The first practical automobiles were invented in 1886 and, for the next 20 years, such vehicles gradually spread around the world. Then, through new mass-production techniques, they would spread like wildfire – dramatically altering the physical, social, and economic landscapes of our planet like nothing before.
Sources for this chapter include:
Abdelfatah, Rund and Ramtin Arablouei, hosts. “Resistance Is Futile.” Throughline. NPR. 25 Apr 2019. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/716521520
“Adam Ruins Cars.” Adam Ruins Everything. Created by Adam Conover. Season 1, Episode 3. 13 Oct 2015. TruTV. https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/season-1/episode-3/adam-ruins-cars
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
“Bertha Benz: Karl’s muse.” Cockpit. 13 Jan 2025. https://www.cockpitdz.com/en/post/bertha-benz-karl-s-muse
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine Books. 1953.
“Carl Benz.” Mercedes-Benz: Founders and Founding families. https://mercedes-benz-publicarchive.com/marsClassic/en/instance/ko/Carl-Benz.xhtml?oid=580
“The Fearless Spirit of William Durant.” GM: Heritage. https://www.gm.com/heritage/durant
Frey, Carl Benedikt. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Princeton University Press. 2019.
“Full History of the Semi-Truck.” Top Mark Funding LLC. 20 Jul 2022. https://www.topmarkfunding.com/full-history-of-semi-trucking/
Kiernan, Denise. The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home. Touchstone. 2017.
Parissien, Steven. The Life of the Automobile. Thomas Dunne Books. 2013.
Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster. 2018.
Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th Edition. Westview Press. 2013.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
Winchester, Simon. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. HarperCollins Publishers. 2018.
Full Transcript
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On August 12, 1888, a woman named Bertha set out on a trip to visit her mother. Along with her teenage sons, she made the 65-or-so-mile journey in a little over 12 hours. She had not told her husband about the trip ahead of time, but she him a short note on her way out the door in the early morning. That evening, she sent him a telegram reading, “Arrived safely. The automobile works.”
She was born Cäcilie Bertha Ringer in the city of Pforzheim in 1849. Educated at a local boarding school, she stood out for her intelligence and fascination with mechanics. However, as a woman, she was prohibited from attending a university. It’s a shame because she would have surely shined and perhaps, someday, she’d have launched a legendary career of her own. However, when she was 20, she attended an event at a social club and met a draughtsman employed by a local bridge-building company. He had his own dreams of becoming a master mechanic and – no doubt bonding over their shared passion for machines – the two fell in love. His name was Carl Friedrich Benz.
Bertha’s father was a successful carpenter and construction contractor, and with his resources, she helped convince Benz to follow his dreams. She invested in his iron-production company and – two years later – they were married. The company failed, but she provided a sufficient dowry for him to start a new venture, pursuing his greatest dream of all: making a practical automobile.
In the years to come, Bertha Benz continued to be a loyal helpmeet to her husband, giving birth to several children while assisting him in his research and development. Many years and patents later, Carl at last received a patent for his “automobile fueled by gas” in 1886.
But though he was a natural engineer, Carl Benz was not a natural businessman. He struggled to market and sell his Benz-Patent-Motorwagen. Frustrated by her husband’s timidity, Bertha decided to take matters into her own hands.
Though she did not have a driver’s license (Carl was just about the only person who did have one), and though it was illegal to operate a horseless carriage on the roads she would use, Bertha departed from their home in Mannheim to her hometown in Pforzheim on that summer day in 1888. Along the way, she employed her own mechanical skills to deal with the car’s inevitable breakdowns. She cleverly used a pin from her bonnet to unclog a fuel pipe and her garter to fix the vehicle’s ignition. She stopped in the town of Wiesloch to buy 10 liters of a petroleum-based cleaning product called ligroin to refuel. On the journey home, she purchased some strips of leather to fit on the worn-down breaks, effectively inventing the break-pad. And, after making her two sons push the vehicle uphill at times, she came up with an idea for a slower, third gear shift, to help with such inclines.
