everywhere in business: Ford Motor’s Model T, Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, Bill Hewlett and Bob Packard’s garage, Steve Jobs and the first Apple computer. “In business, creation stories reinforce the role of the individual as a societal agent of change and speak to a core audience of customers,” wrote Nicolas Colas, chief market strategist for brokerage ConvergEx, in a research piece reflecting on the importance of the mystery surrounding bitcoin’s founder.

The Pragmatic Programmer
by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
Published 19 Oct 1999

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost
Published 19 Apr 2010

Moonwalking With Einstein
by Joshua Foer
Published 3 Mar 2011

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job
by David Lindahl and Jonathan Rozek
Published 4 Aug 2010

Whether it’s postal mail or e-mail, both channels contain both good stuff and trash. It’s your responsibility to be categorized as good stuff. That’s why I now want to give you the following: FOUR TIPS FOR BUILDING PROFITABLE RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH E-MAIL Tip One: Segment for Success Henry Ford once said about his Model T: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Well, in the twenty-first century it’s time to get away from the one-size-fits-all mentality, especially when it comes to your e-mail communications. It’s important to segment your list so each group gets e-mails appropriate for that group.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

Freud wrote his stories during the very decades that Europe and America and other enclaves of the world were transitioning from a First to a Second industrial revolution. His most eloquent tracts were written in the 1920s, when the factories were shifting over from steam power to electrification, women were taking the wheel in Henry Ford’s Model T car, and female liberation was becoming all the rage. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald branded the new women the fl appers and their image of defiance of male domination became the signature for what would be called the Roaring Twenties. WHAT BABIES REALLY WANT All of this was not lost on a younger generation of psychologists who began to question the central tenets of Freud’s vision of human nature.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Published 22 Jan 2009

In addition to giving Britain some breathing room, there were good domestic reasons to justify such a cut. Prices around the world were falling—not precipitously, but very gradually and very steadily. Since 1925, U.S. wholesale prices had fallen 10 percent, and consumer prices 2 percent. The United States had also entered a mild recession in late 1926, brought on in part by the changeover at Ford from the Model T to the Model A. The two main domestic indicators that Strong had come to rely on to guide his credit decisions—the trend in prices and the level of business activity—argued that the Fed should ease. But interest rates at 4 percent were already unusually low. Ever since the early 1920s when he had embarked on his policy of keeping interest rates low to help Europe, a faction within the Fed, led by Miller, had argued that Strong was too influenced by international considerations and especially by Norman.

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During the second half of the year, despite a weakening in profits, the Dow leaped from 150 to around 200, a rise of about 30 percent. It was still not clear that this was a bubble, for it was possible to argue that the fall in earnings was temporary—a consequence of the modest recession associated with Ford’s shutdown to retool for the change from the Model T to the Model A—and that stocks were being unusually prescient in anticipating a rebound in earnings the following year. The market was still well behaved, rising steadily with only a few stumbles, and without the slightly crazed erratic moves and frenetic trading that were to come.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

This virtuous circle has been turning ever since the Phoenicians in Pliny’s story accidentally made glass on a Mediterranean beach and the men and women on the cliff at Boulby began to manufacture salt, though it wasn’t until the 1930s that someone came up with a formula for the phenomenon. That person was Theodore Wright, an American aeronautical engineer who had noticed that the cost of planes seemed to be falling year by year. Then he noticed the same thing with cars: a decade and a half after Henry Ford produced his first Model T, the price was down by three-quarters. Ford, noticed Wright, was deploying one of the critical lessons laid down by Adam Smith in the first great economic work The Wealth of Nations , that by specialising in certain discrete tasks, humans can get more work done. These giant car plants in Detroit were where Smith’s notion of the ‘division of labour’ became a large-scale reality.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

The Domestic Revolution
by Ruth Goodman
Published 15 Apr 2020

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

But automation could play out in as little as 20 to 30 years—the span of a single generation. Self-Driving Suburbs and Car-Lite Communes If our history with the automobile does teach us anything—it is that the future we find in the driverless revolution won’t be the one we expected. Consider, for instance, that Henry Ford originally built the Model T for farmers. The car was cheap, rugged, and simple to repair. Indeed, it was a huge success in rural areas and connected farmers to urban markets. But it was city dwellers and a new suburban middle class who soon turned the new machine to their own purposes. Ford’s neo-Jeffersonian vision of a nation of mechanized farmers gave way to a metropolitan reality—private cars carried millions more commuters to factories and offices instead.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History
by Elizabeth Abbott
Published 14 Sep 2011

To protect themselves against changes in sugar and gas prices, exchange rates and government policies, Brazilians have turned to flex-fueled vehicles such as Fiat, Chevrolet, Ford, Renault and Peugeot cars, the Volkswagen TotalFlex Golf and the Saab biofueled car. (A century ago, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, the first flex-fueled car: it ran on either gas or ethanol.) These men are likely prouder of their Model T’s sporty style after its conversion from a roundabout body than they are of its flex-fuel capacity—it can use either gas or ethanol as fuel, c. 1910. Brazil’s sugar industry is both efficient and exploitative, relying on streamlined technology and underpaid cane workers to produce cane cheaply.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

For these scholars and practitioners, platforms are architectures comprising three key elements: • Core components with low variability (the platform) • Complementary components with high variability • Interfaces that connect core and complementary components The platform strategy lowers the cost of variation and innovation, because it avoids designing entirely new products to address related but different needs. A celebrated example is the Chrysler K-car platform (1981–1988), essentially a single chassis and drive train built to accommodate many different car and truck bodies. This approach dates to the early days of the American automobile industry, when Ford fitted its Model T chassis with bodies ranging from open touring cars to sedans to trucks. (There was even a snowmobile.) Successful platforms often attract ecosystems of smaller firms, with producers of complementary components and interfaces forming loose, “disaggregated clusters” around the producer of the core component.10 In the 1990s, management scholars promoted “platform thinking” as a generic corporate strategy.11 Also in the 1990s, the computer industry adopted the “platform” vocabulary, applying it agnostically to both hardware and software.

