The car that changed America: how Henry Ford's 1908 Model T--the first mass-produced and affordable car--sparked the growth of highways, surburbs, and the middle class itself.

• Author: Davey, Monica
• Position: TIMES PAST

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It all began a century ago in a factory on Piquette Avenue in Detroit.

In a secret back room on the third floor, Henry Ford, who by then had been building cars for several years, drew up plans for a new one. While he had already produced models he named, simply, for letters of the alphabet--B, C, E K, etc.--it was the Model T that would change everything.

The lightweight but sturdy Model T was the first affordable car. Mass produced along an assembly line, it not only spurred the growth of the auto industry and led the way to the adoption of mass production for industry as a whole, it also sowed the seeds of America's middle class and much of American life as we know it today.

Cars had been built in the U.S. since the 1890s, but in 1908 they were a luxury--a bit of an oddity, in fact. They were used not so much for getting around as for sport; wealthy auto enthusiasts toured the bumpy, gravel and dirt roads from one part of the country to another, with newspapers following their journeys. In fact, there were fewer than 200,000 cars on the road when Ford built his Model T.

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Ford grew up on his family's farm in Michigan but was always more interested in machines than crops. He was working as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating company in Detroit when he began building his first cars. With the encouragement of Thomas Edison himself, he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903.

The first Model Ts, built one by one, sold for about $800 (more than $18,000 in 2008 dollars)--out of reach for most Americans. But then came Ford's biggest innovation: the moving assembly line, which allowed a worker to complete a task, then watch as the car moved on to the next worker and the next task.

The assembly-line concept had been used in slaughterhouses and for simple products like tin cans, but rarely with products as complicated as cars. The assembly line lowered Ford's cost so much that he could slash the Model T's price to as little as $260--a price that, for the first time, ordinary Americans could afford.

"If there's anything about Henry Ford that we could call genius, it was that he could imagine millions of people buying his automobile and driving it," says Charles Hyde, an automotive historian at Wayne State University in Detroit. "At the time, people thought that was crazy."

The shift was rapid. Sales of the Model T boomed. In coverage of a 1910 auto show in New York, The New York Times noted a 50 percent increase in sales of the Model T from a year earlier.

"The transportation problem is gradually being...