October 1st · 1908 · Society & Movements
A Car for the Multitude: The Ford Model T Goes on Sale
On 1 October 1908, the first production Ford Model T was offered for sale — the affordable, durable car that would put America on wheels and remake the modern factory.
When Henry Ford set out to build the Model T, the automobile was a plaything of the rich. By the time the last one rolled off the line nineteen years later, the car had become an ordinary fixture of everyday life — and Ford had changed how nearly everything was made.
The everyman’s car
The first Model T was offered for sale on 1 October 1908. Ford’s stated ambition was to build “a motor car for the great multitude” — large enough for a family, simple enough to maintain, and cheap enough that an ordinary worker could own one. [1] It was rugged, easy to repair, and well suited to the rough, unpaved roads of the era.
The moving assembly line
The Model T’s real revolution came a few years after its launch. In 1913, Ford installed a moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, in which the chassis was pulled past stationary workers who each performed a single repetitive task. [2] The time to assemble a car fell from over twelve hours to about ninety minutes. Mass production drove the price down relentlessly — from around $850 in 1908 to under $300 by the 1920s. [1]
Five dollars a day
In 1914, Ford startled the industrial world by doubling his workers’ pay to five dollars a day, partly to reduce the punishing turnover that the monotonous line work produced. The high wage also helped create a workforce that could afford the very product it built — a feedback loop that became a touchstone of twentieth-century industrial capitalism.
Fifteen million cars
Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts before production ended in 1927, a record that stood for decades. [2] The car democratized mobility, reshaped American geography around the automobile, and made the assembly line the defining template of modern manufacturing.