The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life
by Francine Jay

Standardize I once saw an interview with a prolific author who had turned out hundreds of books over the course of his career—and could write a single one in a matter of days. His secret? He had developed a computerized template for outlining his plot, and simply changed the premise, locations, characters, and other details for each new story. In essence, he had created an assembly line for books, just as Henry Ford had done for his Model T’s. Although far from the creative ideal, his method brought him great success in the genre of mass-market fiction. Such is the power of standardization! Although I don’t condone such a formulaic approach to writing, I think it’s perfect for the repetitive tasks we face on a daily basis.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al
Published 11 Apr 2022

After World War I, these suburban areas were marketed as an idyllic land of cottages for Londoners sick of urban life. The developers named it “Metro-land.” It later became known, as a songwriter wrote, as “a land where the wild flowers grow.” Unfortunately, progress for transportation did not always lead to urban progress. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the mass-produced Model T, which made car travel—up until then a luxury—affordable for many. Only four years later, in New York, more cars than horses occupied the road. Soon, car washes, parking garages, and gas stations graced our cities. The street was once a place of social gathering. It became a “traffic machine . . . a sort of factory for producing speed traffic.”7 So planned Le Corbusier in his 1929 The City of To-morrow and Its Planning.

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 3 Sep 2012

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling. That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages. But for the last thirty years that basic bargain has been coming apart. In 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day—three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime,” but Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s autoworkers into customers who could afford to buy Model Ts.

Frozen in Time
by Mitchell Zuckoff
Published 4 Mar 2013

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton
Published 15 Mar 2013

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 1 Jan 1975

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

The basic principle was demonstrated as far back as 1839. NASA has used fuel cells to power its instruments in space for decades. What is new is the determination of car manufacturers to increase production and bring down costs. Another problem facing the fuel cell car is the same problem that dogged Henry Ford when he marketed the Model T. Critics claimed that gasoline was dangerous, that people would die in horrible car accidents, being burned alive in a crash. Also, you would have to have a gasoline pump on nearly every block. On all these points, the critics were right. People do die by the thousands every year in gruesome car accidents, and we see gasoline stations everywhere.

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But in the main, it is the consumer who has the advantage, who instantly has comparative knowledge of any product, and who demands the cheapest price. The producer must then react to the constantly changing demands of the consumer. • Mass production to mass customization In the present system, goods are created by mass production. Henry Ford once famously said that the consumer could have the Model T in any color, as long as it’s black. Mass production drastically lowered prices, replacing the inefficient, older system of guilds and handcrafted goods. The computer revolution will change all this. Today, if a customer sees a dress of the perfect style and color but the wrong size, then there is no sale.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
by Michael E. Gerber
Published 3 Mar 1995

Unlike most small business owners before him—and since—Ray Kroc went to work on his business, not in it. He began to think about his business like an engineer working on a pre-production prototype of a mass-produceable product. He began to reengineer McDonald’s decades before the word and the process came into fashion. He began to think about McDonald’s just like Henry Ford must have thought about the Model T. How could the components of the prototype be constructed so that it could be assembled at a very low cost with totally interchangeable parts? How could the components be constructed so that the resulting business system could be replicated over and over again, each business working—just like the Model T—as reliably as the thousands that preceded it?

In-N-Out Burger
by Stacy Perman
Published 11 May 2009

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Published 11 Jan 2022

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time
by Stephen Fried
Published 23 Mar 2010

(This would be torn down in the 1960s, its facilities driven underground in order to create the new Madison Square Garden.) Every other major American city hoped to follow suit, erecting a fabulous classical station not only for the railroads but to anchor an entire new local transport system of trolley cars or even subways. On September 27, 1908, Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the production line in Detroit. But it was, at the time, just one more automobile—a machine that was, for most, as unfathomable an expense as buying your own Pullman car. The United States was still a country connected by tracks, not highways. Americans rode together, in trains.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

E-mail is not just cheaper, but simpler than postal mail. USB flash drives were not just less expensive than compact discs, but simpler to use. And cloud storage became even simpler than flash. Automobiles won out over horse-and-carriage because they made transportation simpler. The machines themselves were complicated, but Henry Ford kept the complexity under the Model T’s hood. There are a lot of great inventors and improvers in the world. But those who hack world-class success tend to be the ones who can focus relentlessly on a tiny number of things. In other words, to soar, we need to simplify. TECH WRITER BRIAN LAM, known to friends as Blam, was one of the first to give me a shot as a journalist.

Frommer's Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs
by Eric Peterson
Published 1 Jan 2005

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

The Search for Life on Mars
by Elizabeth Howell
Published 14 Apr 2020

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published 25 Feb 2021

The policy was the use of ethanol – a type of alcohol derived from grains or sugars – to fuel cars. It was not a new idea: ethanol had been used as a fuel since the dawn of the automobile. German inventor Nikolaus Otto used ethanol to power an early version of his internal combustion engine, and Henry Ford designed his popular Model T car in 1908 to run on it. 35 But soon ethanol lost ground as a motor fuel to gasoline and diesel. The idea of mandating ethanol derived from corn to be used to power cars started to gather steam during the oil crises of the 1970s, and over the next four decades it garnered more and more support.

The Rough Guide to Cyprus (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 30 Apr 2019

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Published 31 May 2017

There were no commercial airplanes, but there were submarines, and steamships plied the oceans at an average speed of a little under twelve knots (about twenty kilometres per hour).6 Many countries had well-developed rail networks, but many did not. Persia, a country three times the size of France, had twelve kilometres of rail. It also had only 300 kilometres of road and a single car–the shah’s. Ford had issued his affordable Model T, but cars were a luxury, even in America. The most common mode of transport was the mule. It was a world that was both familiar to us, and terribly foreign. Despite the inroads made by germ theory, for example, human populations were far less healthy than they are now, and even in the industrialised world, the main cause of ill health was still, overwhelmingly, infectious diseases–not the chronic, degenerative diseases that kill most of us today.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

Elly had expanded his investments to a new industry with huge potential—rubber—and he had begun buying up stock in rubber companies in Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The industry was booming thanks to the rapidly growing auto industry in Europe and the United States, which required rubber to manufacture tires. When Henry Ford began mass-producing his Model T cars in 1908, interest in rubber stocks soared, rising 20 percent to 30 percent a week. Unfortunately, the surge in the price of rubber company stocks was a classic “bubble” in which the stock prices far outstrip the reality of the business. When American demand for rubber slowed, the market crashed.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

Alfred Sloan was then an executive at the company and would eventually be made President by Pierre du Pont, who was Chairman of the Board of GM from 1915 until 1929. Sloan’s genius for operations and sales was enormous, but there were several aspects of his tenure at GM that helped the company take the lead in the auto industry away from Ford. First, Sloan wanted to have a new product every year, “a product for every purse,” whereas Ford manufactured the same car, the Model T, for almost two decades from 1908 to 1927. Second, Sloan realized that the lack of financing for new car purchases after WWI was pushing consumers to buy used cars instead of new models. Even a two-year old Chevy, Sloan realized, was more attractive than the cranky and increasingly obsolete Model T.