Most importantly, though, her trip instilled new confidence in Carl to believe in his machine. Not only did Bertha’s trip make for good publicity, but the family departed on other such trips in the months to come. As a Munich newspaper put it that year:
“Seldom, if ever, have passers-by in the streets of our city seen a more startling sight on a Saturday afternoon when a one-horse chaise came from the Sendlingerstrasse over Sendlingertonplatz and down Herzog Wilhelmstrasse at a good clip without any horse… a gentleman sitting under a surrey top, riding on three wheels – one in front and two behind – speeding on his way toward the center of town… the astonishment was general and widespread.”
Over the next 20 years, the automobile began to gradually spread around the world. And then, through new mass-production techniques, it would spread like wildfire – dramatically altering the physical, social, and economic landscapes of our planet like nothing before.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 71: The Automobile
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Okay, a little admin to start. First, I normally try to release new chapters the first Monday of the month. But with our daughter starting preschool, she’s bringing home new illnesses every other week, and so I was super-sick the day I was originally scheduled to record this. I’m actually not 100% yet – in case my voice sounds off – I’m still battling clogged sinuses and a sore throat. What’s more, this is going to make the podcast schedule for the remainder of the year a little funky, but you can get updates by signing up for the e-newsletter at InudstrialRevolutionsPod.com, or following along on Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky by following @IndRevPod – that’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D.
Second, I do have a quick note for you. There was a clarification about the breakup of Standard Oil made in the Spotify comments for Chapter 70. SunderWit explains that “Texaco and Phillips were Texas based oil companies and thus not descended from Standard Oil” and that “you can usually tell the descendants by their blue, white, and red logos: ExxonMobile, Cheveron, Marathon.” Yes, strictly speaking, that is true. The reason I included Texaco and Phillips is because, over the years, they acquired and merged with firms that were descendants of Standard Oil. The history of the American oil industry is a bit complicated that way, and I didn’t really want to get too into the weeds with it. But thank you, SunderWit, for the helpful clarification.
Additionally, I want to thank everyone who continues supporting the podcast each month on Patreon. Special shouts outs this time go to new patron, Annalisa Barrett, as well as John Bartlett, Harriet Buchannon, Jeppe Burchhardt, Britt Cleaver, Aleksandr Guljajev, Aaron Hertes, Eric Hogensen, Alonso Ibañez, Naomi Kanakia, Kathryn Kennedy, Sebastian Kiessling, Paul Krasin, Jeremy L, Kyle Laskowski, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Martin Mann, J.J. Marx, John Newton, Tomoharu Nishino, Emeka Okafor, Theodor Richter, David Roberson, Joshua Shanley, Kristian Sibast, Hubert Skrzyński, Sean Southern, Ray Squitieri, Ross Templeton, and Wakkas. Thank you all!
Now, let’s start her up!
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Carl Benz was born in the city of Carlsruhe in 1844. His father was a locomotive driver who died when Carl was a toddler. Though they were living in a financially dire situation, his mother insisted the young Benz be well-educated. After graduating from a scientifically-oriented school, he matriculated at the local Polytechnic institute where he studied mechanical engineering.
In his 20s, Benz worked a few different jobs working on steam engines and other machinery. But ever since his time at the Polytechnic, his real interest was in building internal combustion engines, like the one recently invented by Étienne Lenoir. (Shout out Chapter 61!) In 1871, he and a business partner started their own firm – an iron foundry and engineering workshop – where he could spend time tinkering with such engines.
The business was never a successful one and, in 1877, it was seized as part of a debt collection. But thanks to the financing that came with his marriage to Bertha, he was able to continue his R&D and soon produced a reliable two-stroke engine that could run at 400 revolutions per minute (RPM). He set up a joint stock corporation to produce them (for stationary purposes), with bank investors owning the vast majority of shares. Meanwhile, he joined forces with a couple of bicycle manufactures to found a new enterprise which would use his engines to get the “motor car” dream off the ground.
From 1883 to ‘85, Benz worked tirelessly to build his prototype. He designed a three-wheel carriage around his engine and, in the fall of 1885, tested it to his satisfaction. He then applied for and was granted the Imperial Patent DRP 37435 the following January.
