[...]
The old road was not only a road, it was a way of life, slow and often rough.
If you lived way out in the
country, 15 or 20 miles away from the railroad station, you had to get up before
dawn to catch the 930 train.
You harnessed up the reliable horse, and for the next two hours the carriage went
creaking down the old familiar road while the countryside moved slowly past.
If you were leaving the farm for good to go to the city, you had mixed feelings
on that long ride to the station.
It's not easy to pull up routes and start a new kind of life.
You saw the faces of old friends as you passed their house waving goodbye,
and you felt sad at leaving them.
But you saw too how old and tired they looked, worn out by hard
work, locked on the land.
A woman looked 50 before she was 35 with all she had to do.
In a way, you were glad you were leaving.
You passed the old schoolhouse where you'd gone as a kid, and you remembered the
long miles you'd walked morning after morning to get there.
That final run to get inside before the bells stopped clanging.
Or perhaps you passed the doctor's buggy drawn up in front of someone's house,
and you'd remember the terrible night your mother lay upstairs in the bedroom,
sick, and the long hours of waiting for the doctor to come.
The roads were bad that night. When he finally arrived, there was
nothing he could do anymore.
After that, you never saw the doctor's buggy without
wondering if he'd gotten there in time.
You passed the church too, but you knew you were not leaving God behind.
He would be with you in the uncertain days that lay ahead.
Still, there were good times to remember as well as bad, and by the time you
reached the station, you wondered if you were making a mistake.
Some people might call you a darn fool to leave a fine farm and go running off of
the city where it was noisy and dirty, full of pickpockets and swindlers
and women who painted their faces.
But there were things you wanted to do that couldn't get done on the farm.
If you were interested in machinery, for instance, or wanted to tinker with
engines that ran on gasoline, the country was no place for you.
You had to go where other men were doing this kind of thing.
The train was late, of course. You could have slept another half hour.
You stood and looked down the empty tracks, waiting.
Somewhere out there beyond the horizon lay the city where your destiny waited.
The people who lived in the city stayed in the city. They walked the hard
pavements till their feet ate.
If a person were well-heeled, he took a cab.
If a nickel was all he could afford, he took a
streetcar and got there an hour later.
The fastest thing in town was the fire engine.
In the good old summertime, the streets got hot as buns.
Vegetables and peanuts were the [...]
People wilted under the blazing sun, and the kids were hard-boiled.
Everybody taunted and swelted and longed to get away from the cranking thunder of
the elevated trains and the clatter of wagon wheels on cobblestones.
Part of town lay the ballpark.
And if you went for a long boat ride down the bay, you finally arrived at an
amusement park where there were rollercoasters.
Shoot the chutes, camels to ride, and
a real beach where a kid could get to swim in the ocean.
But it took the better part of a day to get there than back, so you settled for
the nearest fire hydrant on your block.
Bicycles for all the rage.
On Sunday afternoons, you could pedal out past the city limits and see real trees
and grass and hear a bird sing.
That was fun. As long as your legs held out, you could go wherever you wanted,
right up to the end of the road, that is.
A few miles out of town, the paving ended, and from then
on, bicycling was no pleasure.
A lot of people accepted the end of the road and turned back.
But the bicycle wheels had a greater destiny.
In Detroit, a man named Henry Ford, who had left the farm and come to the city to
tinker with machinery, was making what he called a quadracycle.
It looked like a buggy, only it had no shafts for a horse to be harnessed to.
The horsepower was going to come from a gasoline engine he'd made himself.
He did everything himself, working nights and holding down a daytime job with the
Detroit Illuminating Company.
It took a long while
to make this machine, but Henry Ford stuck to it, and finally it was ready.
One momentous night, he pushed it out for its first trial run.
Up and down the dark, empty streets ran the little quadracycle.
Past the sleeping houses, ghost-like and unreal, with it
the shape of things to come.
If anybody had waked up and looked out the window, he probably
would have thought he was still dreaming.
That night, history was made of [...]
The streets were never the same again.
It didn't happen overnight. The going was rough for
those early cars on the American road.
We should pause to remember and admire not only the adventurous men who kept on
making automobiles, but the reckless few who had courage enough to drive them.
Some people thought that the sail wagon had a more
promising future than the automobile.