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Henry Ford was an extremely conservative man who ran his entire company on a cash basis until the end of WWII. Suppliers bringing raw materials and parts to the Ford factory were paid in cash. Ford distrusted bankers and hated debt. By 1929 Ford was one of the largest cash depositors in the U.S. banking system. Never thinking of using credit to encourage sales, Ford believed that pushing down the cost of his beloved Model T and making incremental improvements to the perfect car was all the incentive needed to spur sales. And Ford’s inability to grasp the significance of consumer credit to expanding demand for his products would allow GM to capture leadership in the auto industry by the mid-1920s, a position of dominance that GM holds to this day—even after a bankruptcy reorganization in 2009.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

At the same time, the 1950s saw the introduction of hybrid farm animals—specially bred pigs and chickens (among them the winners of a “the chicken of tomorrow” contest) that were bred for the conditions of the factory farm. World steel production trebled between 1950 and 1970, with plants becoming much larger and more efficient. Ford was building two million Model T cars a year at its peak in the 1920s—churning out a staggering fifteen million of the cars before production ended in 1927. (So affordable were these cars, so impressive was the American economic engine, that “even the richest parts of Europe would not reach 1920s levels of US motorization until the late 1950s.”)24 Fewer workers could produce much more in far less time.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
by Tim Flannery
Published 10 Jan 2001

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

When in 1926 a group of 32 prominent American businessmen were asked how they felt about a shorter workweek, a grand total of two thought the idea had merit. According to the other 30, more free time would only result in higher crime rates, debts, and degeneration.4 Yet it was none other than Henry Ford – titan of industry, founder of Ford Motor Company, and creator of the Model-T – who, in that same year, became the first to implement a five-day workweek. People called him crazy. Then they followed in his footsteps. A dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and the mastermind behind the production line, Henry Ford had discovered that a shorter workweek actually increased productivity among his employees.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

The assembly line wasn’t just about maximizing efficiency through discrete repetitive tasks, it was a metaphor for how a company’s product can dictate its supply chains, manufacturing processes, distribution channels, and management layer. The product was the only governing principle—it organized everything across a perfectly straight line. The actual people involved in making, buying, and selling the product were entirely disposable. Henry Ford’s customers could famously pick any Model T color they wanted, as long as it was black. The result of all this relentless efficiency was that Henry Ford’s cost per unit dropped precipitously, allowing him to flood the market with cheap but durably made cars. Model Ts came only in black because with one automobile coming off the line every three minutes, that was the only color that would dry fast enough.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

The Forgotten Man
by Amity Shlaes
Published 25 Jun 2007

There was nothing bubbly about the potential for productivity gains. By the end of 1925 Ford’s peak production was 8,500 a day, up substantially from the 6,000 from a few years before. Overall in the years from 1923 to 1929 car production would double. Another emblem of the new progress was the price of Henry Ford’s cars. The Model T, $600 before the war, sold for $240 in the mid-1920s. Right after the war it seemed that the United States had become the greatest power through might. With the growth of the 1920s, the country was showing that it deserved to be that power. Coolidge began his December 6, 1927, yearly message to Congress by announcing that “It is gratifying to report that for the fourth consecutive year the state of the union in general is good.”

Fodor's Essential Belgium
by Fodor's Travel Guides
Published 23 Aug 2022

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?
by Eric Berne
Published 2 Jan 1975

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

IISH, Amsterdam, # USSR, 1932 – BG E12/680–1. International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). 16. China work propaganda: poster design by Jin Zhaofang, July 1954. Serial no. 538, IISH, Amsterdam # China, 1954 – BG E16/627. International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). 17. Ford assembly line: Ford’s 10 millionth Model T, 4 June 1924. Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo. 18. Control room: fossil fuel power plant in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, 27 May 2007. In text Introduction. Washing day on the street, Lindenstraat, Amsterdam, 1951. Photo Ben van Meerendonk. International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

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‘Civilized life – productive work’ was a message for the members of Komsomol, the communist youth organization, who had to set an example through their actions. 16. ‘A glorious production model’ worker proudly shows her Stakhanovite-like diploma and medal to her excited daughter and two sons; in the background is the factory where she works, China, 1954. 17. Assembly line workers pose for a promotional film at the Ford factory in Highland Park, Michigan, to mark the 10 millionth Model T in 1924. The first Model was made less than sixteen years previously. 18. A man reclines in his chair in the control room at the Point Tupper power plant in Nova Scotia, Canada, 2007. This photograph shows the advances of automation, and the minimum effort needed on the part of the worker.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

What counted was the number of workers or the size of the workforce, akin to the area of land for agricultural production or the number of machines in a factory. Well into the twentieth century, people were treated as expensive machines, and the personal costs of rising prosperity continued to be high. Fordist production lines—named after Henry Ford, who pioneered the mass production of Model T automobiles in the early 1900s—were widely used in the manufacture of goods, including televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines that fueled the consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Although the families of production workers became more affluent, it required employees to leave their brains at the factory gate.