The “Model 1” as he dubbed it, was soon followed by Models 2 and 3, which sought to make further improvements on the design. After presenting the Model 3 to an enraptured audience at the Munich Engineering Exhibition in 1888, he was finally ready to begin production of cars to sell to the public. Sales were slow at first, but he eventually patented a four-wheel model and production was scaled. Benz produced 1,200 units of his “Velo” car, as it was called, between 1894 and 1901. The firm was taken public in 1899. And they found distributors in France, which was soon becoming the top market for the burgeoning auto industry.
But Benz wasn’t the only German engineer to create a practical automobile. In fact, the same year he built his first model, another one was built about 60 miles away by our old friends Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach.
Daimler had been fired by Nicolaus Otto (shout out Chapter 61 again) in 1880, but he received a good payout for his work developing the Otto engine. His close friend and colleague, Maybach, resigned not long after and joined Daimler in a suburb of Stuttgart. Together, they built a workshop attached to Daimler’s house and began making their own gas engines. Like the Otto engine, these would run on petroleum and use a four-stroke cycle. But they were to be smaller and more efficient, with a quicker-starting ignition. By 1885, they had produced a one-horsepower engine that ran at 650 RPM.
For the most part, the engines they sold were used for either machinery or for the world’s first motorboats. But in January 1886, they learned that this guy, Carl Benz, had secured a patent for a new automobile. Building the first practical automobile had long been Daimler’s greatest ambition, and so now they turned their attention to cars.
A couple of months later, they purchased a horse coach. Concerned that the competition would find out about the purchase, they claimed it was a present for Daimler’s wife. But, in fact, they fitted one of their engines on it and tested it by riding around the garden. Unlike Benz’s three-wheeled, open carriage vehicle, Daimler’s and Maybach’s four-wheeled, enclosed vehicle could rightfully be called the world’s first motor coach.
After making design improvements and variations, they took their business public in 1890 and began licensing their technology to firms in France and Britain. They had their first car sale in 1892, but – despite continued innovations – the business struggled to meet their investors’ expectations.
In 1900, Daimler died after years of suffering heart problems. But around that same time, Maybach began work on a revolutionary new car, thanks to a salesman in France named Emil Jellinek.
A successful Jewish businessman from Vienna, Jellinek was actually serving as an Austro-Hungarian consular official in Nice at the time. From Nice, he marketed Benz automobiles to the French public. But he believed the company’s brand was too German for the generally anti-German French. He started using a new brand name, based on his daughter Adrienne’s nickname, which he also used for his racing team and his personal yacht. Then he persuaded Maybach to use it as the name for a new, 35-horsepower sports car: the Mercedes.
With a steel-framed undercarriage and a honeycomb radiator designed by Maybach, the Mercedes was a true game-changer. This was the moment when the goofy-looking cars of the 1800s are replaced by the more modern-looking cars of the early 1900s. In 1901, it dominated the races at the Nice Speed Week and the director of the French Automobile Club commented that “We have entered the Mercedes era.” The Mercedes was being sold to the public the next year.
Still, both the Daimler and Benz companies were by now in the hands of their investors, who remained frustrated by R&D taking precedent over profits. Benz was effectively pushed out of his position in 1903 and Maybach in 1907. The two firms merged into Daimler-Benz in 1926, bringing the Mercedes brand to the Benz company. Both men died in 1929 and Maybach, remarkably, did so without ever having owned a car.
Thanks to Daimler Motors’ licensing scheme, Germany would merely get credit for the invention of the automobile – not for building up an auto manufacturing industry. That honor – at least initially – belonged to France.
While there were a few French automakers, none were more important than Émile Levassor and his longtime partner René Panhard. Both men had studied at the École Centrale Paris before taking up work at a company that made woodworking machines. They met each other at that company, which also started making gas engines. The two men set out together to produce engines for a Belgian entrepreneur who had a license to build Daimler engines in France. The license was passed to Levassor after the Belgian died and Levassor married his widow.
