James Baquet

    The next lyrics in the Gershwin song “They All Laughed” read: “Ford and his Lizzie kept the laughers busy.” The “Ford” here is the American industrialist Henry Ford (1863-1947). And “his Lizzie” is his first successful car, the Model T.

    Leaving the family farm in Michigan at 16 after the death of his mother, Ford became an apprentice machinist in Detroit, Michigan. He also studied bookkeeping. Later, while working for the Edison Company, in his spare time he built his own automobile with a gasoline engine. He met Edison himself, who approved of Ford’s tinkering with autos.

    Ford built a handful of automobiles called “Quadricycles” — a gas-powered four-wheel bicycle. They were expensive and not commercially viable, but in building and promoting them he founded the Detroit Automobile Company, the first such business to be started in Detroit, which remains the center of the auto manufacturing industry in America today.

    That company folded two years after its founding, but he started the Henry Ford Company in 1901 which he left, and became the Cadillac Company, later acquired by General Motors. The Ford Motor Company, established in 1903, survives to this day.

    But 1908 was the watershed year. It was then that Ford introduced the “Model T.” The car was simple, but what made it a smashing success was “Fordism”: interchangeable parts, put together on an assembly line, and sold at a low price — mass production leading to mass consumption.

    The Model T was priced at just US$825 (US$21,730 today), making it possible for even his own workers to buy one. The price kept dropping as Ford made his manufacturing process more efficient, until it reached a low of US$360 (US$7,828.08 in 2015) in 1916, a year when 472,000 Model Ts were sold. Two years later, half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts. When production stopped in 1927, the total sales stood at 15,007,034 in just 19 years. This is the “[Tin] Lizzie” of which the Gershwins sang.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. nearly identical pieces that can be exchanged one for the other

    2. huge

    3. one who operates machines

    4. purchase of goods by a large number of people

    5. large manufacturer

    6. able to make a profit

    7. way of production where each worker has a specific task, and passes the product on to the next worker

    8. fooling around with something