The Great Crash 1929
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 15 Dec 2009

On May 20, when Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field and headed for Paris, a fair number of citizens were unaware of the event. The market, which that day was registering another of its small but solid gains, had by then acquired a faithful band of devotees who spared no attention for more celestial matters. In the summer of 1927 Henry Ford rang down the curtain on the immortal Model T and closed his plant to prepare for Model A. The Federal Reserve index of industrial production receded, presumably as a result of the Ford shutdown, and there was general talk of depression. The effect on the market was imperceptible. At the end of the year, by which time production had also turned up again, the Times industrials had reached 245, a net gain of 69 points for the year.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023

One early advocate, a real estate broker by the name of Bernard London, even argued for the creation of a government agency that would prescribe maximum (rather than minimum) life spans for products, at which point they would have to be traded in for a new model.18 (Reading it now, London’s plan looks remarkably similar to many tech trade-in schemes.) Obsolescence went radically against the existing notions of the time, in which businesses had competed to build products that were of the highest quality; Henry Ford, for example, built the Model T to be repairable and long-lasting, while declaring, ‘We want the man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy another.’19 But obsolescence, like disposability, really experienced its golden age in the mid-1950s, as the post-war boom began to slow. Manufacturers were realising that once everyone had a TV, refrigerator, car, and radio, they needed to create reasons for them to ‘upgrade’ to newer models.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Turing's Cathedral
by George Dyson
Published 6 Mar 2012

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire
by Dale van Atta
Published 14 Aug 2019

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
by Joel Bakan
Published 1 Jan 2003

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
by Christopher B. Leinberger
Published 15 Nov 2008

The promise of the Futurama exhibit helped launched an interlocking system of policies and subsidies that unwittingly pushed aside all historical precedents in city building and produced the car-only, drivable suburban pattern of growth. It is the land use equivalent of the supposed Henry Ford dictate that the buyer can have a Model T “in any color, so long as it’s black.” In the next two chapters, we will see how this system played out on the ground and in the real estate industry to produce more and more “black Model Ts.” 2 THE R ISE OF D RIVABLE S UB - URBIA W alkable urbanism was not what the returning World War II veterans and the home-front families wanted.

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones
by James E. Gaskin
Published 15 Mar 2005

Our history lesson in Chapter 1 told us how the government granted AT&T a monopoly in order to pay the huge expense necessary to get telephone service to every household (called Universal Service, which you're still paying for every month). AT&T did a great job of building that huge wired network across the country. But Henry Ford did a great job building Model Ts, and we don't need those anymore, either. The old copper wires remain critical in reaching homes and businesses without broadband connections. Every phone still part of POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) connects to the rest of the world through those two copper wires strung by AT&T so many years ago.

…

Our history lesson in Chapter 1 told us how the government granted AT&T a monopoly in order to pay the huge expense necessary to get telephone service to every household (called Universal Service, which you're still paying for every month). AT&T did a great job of building that huge wired network across the country. But Henry Ford did a great job building Model Ts, and we don't need those anymore, either. The old copper wires remain critical in reaching homes and businesses without broadband connections. Every phone still part of POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) connects to the rest of the world through those two copper wires strung by AT&T so many years ago.

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
by Ira Rutkow
Published 8 Mar 2022

Henry Maudsley, British Medical Journal, 1905 A good surgeon is a good medical man who can cut. Most of the surgeons have forgotten their medicine but go right on cutting. Martin H. Fischer as quoted by Howard Fabing, Fischerisms, 1930 The decade following World War I, the “Roaring Twenties,” was an exciting and prosperous time for the United States. In the wake of Henry Ford’s production of the Model T and the flourishing of oil companies, a web of highways spread across the nation as the automotive and energy industries took hold. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris roused the country and brought about the business of aviation. Bootleggers, flappers, and speakeasies thrived despite a constitutional ban on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Neumann and Gross were in the city’s Arts District, where pour-over coffee shops were sprinkled in between decaying old factories. The two, with a handful of other WeWork employees, rolled up in a black SUV that reeked of marijuana to meet a young office space leasing broker who was waiting to take them on a tour of a former Ford factory that built the Model T. Neumann insisted the broker down two tequila shots before commencing the tour. It was before noon, but the broker assented. When the group stepped inside, Neumann loved the boxy five-story structure and its big old factory windows. He then started running around its cavernous empty spaces.

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Consumers could pay with cash or use the newfangled installment plan. By 1926, according to a survey, 85 percent of central station customers had irons, nearly 71 percent had vacuum cleaners, 42 percent had washing machines, and 31 percent had toasters.43 During these same years the automobile, led by Henry Ford’s fabulous Model T, transformed American life as well as the landscape. Insull and his colleagues played a key role in that process by supplying the electricity that enabled Ford to revolutionize production with his assembly line. But Insull had more direct ambitions in the field. Between 1917 and 1922 Insull invested heavily in garages to service electric-powered cars and backed the effort with an intensive publicity campaign.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection
by Kevin Morrison
Published 15 Jul 2008

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2007

The manufacturer wanted to feature nine different watches in the ad, and Joe recommended featuring just one. The client insisted and Joe offered to do both and test them in the same issue of The Wall Street Journal. The result? The one-watch offer outsold the nine-watch offer 6-to-1.55 Henry Ford once said, referring to his Model-T, the bestselling car of all time,56 “The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it’s black.” He understood something that businesspeople seem to have forgotten: Serving the customer (“customer service”) is not becoming a personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
by James Mahaffey
Published 15 Feb 2015

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think
by Luke Johnson
Published 31 Aug 2011

He too started out as an engineer, eventually running Edison Illuminating’s factory in Detroit. In 1899, at the age of thirty-six, he left to run his own car workshop. Initially he had partners, but with growth Ford was able to squeeze out his co-shareholders, and he became majority owner of the Ford Motor Company in 1904. His really big winner, the Model T, was launched in October 1908, for $825. It soon became a by-word for the successful application of the mass assembly techniques instituted by Ford himself. By the end of the First World War, almost half the cars in the world were Model Ts, a quite astounding achievement.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less
by Richard Koch
Published 15 Dec 1999

Marketing as a separate function or activity was not necessary, yet the small business made sure that it looked after its customers. Then came the Industrial Revolution, which created big business, specialization (Adam Smith’s pin factory), and eventually the production line. The natural tendency of big business was to subordinate customer needs to the exigencies of low-cost mass production. Henry Ford famously said that customers could have his Model T in “any color as long as it’s black.” Until the late 1950s, big business everywhere was overwhelmingly production led. It is easy for the sophisticated marketeer or businessperson today to sneer at the primitiveness of the production-led approach. In fact the Fordist approach was plainly the right one for its time; the mission to simplify goods and lower their cost, while making them more attractive, is the foundation for today’s wealthy consumer society.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future
by Robert B. Reich
Published 21 Sep 2010

* There is no strict definition of the “middle class.” For the purposes of simplicity and clarity, I define it broadly to include the 40 percent of American families with incomes above the median family income and the 40 percent below. 3 The Basic Bargain On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford announced that he was paying workers on his famously productive Model T assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan, $5 per eight-hour day. That was almost three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. In light of this audacious move, some lauded Ford as a friend of the American worker; others called him a madman or a socialist, or both.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

In 1932 he was fired from Ford for organizing a rally for Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate for president. He spent 1932 through 1935 traveling the world. During this time, he trained Russian workers in Gorky—Nizhny Novgorod—to work the Model T production-line machines that Ford had sold to Stalin when he replaced the Model T with the Model A in 1927. Back in Detroit, he joined the United Auto Workers (UAW), and in December 1936 he launched a sit-down strike against Ford’s brake supplier, Kelsey-Hayes. Thousands of sympathizers came out to block management’s attempts to move the machines elsewhere so they could restart production with scabs.