By 1891, the new company Panhard et Levassor began assembling their own cars with the Daimler engine. But they made several significant improvements. The engine was moved from the rear of the car to the front. A water radiator was added to keep the engine cool. A crankshaft was added, as was a clutch pedal and gear stick, to operate the engine via the gearbox, creating the modern transmission system. This système Panhard, as it was known, soon became the standard layout for automobiles.
Then there was De Dion-Bouton, founded in 1883 by Jules Félix Philippe Albert de Dion de Wandonne, the Marquis de Dion, and his partner, the engineer Georges Bouton. Together they developed a small vehicle called the Voiturette, which they began selling in 1899. It was effectively the first “people’s car” (so to speak), because it was manufactured to be sold at a low cost, allowing middle-class customers to afford an automobile for the first time.
Perhaps the only French automaker to survive the First World War was that of an engineer named Louis Renault, an “odd-looking and distinctly unsociable” businessman who took the business over from his brother, Marcel, who had died in a car crash. His Renault Voiturette was smoother, faster, and more reliable than most of its competitors, with a groundbreaking three-speed gearbox.
According to historian Serge Bellu, France was the world’s leading automaking country by 1903, producing some 30,000 vehicles and commanding nearly half of the global market. And the writer Simon Winchester has noted “The vocabulary reflects still the Gallic origins: words such as garage, chauffeur, sedan, coupe, and indeed automobile serving as reminders.”
Though efforts to build an auto industry there were generally unsuccessful, the British also started building cars.
It got off to an inauspicious start, thanks in part to the country’s notorious Locomotive Acts. Horseless vehicles using the turnpikes and town roads were subject to prohibitive tolls and speed limits – as little as 2 miles per hour in town – and required three people to accompany the vehicle at all times. As an 1865 law declared, “one of such persons, while such Locomotive is in motion, shall precede such Locomotive on foot by not less than sixty yards and shall carry a red flag constantly displayed, and shall warn drivers of horses and riders of the approach of such Locomotive and shall signal the driver thereof when it is necessary to stop and shall assist horses, and carriages drawn by horses, passing the same.”
Then there was the bicycle entrepreneur Harry Lawson, who established the British Motor Syndicate, moved to Coventry, and tried to establish a monopoly on the production of automobiles in Britain. This crowded out many of the more-worthy engineers hoping to build cars there. Eventually, he was tried for defrauding his shareholders and served 12 months of hard labor.
With Lawson out of the way, others emerged. Entrepreneurs like Frederick Simms, Frederick Lanchester, and Herbert Austin experimented with the German engines and French automobiles to make their own. But it was a self-made engineer and a wealthy aristocrat who would team up to build Britain’s most famous cars.
Frederick Henry Royce was born to a poor family in Cambridgeshire in 1863. His father, a miller, died in a poorhouse when Henry was nine years old. As a child, he worked as a bird scarer (told you that was a real thing), a newsboy, and a telegram delivery boy, before the Great Northern Railway built a locomotive repair and maintenance shop nearby. His mother got him an apprenticeship with the railway, and there Royce began fixing up steam engines. As time passed, and his engineer talents flourished, he began working on electrical experiments and – eventually – building cranes for high-rise construction.
Then, in 1902, Royce bought himself a Decauville quadricycle from De Dion-Bouton, and his interest in cars suddenly turned into his main career focus. He loved his vehicle, driving it almost daily. But he was frustrated by the loud noise of the engine, the poor acceleration, the overheating, and the lack of reliability. He tinkered with his French automobile until he had a vastly superior version of it. He then put together a team of craftsmen in Manchester to assemble new cars by hand. Soon enough, these cars caught the attention of an auto enthusiast and salesman in London.
Charles Stewart Rolls was born in London in 1877. The third son of Lord Llangattock, a Welsh baron, and his wife Georgina (who hailed from the Scottish nobility), Rolls was a bit of a character. He had studied mechanical and applied science at Cambridge and then used some family money to set up one of Britain’s first auto-dealerships, trying to sell French cars to wealthy customers in London.
