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It is with some trepidation that I enter into this post. Following my recent excursion into early 20th century racing my interest was piqued in some of the cars from that era, roughly the period before WWII, but really pre-1930s. This is a new area for me since my interest in cars has mainly been restricted to the post-war years generally, and largely only the 1960s and later. Like many, I have a somewhat limited knowledge of pre-war cars. First there are the high-end models that we see annually at Pebble Beach and other concours d’Elegance-level car shows–the Duesenbergs, the Bugattis, etc. I have little expertise in this area, but the cars I usually see seem to have been expensive to begin with and have just increased in value since. Most of these cars have inhabited the rarefied air of the rich and famous since their initial purchase and hence us common folks can only eye them from afar with something of a detached interest.

Second, apart from the occasional classic car show, I know most of the lesser forms–Model Ts, Model As, Dodge, Chevy, etc.–from either old movies or more recent period films. This seems to lend something of a 2-dimensional cartoon quality to them, a sort of Keystone Kops version of automotive history. When someone mentions “Model T” we probably get a mental image mural involving the Marx Brothers and Ma & Pa Kettle together with modern enthusiasts sporting goggles and long leather coats dutifully cranking up their Model Ts and puttering off down the road.

We all know the significance of the Model T in terms of introducing mass production on an efficient moving assembly line, and the distribution of cars to the masses rather than the toys of the elites that automobiles largely were previously. What we rarely get is a feel for what these cars actually did. After all, out of the 15+ million Model Ts sold over its lifespan, I daresay most weren’t used by comedians or road racers and they didn’t just move off those magic assembly lines and simply disappear into the mist. Like the Pinto, and most other cars we here at Car Lust regularly feature, they were bought mostly by regular people to just go about their daily business, becoming a part of the very warp and weft of the fabric of American society. People lived in them, went to work in them, and more than a few amorous couples probably … well, we won’t go there. But the everyday lives of these cars are what I would like to highlight here and perhaps move the venerable Model T out of the realm of the fanciful and back on solid ground.

I won’t bore you with details of the Model T production and design innovations; these are fairly well known, at least in general, and the video at the end of this post provides a nice graphic introduction to the Model T. I will, however, note a couple of items not mentioned in great detail there that helped make the Model T such a success. First, design-wise the Model T was both very simple and extremely standardized. This simplicity not only made it relatively easy to assemble, but also fairly straightforward to maintain. Most owners with some mechanical inclination (and people back then tended to be far more mechanically inclined than we are) could readily figure out the car’s internals, obtain spare parts, and keep them running without all the infrastructure we enjoy today. Standardization also meant that many of the parts could easily be swapped between models and they were relatively easy to modify. This made the vehicle incredibly adaptable to whatever functions the end users had in mind.

 Second, the basic design and operation didn’t change much over the production life of the vehicle. This had both good and bad consequences. On the negative side, Ford somewhat obstinately refused to keep up with changes in the automotive world until the end of the Model T’s run, giving other manufacturers marketing advantages in terms of ease of operation and styling. On the plus side, it meant that once you figured out your first T, you basically figured out all of them. This is important not only mechanically, but operationally as well. Here, for example, are the basic steps in starting and driving a Model T:

1) Engage neutral and the parking brake by pulling the handle on the floor backwards.

2) Retard the spark timing by pushing the timing lever all the way up and moving the throttle down a few notches, both levers located on the steering column.

3) Go to the front of the car (for crank-starts; electric starters were introduced in 1918) and close the choke by pulling the metal ring at the bottom of the radiator cover.

4) Move the crank to the 8 o’clock position and push it into the socket to engage it to the crankshaft.
Grasp the crank with only your fingers — in case the crank jerks around and tries to break your wrist –  and then give it a good yank clockwise. Most of the time, a half-crank will start it up.

5) Hop in and advance the spark timing to avoid stalling.

And you’re off! Except it’s not quite as easy as simply hitting the gas and steering. The throttle, as  indicated above, is a lever on the steering column. The brake pedal is still there, but it’s on the right. The other two pedals control the transmission. To put the car into low gear, press the left pedal in slightly to engage neutral, throttle up a bit, disengage the parking brake, and depress the left pedal. To switch to high gear, throttle down a bit and ease up on the left peddle. The center peddle engages reverse.

This 3-pedal, throttle-on-a-stick setup seems needlessly complex to our modern eyes, but it does have its advantages. With some skill, it is possible to switch from forward to reverse quickly and directly. Anyone who’s ever been stuck in snow, mud, or sand, can readily see the advantage this provides: you can rock the car back and forth from the driver’s seat. Considering the state of the road system at the time, this is a very nice feature to have.

Stopping the car was similarly complicated: throttle down and simultaneously hit the brake and find neutral with the left pedal. While this sounds like an operational nightmare, a little practice was all it  took for the process to become second nature, and with over 15 million sold, a lot of people figured it out readily enough. And once you did, you were set for every other Model T on the road.