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Published 15 Aug 2006

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 10 Sep 2007

For example, they judge that a woman dimmed the lights only when she slid a dimmer switch, not when she turned on her toaster, that a man waved the flag only when he shook a flagpole, not when he raised the flag on a windy day, and that a boy popped a balloon only when he pricked it, not when he let it graze against a hot light bulb on the ceiling.69 The grain size of the mind’s view of the world is adjustable. From a bird’s-eye view, we can say that Henry Ford made cars or Bush invaded Iraq, though the causal chain between anything that Ford did and a Model T rolling off the assembly line had many intervening links. This feature of conceptual semantics inspired Bertolt Brecht’s “Questions from a Worker Who Reads”:Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? . . .

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's
by Ray Kroc
Published 1 Jan 1977

Herr Bittner’s a hard man, but he’s fair and square, and if you deserve it he’ll give you a chance.” A few weeks later, I got my first order from Bittner, and it was a substantial one. He gave me all his business after that. Other accounts were shaping up, too, and my efforts paid off in a salary increase. With this and my piano playing income, I was able to go to a Ford dealership that August and buy a brand new Model T on a Bohemian charge account—cold cash. I had been reading about the business boom down in Florida. Newspaper cartoons compared the rush down there to the gold rush of 1849, and I managed to talk Ethel into going down with me for the winter. She agreed to go if her sister, Maybelle, would come along.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry
by Steven Rattner
Published 19 Sep 2010

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

For upholsterers, it was the best of times. If this trend was international in scope, it had a particular thrust in the United States. It was no accident that the man most responsible for streamlining conveyor-belt mass production was also in the vanguard of collecting ordinary objects made by ordinary people: Henry Ford, the father of the Model T automobile. Ford started to gather mundane stuff in 1906. By 1929, his collection had grown into a museum of junk, a kind of Smithsonian of the common man, and is still open to the public today, in Dearborn, just outside Detroit. Edith Roosevelt, wife of President Theodore, was another ‘junk snupper’.

Lonely Planet London City Guide
by Tom Masters , Steve Fallon and Vesna Maric
Published 31 Jan 2010

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

The Companion Guide to London
by David Piper and Fionnuala Jervis
Published 2 Jan 1970

Purely Functional Data Structures
by Chris Okasaki
Published 12 Apr 1998

However, there is one aspect of functional programming that no amount of cleverness on the part of the compiler writer is likely to mitigate — the use of inferior or inappropriate data structures. Unfortunately, the existing literature has relatively little advice to offer on this subject. Why should functional data structures be any more difficult to design and implement than imperative ones? There are two basic problems. First, from f Henry Ford once said of the available colors for his Model T automobile, "[Customers] can have any color they want, as long as it's black." 2 Introduction the point of view of designing and implementing efficient data structures, functional programming's stricture against destructive updates (i.e., assignments) is a staggering handicap, tantamount to confiscating a master chef's knives.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

There was much to say about this setup in terms of efficiency, which was effectively an assembly line for film. Out of the factory came a steady supply of films of reliable quality; yet on the other hand, like any factory, the studios did not admit a lot of variety in their product. Henry Ford famously refused to issue his Model T car in any color but black, and while Hollywood didn’t go that far, there was a certain sameness, a certain homogeneity to the films produced in the 1930s through the 1950s. That homogeneity was buttressed by the ongoing precensorship under the Production Code, which ensured that films would not stray too far from delivering the “right” messages: marriage was good, divorce bad; police good, gangsters bad—leaving no room for, say, The Godfather, let alone its sequels.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
by Dan Ariely
Published 31 May 2010

In summary, these initial experiments suggest that once we build something, we do, in fact, view it with more loving eyes. As an old Arabic saying goes, “Even the monkey, in his mother’s eyes, is an antelope.” Customization, Labor, and Love At the birth of the automotive industry, Henry Ford quipped that any customer could have a Model T painted any color that they wanted so long as it was black. Producing cars in just one color kept costs low so that more people could afford them. As manufacturing technology evolved, Ford was able to produce different makes and models without adding too much to their cost. Fast-forward to today, when you can find millions of products to suit your taste.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

Frommer's Oregon
by Karl Samson
Published 26 Apr 2010

Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
by Edward Chancellor
Published 31 May 2000

The Rough Guide to Switzerland (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 24 May 2022

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

In the first decade of the twentieth century, electrical communication converged with the oil-powered internal combustion engine, giving rise to the Second Industrial Revolution. The electrification of factories ushered in the era of mass-produced goods, the most important being the automobile. Henry Ford began to manufacture his gasoline-powered Model T car, altering the spatial and temporal orientation of society. Virtually overnight, millions of people began to trade in their horses and buggies for automobiles. To meet the increased demand for fuel, the nascent oil industry revved up exploration and drilling, making the United States the leading oil producer in the world.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low
by Richard Jurek
Published 2 Dec 2019

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr
Published 14 Jun 2020

Prior to mass production, cars were crafted by hand, one by one, the exterior metal beaten into place by wooden mallets, while more technical work was accomplished in dozens of shops scattered around the city. The cars that emerged were unique, beautiful, and only for the filthy rich. Think about the market for satellites and supercomputers today. By first simplifying the car itself—Ford’s abecedarian march from Model A to T was all about streamlining his cars into something so simple anyone could fix them with regular household tools sans mechanic—and then simplifying its production, he made the single most complex piece of technology of his era affordable for the average consumer. It was the first stab at a blueprint that has subsequently been followed for almost every modern convenience—from air conditioner to iBauble—and that has essentially built the expectation that the lifestyle and toys of the elite will be available to us all within a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

If everyone were satisfied no one would want to buy the new thing.”37 This cry became an increasingly popular concept as companies realized they no longer had a production problem but rather had a demand problem. They needed to shift their attention to finding new ways to sell existing products. For fifteen years Ford showed a fanatical dedication to sticking with the Model T’s original design (with the exception of a few minor changes). In 1922, he proclaimed, “We have been told . . . that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that [it] is bad business to try to make anything that will last forever. . . . Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. . . .

