Ford Model T

[Narrator] Over 100 years ago, the Ford Model T put the freedom of the open road within reach for more Americans than ever before. But there's a little known Iowa connection to the ingenious way these cars were assembled.

(The car has a shiny black streamlined body with whitewall tires and a retractable fabric roof.)

This film from 1899 shows the first automobile parade in New York City. At the time, inventors were adapting the mechanics of wagons and buggies into early steam and electric powered cars. But in those early days, automobiles were still costly. Hand-built one by one.

[Leo Landis, Historian] Pre 1913 it was all non assembly line production so they're produced one at a time. Maybe one a day, so that you might do about 300 a year total. And that would be pretty ambitious.

Henry Ford introduces assembly line at his Highland Park plant in 1913, in Michigan. And that then increases productivity on automobiles. So what have been close to a $900 model T drops down to around a $500 model T and even cheaper in the 1920s. As price points dropped more and more, especially Iowa farm families, embraced the model T. It had high road clearance.

[Narrator] To illustrate how quickly the assembly line impacted car ownership in America, consider this: In the year 1900, there were only 8,000 registered motor vehicles. By 1906, that number had jumped to 105,000. In 1915, a mere two years after Henry Ford began building cars with moving assembly lines, there were 2.5 million cars on the road. By the 1920s, Ford Model T's weren't only rolling off assembly lines in Michigan and Ohio. Iowa steered its way into the business, too.

[Landis] A lot of people in Iowa don't realize this. When you're driving Grand Avenue West out of downtown Des Moines, you go by Des Moines Public Schools central campus building. That is the original location of Ford Motor Company's assembly plant. They would make bodies there, that's the compartment that the humans were riding in. The other components, the frame and the powertrain, those would have been shipped in from Michigan. So the Des Moines plant was both a body plant and an assembly plant for Ford Motor Company. What would have been impressive in the 1920s and 1930s is that parts would be unloaded off of rail cars outside the building, and then cars would come rolling out, completed from that building from Ford Motor Company on Grand Avenue.

[Narrator] By the time the Des Moines assembly plant closed in 1932, it had contributed to the production of almost 20 million Ford Model T and Model A vehicles worldwide.

One other significant development assemblers in the Des Moines plant would have noticed was an evolution in the floor pedals of the cars. The Ford Model T had 3 floor pedals, none of which controlled acceleration. The left petal was a clutch. The middle one was reverse. And the right pedal was the brake. Acceleration was controlled by a hand lever mounted on the steering wheel column. In 1927, when the Ford Model A was introduced. The function of those three pedal changed. The left one remained the clutch, but the middle pedal became the brake and the right pedal became the accelerator, a layout we still use today.

Beyond factory floors and mechanical innovations, Iowa shared something else with Henry Ford, a practical understanding of rural life and its challenges. For many farm families, the automobile meant freedom, connection, and access to a wider world. And few vehicles transformed rural life more dramatically than the Ford Model T.

[Landis] Henry Ford had grown up on a farm. He knew the challenges faced by farm families. So the Model T was really the ideal car to introduce rural Iowans to what an automobile could mean to their lives.

[Narrator] From Iowa assembly lines to Iowa roads, the Model T transported rural communities into a new era and helped reshape daily life across the state.