One Summer: America, 1927

much petrol they had in the tank had to stop the car, get out and tip back the driver’s seat to check a dipstick located on the chassis floor. Determining the oil level was even trickier. The owner, or some other compliant soul, had to slide under the chassis, open two petcocks with pliers and judge from how fast the oil ran out how much and how urgently more was needed. For gears, the car employed something called a planetary transmission, which was famously idiosyncratic. It took much practice to master the two forward gears and one reverse gear. The headlights, run off a magneto, were uselessly dim at low speeds and burned so hot at high speedsthat they were inclined to explode. The front and rear tyres were of different sizes, a needless quirk that required every owner to carry two sets of spares. Electric starters didn’t become standard until 1926, years after nearly all other manufacturers included them as a matter of routine.
    Yet the Model T inspired great affection. It was the source of many loving jokes. In one, a farmer whose tin house roof had been mangled in a tornado sent it to the Ford factory hoping they could advise him how to restore it. The message came back: ‘Your car is one of the worst wrecks we have ever seen, but we should be able to fix it.’ For all its faults, the Model T was practically indestructible, easily repaired, strong enough to pull itself through mud and snow, and built high enough to clear ruts at a time when most rural roads were unpaved. It was also admirably adaptable. Many farmers modified their Model Ts to plough fields, saw lumber, pump water, bore holes or otherwise perform useful tasks.
    One central characteristic of the Model T that is now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, kerb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out on to a grassy verge or dry pavement rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out of facing windows. Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature. Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford’s seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.
    The Model T was an immediate success. In its first full year, Ford produced 10,607 cars, more than any manufacturer had ever made before, and still couldn’t meet demand. Production doubled annually (more or less) until by 1913–14 it was producing nearly 250,000 cars a year and by 1920–21 over 1.25 million.
    The most persistent belief about the Model T, that you could have it in any colour so long as it was black, was only ever partly true. Early versions of the car came in a small range of colours, but the colours depended on which model one bought. Runabouts were grey, touring cars red and town cars green. Black, notably, was not available at all. It became the exclusive colour in 1914 simply because black enamel was the only colour that would dry fast enough to suit Henry Ford’s assembly line methods, and that lasted only until 1924, when blue, green and red were made available.
    One thing above all accounted for Ford’s competitive edge: the moving assembly line. The process was perfected bit by bit between 1906 and 1914, not so much as a progressive, systematic plan, but more as a series of desperate expedients to try to keep up with demand. The basic idea of the assembly line – or ‘progressive assembling’, as it was at first known – came from the movement of animal carcasses through the slaughterhouses of Chicago, which, as has often been noted, was actually a kind of ‘disassembly line’. Other companies used assembly line techniques – it was how Westinghouse made air brakes – but no other manufacturer embraced the system as comprehensively and obsessively as Ford. Workers in Ford plants were not permitted to talk, hum, whistle, sit, lean, pause for reflection or otherwise behave in a non-robotic fashion while working, and were given just one thirty-minute break per shift in which to go to the lavatory, have lunch or attend to any other personal needs. Everything was arranged for the benefit of the