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

As many critics have pointed out, these techniques found their ultimate expression in Taylorism: the set of organisational practices famously developed by the American engineer Frederick Taylor in the late nineteenth century. Capitalism’s unscrupulous pursuit of efficiency and profit meant that no decision about the pace or techniques of the labour process would be left to the worker’s discretion. The developments associated with Taylorism were perfected in Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, which churned out identical Model T cars at a highly predictable rate of production, but not without significant spiritual costs for the worker. As the more uniquely human qualities such as initiative, creativity and cooperation were expelled from the labour process, critics argued that work condemned us to act not as human beings but as impersonal, interchangeable units of labour power.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
by John de Graaf , David Wann , Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey
Published 1 Jan 2001

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

The potential for unsold inventory in unwanted colors points to two potential actions. A company could construct its supply chain so that color choices come last; for example, a clothing company might wait to dye sweaters until popular colors become clearer. Or a company could choose to not give people a choice. Henry Ford offered his customers any color Model T they desired, so long as it was black. Apple did the same when it rolled out the first iPhone: you could get black, or, for the same price, you could get black. The Balancing Process Our second model, the balancing process, makes the opposite assumption of the Polya process.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Sull’s favorite example of active inertia is Firestone. The company’s founder, Harvey Firestone, was adept at responding to revolution. Firestone began producing tires in Akron, Ohio, in 1900. He saw the potential in Henry Ford’s pioneering mass production of automobiles, and in 1906 Firestone was chosen by Ford to supply the tires for the Model T. But in 1988, Firestone was acquired by Bridgestone, a Japanese competitor, for a fraction of its market capitalization a decade and a half earlier. Firestone, like so many strong legacy companies, was undone by the emergence of a new, disruptive technology—the radial tire—that had been introduced to the U.S. market.

Without Remorse
by Tom Clancy
Published 2 Jan 1993

Lonely Planet Scotland
by Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet Scotland
by Lonely Planet

Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar
by Kelly Oxford
Published 20 Aug 2012

I took off my Sally Jesses, put my hands on her desk, and leaned forward. “Maybe you like me better now that you can see me close up?” The woman put her hand on mine and whispered, “I’m sorry.” I turned and walked away. Wilhelmina was a dumb name for an agency anyhow. My next stop was the local agency that was feeding models to the Ford Modeling Agency in New York. “Hi.” The man didn’t look up. “Number?” “Eleven forty-nine.” “Eleven forty-nine, eleven forty-nine, eleven forty-nine . . . No, I—” and then he looked up, his mouth still open, frozen in place, his tongue thrust forward a little. “I’m sure you called my number.” I wagged my eyebrows again.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

Scotland Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris
Published 11 Oct 2010

A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War
by Keith Fisher
Published 3 Aug 2022

Its design was so accommodating of fuel types that Diesel even experimented with coal dust as fuel – an idea perhaps inspired by the recent discovery that some serious explosions in coal mines were caused by airborne coal dust.295 This type of engine became effective for heavy-duty work where engine weight was less of an issue, and it began to be introduced, for example, for powering drilling rigs in the Russian oilfields. As well as for stationary power, diesel engines began to be used for powering ships and submarines.296 As the number of motor vehicles rose to 150,000 in Britain and 200,000 in the United States by 1908 – the year Ford brought out its Model T – even assuming that the production of light crude were to continue at high levels, would the oil industry have the capacity to refine and distribute that much petrol?297 In the UK, which was entirely dependent on imports, the price of petrol jumped sharply in 1907, prompting the fuels committee of the Motor Union of Great Britain and Ireland to warn that ‘a famine in petrol appears to be inevitable in the near future, owing to the demand increasing at a much greater rate than the supply’.298 Yet at the same time, the newly merged Royal Dutch-Shell was burning off 30 million gallons of petrol a year at its sites in the Dutch East Indies.299 However, with the merger, supplies from Sumatra and Borneo surged, assisted by the decision of the Suez Canal authorities to allow the passage of gasoline in bulk, while further supplies arrived from Romania, and from Grozny in Russia’s North Caucasus.300 Similarly, fears over petrol supplies in the US began to be assuaged, from 1905, by the growing production of high-grade crude from the new Mid-Continent field, which extended from Kansas southwestwards into Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory.301 ‘THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COMMUNISTIC SYSTEM’ Indian Territory had been the last expansive refuge for numerous native tribes who had been herded there from all over the United States under varying degrees of duress throughout the nineteenth century, most notoriously in the deadly Trail of Tears during the early 1830s.302 As the populations of the surrounding states of Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Texas increased, the original solemn promises given by the US government that Indian Territory would be inviolable were gradually forgotten.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

Indeed, corporate officers who failed to focus on the profitability of the business, at least in the long term, would be in breach of their fiduciary duties. If the transformation of the corporation from public to private was begun in 1819 with Dartmouth College, involving storied lawyer Daniel Webster, it was completed exactly a century later with a case involving another American legend, Henry Ford. Ford, the visionary carmaker behind the Model T and the assembly line production process, was sued in 1916 by two business partners, James and Horace Dodge. The Dodge brothers, who built Ford’s engines and owned 10 percent of Ford Motor Company stock, had been made immensely wealthy from their relationship with the company; their $10,000 investment netted them more than $32 million.