The simplicity and durability of the Model T made it useful for any number of functions and, further increasing the vehicle’s potential uses, Ford would also sell a bare chassis with no body. First and foremost, of course, the Model T was for personal transportation. The basic car came in several body styles, including a coupe, open runabout, roadster, and town car. Many were converted to trucks and delivery vehicles, and by 1917 Ford was making its own truck bodies available, with a heavier chassis, designated the Model TT. The truck versions, factory or conversions, delivered a variety of goods from water to beer to, well, in the hearse version, your deceased Aunt Margaret. The TT version was rated for up to one ton, but for heavier loads some were equipped with solid rubber rear tires. These tended to have a  very rough ride. 

During the First World War, the Allies pressed many Model Ts into service as ambulances. A wooden box was attached to the standard auto chassis; it could hold up to three stretchers or four seated passengers, plus additional passengers in the seat. More than 4,000 were shipped to Europe to be driven by such luminaries as Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway.

Other uses included paddy wagons, mobile lumber and grain mills, and even an itinerant wedding chapel. You could modify them even further for use on the farm. A company called Pull Ford could outfit one with frame extensions and steel lugged wheels which could be bolted directly onto the back end for use as a tractor (see photo, right). Sales literature noted that one could plow one’s field all week, and then unbolt the back end and drive it to church on Sunday.

Model Ts weren’t just found on roads. Some companies even outfitted them as snowmobiles. The Snowmobile Company, Inc. of West Ossipee, NH received a patent for a snowmobile conversion kit for the Model T that converted the front wheels to skis and the back end to a tread design. These may seem extravagances today but they did have their uses, especially among doctors and mail carriers in more rural areas. Simply by replacing the front skis with wheels, many were sold as desert vehicles, an early form of the half-track famous from WWII.

Since the Model T was designed with the no-roads of rural America in mind, the Model T became an excellent vehicle for carrying out fieldwork of many types. Soil surveys (and any survey requiring accurate measurement of distances over many miles) were revolutionized by vehicular surveys: 

“The greatest time-saver in soil survey field work was introduced in North Carolina in 1920. W. B. Cobb and W. A. Davis, in Tyrrell County, used a Model T Ford as the mode of transportation. Road measurements were by means of special speedometer-odometer attached to the right side of the dash of the auto and connected by a flexible cable to a small gear box clamped to the right frame of the forward axle.”

They also found similar uses among geologists tracing out rock exposures, and, really, any professional who needed to get into the back country. Tracy Storer, a zoologist, did fieldwork in a Model T in Yosemite starting in 1914 cataloging the animal populations found there:

“In a memoir, Storer would recall a 1919 trip when he and Grinnell had to unpack their Model T, hand carry their gear and reload the car at every hairpin turn in the road.”

My personal favorite fieldwork for this is, of course, archaeological. The vehicles found favor among archaeologists for many of the same reasons as others venturing out into the back of beyond: they were tough, light, and could go virtually anywhere. Francis Riddell (right), an archaeologist who worked in California, Alaska, and Peru, used a 1927 Ford Model T Roadster Pickup Truck to survey large swaths of California.

Ford Model Ts even made their way to Egypt and Mesopotamia, carrying many famous archaeologists to their equally famous sites. In Egypt especially, the lightweight car was excellent for traversing the rocky and sometimes sandy deserts near the Nile Valley. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, one of the few early female Egyptologists, used Model Ts in her surveys around the Fayum Depression in the 1920s, and James H. Breasted–founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago–toured much of the Middle East in 1919-1920 in various Model Ts (left). Another less familiar American archaeologist, Alfred Kroeber (quite famous and highly respected in archaeological circles) is said to have “trained” Carl Vogelin in fieldwork by simply telling him to “get a Model T and a cast iron frying pan.”

Perhaps even more famously, the Model T was featured in at least one of the Indiana Jones movies, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The beginning of the film showed young Indiana in “Utah, 1912″ coming upon a group of, shall we say, “early archaeologists” finding the Cross of Coronado. After  snatching the relic Indy is chased home by some of the bad guys, only to be met by the local sheriff arriving in a convertible Model T.

Interestingly, one of the archetypes of fieldwork in far-flung areas of the globe upon which Indiana Jones was based, Roy Chapman Andrews, spent many years exploring Mongolia and the Gobi desert, but he preferred Dodges.

Far from being a slightly goofy looking, rickety, cartoonish automobile, the Model T was truly the workhorse of turn-of-the-century America, and, for that matter, the world. It was most definitely not designed or built to be a curio for the rich and famous to sport about in, but for hard working men and women to carry out the business of their lives. In some ways, it’s barely recognizable to us these days as a real, honest-to-goodness car or truck, but in a lot of ways it’s not all that obsolete either. Forbes magazine recently put a 1921 Model T speedster up against a Hummer H2 in a 475-foot hill climb, and the Tin Lizzie bested it by almost a full second. This isn’t to suggest that a 90-year old Model T is really all that comparable to a modern SUV–its closest recent cousin is probably The Thing–but it does highlight the very basic functional nature of these cars and reminds us that people used these cars much like we do and that good design is simply timeless.

–Anthony Cagle

Credits:

The Egypt photo is from Motor Trend.
The snowmobile image is from the Model T Ford Snowmobile Club. The Model T tractor conversion is from The Prairie Farm Report.

The following video shows much of what went into building the Model T and the sorts of terrain traversed by them.