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- The
Model T, Henry Ford Museum
The first production Model T Ford was assembled at the
Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit on October 1, 1908. Over the
next 19 years, Ford would build 15,000,000 automobiles with
the Model "T" engine, the longest run of any single model
apart from the Volkswagen Beetle. From 1908–1927, the Model T
would endure with little change in its design. Henry Ford had
succeeded in his quest to build a car for the masses.
- Daniel Gross, "Henry
Ford and the Model T" (1996)T
On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the fifteen millionth
Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in
Highland Park, Michigan. Since his "universal car" was the
industrial success story of its age, the ceremony should have
been a happy occasion. Yet Ford was probably wistful that day,
too, knowing as he did that the long production life of the
Model T was about to come to an end. He climbed into the car,
a shiny black coupe, with his son, Edsel, the president of the
Ford Motor Company. Together, they drove to the Dearborn
Engineering Laboratory, fourteen miles away, and parked the T
next to two other historic vehicles: the first automobile that
Henry Ford built in 1896, and the 1908 prototype for the Model
T. Henry himself took each vehicle for a short spin: the
nation's richest man driving the humble car that had made him
the embodiment of the American dream.
Henry Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly
line, but recast each to dominate a new era. Indeed, no other
individual in this century so completely transformed the
nation's way of life. By improving the assembly line so that
the Model T could be produced ever more inexpensively, Ford
placed the power of the internal combustion engine within
reach of the average citizen. He transformed the automobile
itself from a luxury to a necessity.
- Model T Ford
Club of America
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