The Airplane 661pioneers. He was not even the first person to manu-
facture a good low-priced car (that being the achieve-
ment of Ransom E. Olds, producer of the “Merry
Oldsmobile”). Ford’s first brilliant insight was to “get
the prices down to the buying power.” Through mass
production, cars could be made cheaply enough to
put them within reach of the ordinary citizen. In
1908 he designed the Model T Ford, a simple, tough
box on wheels. In a year he proved his point by sell-
ing 11,000 Model Ts. Relentlessly cutting costs and
increasing efficiency with the assembly line system, he
expanded production at an unbelievable rate. By
1925 he was turning out more than 9,000 cars a day,
one approximately every ten seconds, and the price of
the Model T had been reduced below $300.
Ford’s second insight was the importance of high
wages in stimulating output (and selling more auto-
mobiles). The assembly line simplified the laborer’s
task and increased the pace of work; at the same time
it made each worker much more productive. Jobs
became boring and fatiguing, and absenteeism and
labor turnover became serious problems. To combat
this difficulty, in 1914 Ford established the $5 day, an
increase of about $2 over prevailing wages. The rate
of turnover in his plant fell 90 percent, and although
critics charged that he recaptured his additional labor
costs by speeding up the line, his policy had a revolu-
tionary effect on wage rates. Later he raised the mini-
mum to $6 and then to $7 a day.
Ford’s profits soared along with sales; since he
owned the entire company, he became a billionaire.
He also became an authentic folk hero: his homespun
style, his dislike of bankers and sophisticated society,
and his intense individualism endeared him to mil-
lions. He stood as a symbol of the wonders of the
American system—he had given the nation a mar-
velous convenience at a low price, at the same time
enriching himself and raising the living standards of
his thousands of employees.
Unfortunately, Ford had the defects of his virtues
in full measure. He paid high wages but refused to
deal with any union and he employed spies to investi-
gate the private lives of his workers, and gangsters and
thugs to enforce plant discipline. When he discovered
a worker driving any car but a Ford, he had him dis-
missed. So close was the supervision in the factory
that workers devised the “Ford whisper,” a means of
talking without moving one’s lips.
Success made Ford stubborn. The Model T
remained essentially unchanged for nearly twenty
years. Other companies, notably General Motors, were
soon turning out better vehicles for very little more
money. Customers, increasingly affluent and style-
conscious, began to shift to Chevrolets and Chryslers.
Finally, in 1927, Ford shut down all operations for
eighteen months in order to retool for the Model A.
His competitors rushed in during this period to fill the
vacuum. Although his company continued to make a
great deal of money, Ford never regained the dominant
position he had held for so long.
Ford was enormously uninformed, yet—because
of his success and the praise the world heaped on
him—he did not hesitate to speak out on subjects far
outside his area of competence, from the evils of
drink and tobacco to medicine and international
affairs. He developed political ambitions and pub-
lished virulent anti-Semitic propaganda. He said he
would not give five cents for all the art in the world.
While praising his talents as a manufacturer, his-
torians have not dealt kindly with Ford the man, in
part no doubt because he once said, “History is more
or less the bunk.”
The rise and fall of the automobile economyat
http://www.myhistorylab.comThe Airplane
Henry Ford was also an early manufacturer of air-
planes, and while the airplane industry was not eco-
nomically important in the 1920s, its development in
that decade laid the basis for changes in lifestyles and
attitudes at least as momentous as those produced by
the automobile. The invention of the internal combus-
tion gasoline engine, with its extremely high ratio of
power to weight, made the airplane possible, which
explains why the early experiments with “flying
machines” took place at about the same time that the
prototypes of the modern automobile were being
manufactured. Wilbur and Orville Wright made their
famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903,
five years before Ford produced his Model T. Another
pair of brothers, Malcolm and Haimes Lockheed, built
their Model G, one of the earliest commercial planes
(commercial in the sense that they used it to take pas-
sengers up at $5 a ride) in 1913.
The Great War speeded the advance of airplane
technology, and most of the planes built in the
1920s were intended for military use. Practical com-
mercial air travel was long delayed. Aerial acrobats,
parachute jumpers, wing walkers, and other daredev-
ils who put on shows at county fairs and similar
places where crowds gathered were the principal
civilian aviators of the 1920s. They “barnstormed”
from town to town, living the same kind of inbred,
encapsulated lives that circus people did, their chief
rewards being the sense of independence and pride
that the successful performance of their highly
skilled but risky trade provided.
The great event of the decade for aviation, still an
achievement that must strike awe in the hearts of
reflective persons, was Charles A. Lindbergh’s non-
stop flight from New York to Paris in May 1927. ItWatchtheVideo