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline
by Jim Rasenberger
Published 15 Mar 2004

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business
by Bob Lutz
Published 31 May 2011

The result was a huge rise in GM’s manufacturing cost: the combination of paying for the displaced labor and more hours for the costly indirect labor, coupled with the depreciation and amortization of all that new equipment, made GM the high-cost producer, showing once again that having too much money can result in amazing folly. Meanwhile, Ford and Chrysler, the poorer cousins, focused on the Japanese model: don’t create new plants unless necessary, automate only where absolutely needed for quality or worker fatigue, seek the optimum blend of humans and machines. It worked, just as decades later it’s working for GM as well as it ever worked for Toyota. The misunderstood “drive for excellence” bore some really strange fruit.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Already there are eight million ‘flexible fuel vehicles’ on American roads that can run on a gasoline/ethanol blend (many are ‘E85’ vehicles that can run on blends of up to eighty-five per cent ethanol and fifteen per cent gasoline). General Motors has cautiously committed ‘to making 50 per cent of production flex-fuel capable’ by 2012. Ford, Chrysler and Toyota all offer E85 cars. In fact, Ford is returning to its roots – its famous Model T, which went into production in 1908, could run on ethanol, gasoline, or a blend of both. So why not fuel made from CO2 taken out of the sky? Already we have working technologies that can take CO2 from the air and organisms that can turn CO2 into liquid fuels. Klaus may not prevail; Joule might fail; Algenol might be a flash in a pan.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
by Studs Terkel
Published 1 Jan 1974

In Europe
by Geert Mak
Published 15 Sep 2004

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

Ford Motor Co., which established that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.” The case centered on a disagreement between Henry Ford, the founder and majority shareholder of Ford Motor Company, and two automaker brothers—John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge (the founders of Dodge Brothers car company). Henry Ford had been making a killing on his Model T car, cutting prices on the vehicle as economies of scale increased, while also very publicly increasing the wages of his workers, in part so that they would have enough money to buy his products—a strategy that came to be known as Fordism. The company had accumulated quite the cash trove: around $52 million, or $1.1 billion today.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future
by Michael Levi
Published 28 Apr 2013

That year, the two would combine to deliver less than 0.0005 percent of the U.S. electricity supply. By 2008, though, their contribution would rise by a factor of nearly three thousand, breaking the 1 percent threshold for the first time. Ethanol, relegated to the sidelines ever since Henry Ford decided to go with more abundant gasoline for his Model T, began to crawl back out of obscurity in the late 1970s. At first, it was adopted as a replacement for lead, promising to improve engine performance with no damaging consequences for public health. Eventually, farmers and policymakers seized on it as a potential replacement for oil, and the U.S. government started to subsidize its growth.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Advertising aimed at children began in earnest with the Boomers, and continued to slavishly follow them as they grew into teens and adults, always telling them they should own more and be better. That was helped along by the technology of automated production, which made customization possible. Gone were the days when Henry Ford said you could have any color Model T you wanted “as long as it was black.” More and more during the Boomers’ lifetime, cars and everything else could be personalized and made “just as unique as you are.” Consumer culture and individualism worked hand in hand, exalting individual choice above all, fueled by money. In a 1988 Psychology Today article describing the early results showing more depression among Boomers, psychologist Martin Seligman (b. 1942) observed that high expectations had extended beyond products into other areas of life.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

Put another way, News Corporation approaches sport (leagues, teams, and stadia) not as profit centers but as “cog[s] in the machine” of global media capitalism for which it is willing to pay substantial amounts.81 Murdoch has implemented a revolutionary process of rationalization and consolidation within the global media-sport complex. One might venture to say that Murdoch is the Henry Ford of the postindustrial era, with sport programming representing the Model T (or primary commodity) of the new information-based mode of production. As NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol commented in response to Murdoch’s repeat ranking at the top of the Sporting News Power 100, the annual list of the top one hundred most powerful people in sports, “It isn’t even remotely a race.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

In 1872, when the so-called Horse Plague hit the United States, with horses struck down by one of the worst outbreaks of equine flu in recorded history, large parts of the country’s economy came to a halt.9 Some even blame the epidemic for that year’s Great Fire of Boston; seven hundred buildings burned to the ground, they claim, because there were not enough horses to pull firefighting equipment to the scene.10 But the twist in the tale is that, in the end, policymakers didn’t need to worry. In the 1870s, the first internal combustion engine was built. In the 1880s, it was installed in the first automobile. And only a few decades later, Henry Ford brought cars to the mass market with his famous Model T. By 1912, New York had more cars than horses. Five years after that, the last horse-drawn tram was decommissioned in the city.11 The Great Manure Crisis was over. The “Parable of Horseshit,” as Elizabeth Kolbert called it in the New Yorker, has been told many times over the years.12 In most versions of the story, the decline of horses is cast in an optimistic light, as a tale of technological triumph, a reassuring reminder that it is important to remain open-minded even when you find yourself knee-deep in a foul, seemingly intractable problem.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

The Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT), established in 1899 by a group of former cavalry officers including a liberal sprinkling of aristocrats, entered its cars for races, but its managing director, Giovanni Agnelli (1866–1945), saw relatively early on that there was more money to be made from mass production. He travelled to the United States to learn from the example of Henry Ford (1863–1947), who was already earning huge profits by turning out motor cars in the thousands. When Agnelli was asked during his visit whether the streamlined manufacturing methods used to make Ford’s famously inexpensive Model T, first produced in 1908, could be introduced into Europe, his interlocutor noticed that ‘Monsieur Agnelli avoided answering. His eyes lit up briefly but his face, which I was scrutinising, remained impassive. He changed the conversation rapidly.’ The answer was not slow in coming. By 1912, FIAT, now a public company in which Agnelli owned most of the shares, was making a new cheap car, the Model Zero, production of which accelerated from 150 vehicles in 1903 to 4,500 in 1914.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

UPS is justifiably proud of the machine intelligence now embedded in every belt, puck, and package, which corresponds with its desire to strip as much human intelligence as possible out of the hub, in the name of efficiency. The company’s term for it is “de-skilling,” a tradition that dates back to Henry Ford’s first assembly lines for the Model T. The difference now is that there is a greater fortune to be made in moving goods than in making them. It also means that while UPS employs ten thousand people nightly in the sort, most are part-time. FedEx, with fifteen thousand in Memphis and thousands more scattered across its domestic hubs, pays the same, and not even the offers of generous benefits and free tuition hide the fact that what they are looking for is a pool of loyal but unskilled labor.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

I gather that some algorithm predicts the number of McNuggets, Big Macs, and other popular items we’ll sell every hour of each day, and tells the kitchen exactly how many extra Big Macs to make so one’s always ready to go when you reach for it, but not so many that any languish in the hot box for more than a couple of minutes. This was Ray Kroc’s original “assembly line” theory of fast food—simple and standardized, with food made in anticipation of customer orders rather than in response to them. Henry Ford was able to achieve amazing production numbers with the Model T because every car was identical, with standard parts, constructed exactly the same way every time. Model Ts came in exactly one color, because black paint dried the fastest—a microcosm of Ford’s fetish for standardization. The menu Kroc used to take McDonald’s national was similarly minimalist, with exactly three food items—Pure Beef Hamburger, fifteen cents; Tempting Cheeseburger, nineteen cents; Golden French Fries, ten cents.