Built like an ice boat on wheels, it could hit over 50 miles an hour
if the wheels stayed on.
Of course, it took a land-going sailor to operate it, and on a public
road it really stopped traffic.
While people were still letting the wind blow them in various directions, men
like Henry Ford were putting their faith in the gasoline engine.
He built a big one, and put it in a racing car called the 999.
It was a huge, heavy monster, and it spent a lot of time on the [...]
It spent most of its time in the shop getting tuned up.
Nobody at the time probably realized it, but the 999 had a prophetic look.
This was no horseless carriage. It was long and low and
powerful, built for speed.
In a crude but unmistakable way, it forecast the shape of cars to come.
On October 25, 1902, Barney Oldfield set a world record in the 999.
He drove it a mile a minute, and this phrase ushered in a new era.
Cars now became a more and more frequent sight, particularly in cities.
By 1903, there were more than a thousand automobile
manufacturers in the United States.
And in that year, the Ford Motor Company was founded.
The first payroll didn't take much bookkeeping.
The first car of the new little
company was called the Model A.
It had a two-cylinder, eight-horsepower engine, and it could go 30 miles an hour.
It sold for $850, a lot of money in those days, and its owners
were chiefly in the upper brackets.
It was smart and fashionably designed with a door in the rear like a pony cart.
And it cranked from the side, a good safety measure designed to prevent the
cranker from being knocked flat and run over by other [...] that prematurely.
Everybody admired it but only the more daring could be persuaded to ride
in any kind of a motor car.
The farmer was a forgotten man during this early period.
He saw occasional cars go by on the rough roads, but these strange mechanical
contraptions seemed out of place in the country.
They were for city people, not for him.
He kept on grooming his old reliable horse and waited.
And suddenly one day it appeared.
It was called the Model T.
It had a four cylinder, 20 horsepower engine, and a planetary gear that
defied the laws of science.
Maybe it didn't look classy, but it could take a beating on rough country
roads and still get you there.
It was a farmer's car, built by a farmer.
There was only one thing wrong with it.
It cost $850.
Millions of citizens looked at the Model T in lickset shops.
There it was, the car of their dreams, but they couldn't afford it.
Back in Detroit, Henry Ford wondered how he could bring the price of the Model T
down to where everybody could buy it.
He figured that the more cars he made and sold, the
cheaper he could sell each one.
And he went to work on this idea.
In those days, each car was built from the frame up on stationary wooden horses.
There was a different crew for each car, and the same crew
stayed on the car until it was finished.
That meant duplication of effort and a lot of time wasted.
So they tried moving the men from car to car.
Each man had a special job to do, and as soon as he finished it, he moved on to
the next car and did the same thing there.
That was better, but it still took 12 and a half hours to assemble each Model T.
Henry Ford watched it for a while, and he had an inspiration.
Instead of moving the men past the cars, why not move the cars past the men?
Though on one hot August morning they tried it that way, a husky young fellow put
a rope over his shoulder and Henry Ford called, let's go.
And at that very moment, as the workmen began to fasten the parts onto the slowly
moving car, the assembly line was born, a technique that was to revolutionize
mass production all over the world.
Once they found that the idea would work, they began to improve it, refine it.
They rolled a chassis down a single line of track, pushing it from crew to crew.
And the more expert they became at this new method, the faster the cars came off
the assembly line, and the price of the Model T began to drop.
They tried the same idea in all the various parts of the car, and created what
were called sub-assemblies.
Each man on the line became a specialist. He did one thing, and he did it
perfectly, and passed the work along to the next man.
Minute by minute, production was winning the battle against wasted
time and wasted effort.
Parts were fed to the workmen by gravity slides, so they wouldn't have
to stop and wait for new parts.
Then they put the parts on moving conveyor belts, and this was a great step
forward, because now they could regulate the flow of work and keep it moving
at a constant rate of speed.
And the conveyor belts grew longer and more complex as they moved the work from
place to place in the huge shops.
They became fantastic masterpieces of planning and engineering, but the battle
against wasted time and wasted effort was being won.
The cars began coming off the assembly line at the rate of
one every forty seconds.
And what Henry Ford had foreseen happened. Mass production and the assembly line
drove the price of the Model T down from eight hundred and fifty
to three hundred dollars.
Now everybody could have one.
[...]