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
by Neal Bascomb
Published 2 Jan 2003

Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight to Paris made him a hero worthy of ticker-tape parades and keys to cities. Americans spoke of aviation as a “winged gospel” and those who mastered these flying machines as “apostles” and “prophets.” Hollywood produced numerous films featuring daredevils and fighter pilots braving the skies. Henry Ford came out with a single-seat flying flivver, the supposed Model T of airplanes, causing one writer to script: “I dreamed I was an angel . . . And with the angels soared . . . But I was simply touring . . . The heavens in a Ford.” Young boys and girls pestered their parents to help them build model airplanes. And zeppelins, traveling at seventy-five miles per hour, promised a bright future of available transportation for the masses.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

At the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, many city planners were concerned about the increasing use of horse-drawn carriages and their main pollutant: horse manure. Knee-deep in the issue in 1894, one writer in the Times of London predicted that by the 1940s, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of the stuff.45 About ten years later, fortunately, Henry Ford began producing his prototypes of the Model T and the crisis was averted. Extrapolation was also the culprit in several failed predictions related to population growth. Perhaps the first serious effort to predict the growth of the global population was made by an English economist, Sir William Petty, in 1682.46 Population statistics were not widely available at the time and Petty did a lot of rather innovative work to infer, quite correctly, that the growth rate in the human population was fairly slow in the seventeenth century.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

Likewise, Andrew Carnegie, while enormously enriching himself, cut the price of a steel rail by 75 per cent in the same period; John D. Rockefeller cut the price of oil by 80 per cent. During those thirty years, the per capita GDP of Americans rose by 66 per cent. They were enricher-barons, too. Henry Ford got rich by making cars cheap. His first Model T sold for $825, unprecedentedly cheap at the time, and four years later he had cut the price to $575. It took about 4,700 hours of work to afford a Model T in 1908. It takes about 1,000 hours today to afford an ordinary car – though one that is brimming with features that Model Ts never had.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

The departing ideology is Sloanism, a managerial philosophy named after Alfred Sloan, who took over as president of General Motors in 1923. Sloan’s great achievement was to do for management what Henry Ford had done for labor—to turn it into a reliable, efficient, machine-like process. Indeed, to a large extent, Sloan’s system was supposed to be an antidote to temperamental pioneers like Ford, whose irrational dislike of producing anything other than the Model T (he once kicked to pieces a slightly modified version) nearly bankrupted his company. Sloan wanted to invent a company that could run itself. His solution to the problem was the modern multidivisional firm, in which businesses are divided into a set of semiautonomous operating units, each responsible for maintaining the market share and profits of a single business or market and each having its division heads reporting to a group headquarters in charge of setting longterm strategy and allocating capital.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

Even Standard’s historic strength in refining dipped from an 86 percent market share to 70 percent in the five years before the breakup. The automobile was also radically recasting the industry: In 1910, for the first time, gasoline sales surpassed those of kerosene and other illuminating oils. In 1908, William C. Durant launched the General Motors Corporation, and that year Henry Ford brought out his first Model T. Auto ownership soon exploded, reaching 2.5 million cars by 1915 and then 9.2 million by 1920. Though Standard Oil of California introduced the first filling station in 1907, the trust was not a pioneer in this area, and the national network of gas stations would be too extensive to be monopolized by any one company.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin
Published 14 Oct 2004

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

A tour takes about 1½ hours, and consists mostly of looking at old photos and listening to guides’ stories. The museum is 2 miles northwest of Midtown. Model T Automotive Heritage Complex MUSEUM ( 313-872-8759; www.tplex.org; 461 Piquette Ave; adult/child $10/free; 10am-4pm Wed-Fri, 9am-4pm Sat, noon-4pm Sun Apr-Nov) Henry Ford cranked out the first Model T in this landmark factory. Admission includes a tour into the workshop and ‘experimental room,’ plus loads of classic cars to view. It’s about 1 mile northeast of the Detroit Institute of Arts. DOWNTOWN & AROUND Busy Greektown (centered on Monroe St) has restaurants, bakeries and a casino.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

In summary, these initial experiments suggest that once we build something, we do, in fact, view it with more loving eyes. As an old Arabic saying goes, “Even the monkey, in his mother’s eyes, is an antelope.” Customization, Labor, and Love At the birth of the automotive industry, Henry Ford quipped that any customer could have a Model T painted any color that they wanted so long as it was black. Producing cars in just one color kept costs low so that more people could afford them. As manufacturing technology evolved, Ford was able to produce different makes and models without adding too much to their cost. Fast-forward to today, when you can find millions of products to suit your taste.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
by Charles Emmerson
Published 14 Oct 2019

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

A tour takes about 1½ hours, and consists mostly of looking at old photos and listening to guides’ stories. The museum is 2 miles northwest of Midtown. Model T Automotive Heritage Complex MUSEUM ( 313-872-8759; www.tplex.org; 461 Piquette Ave; adult/child $10/free; 10am-4pm Wed-Fri, 9am-4pm Sat, noon-4pm Sun Apr-Nov) Henry Ford cranked out the first Model T in this landmark factory. Admission includes a tour into the workshop and ‘experimental room,’ plus loads of classic cars to view. It’s about 1 mile northeast of the Detroit Institute of Arts. DOWNTOWN & AROUND Busy Greektown (centered on Monroe St) has restaurants, bakeries and a casino.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
by Caro, Robert A
Published 14 Apr 1975

for his workers. Before the eyes of America a bright new world of mass leisure was unfolding. And along with time the new technology brought a means by which the time could be used to conquer space. In 1909, after sixteen years of experimentation with gasoline-driven vehicles, Ford had announced the invention of the Model T, which could be mass-produced, and, with the unrolling of the unparalleled prosperity of the Twenties, which gave the average American money to spend on luxuries, America beat a path to Ford's door and to the doors of his imitators. The number of automobile-owning families in the country in 1919 was less than seven million; by 1923, it would be twenty-three million.