Upon discovering his cars, Rolls tried for weeks to get an audience with Royce before finally coming up to Manchester and demanding a meeting. The two finally met at the Midland Hotel on May 4, 1904, and agreed to form a partnership called – you guessed it – Rolls-Royce. After a train ride back to London, Rolls headed home from the train station around midnight, and suddenly cried out on the street, “I have found the greatest engineer in the world! The greatest engineer in the world!”
In 1906, Rolls-Royce produced their first completely original automobile, soon known as the Silver Ghost. It ran so smoothly that you could stand a coin on its side on the hood and rev the engine without the coin falling over. It could be driven long distances without stopping. (They tested this with a 500 mile journey from London to Glasgow.) And though it required a good deal of routine maintenance, it could keep running for ages – making it a good investment. Indeed, many of the original Silver Ghosts still work perfectly well today. In time, it became the gold standard for cars. To be sure, it was only accessible to the rich, but, with a Rolls-Royce, they’d get their money’s worth.
The superiority of Rolls-Royce vehicles was based on their limited production. Between its debut in 1906 and its retirement in 1925, only about 8,000 Silver Ghosts were assembled. As Rolls explained it in 1907:
“In the first place, the class of man who would be quite acceptable in ordinary engineering works would be quite unsuitable for us and for our standard of work… To produce the most perfect cars you must have the most perfect workmen, and having got these workmen, it is our aim to educate them so that each man in these works can do his particular work better than anyone else in the world… We consider that the success of the Rolls-Royce and its extraordinary durability and low cost of upkeep, as exemplified in the 15,000 miles trial of last year, is entirely due to scientific design, to the original research and close study of metals which has been made by Mr. Royce and his assistants in the Physical Laboratory of this Company. We regard this as perhaps the most important department in the works.”
To achieve this degree of engineering precision, the engineers at Rolls-Royce worked like master craftsmen. Using state-of-the-art gauges, they filed each component of each car to fit together perfectly. It was a time-intensive, laborious process.
But across the Atlantic, an entirely new method of automaking was about to begin. The world would never be the same.
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At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was hardly on the forefront of the automotive industry, and few might have predicted its eventual success. Within the decade, though, this country was clearly poised to dominate the industry for decades to come.
In retrospect, it made sense. First of all, even the simplest of the early automobiles were made up of dozens of components. To mass-produce automobiles, then, there needed to be a mass-production of interchangeable parts. The U.S. had long been world leaders in the manufacturing of such parts with precision machine tools. (As you’ll remember from Chapter 33, the “American System of Manufacturing” had been lauded by the British going back to the Great Exhibition of 1851.)
Second, the U.S. was well-poised to produce automobiles that could be sold at affordable prices. The country did not have the legacy of the guild system like Europe did. Thus, skilled labor was not as revered in the U.S. as it was in Europe. Manufacturers here did not need to worry about labor alienation as much as they did in places like Germany and France. So, they could build cars with lower labor costs and pass the savings onto their customers.
Other input costs were lower as well, giving U.S. automakers a further advantage over their European counterparts. The postbellum boom of the Great Lakes region provided a firm foundation for the industries that supplied the automakers – like mass-produced steel from Pittsburgh and mass-produced rubber from Akron. (Shout out Chapter 59!). It’s little wonder, then, that the American auto industry would take off in a place like Detroit. Not to mention, the petroleum products coming out of Cleveland refineries provided low-cost fuel for the end users of the automobiles.
Finally, the huge physical size of the United States made automobiles attractive to consumers. Achieving the kind of rail density seen in Europe was not so practical in the U.S. Automobiles would prove to be a more economical means of transportation around rural areas. This created a vast internal consumer market for such vehicles.
During the Progressive Era, there were two individuals in particular who stand out for catalyzing the American auto-industry. And they couldn’t have been more different in terms of their personalities or in terms of their approaches to the business.
The first was William Crapo Durant. Born in Boston in 1861, his father abandoned the family when he was a young boy. His mother, Rebecca, subsequently moved the family to the old lumber town of Flint, Michigan, where her father had relocated some years earlier. In Flint, Durant’s grandfather had become a wealthy lumber merchant and – eventually – Governor of Michigan.
Despite his family’s aspirations for him, Durant dropped out of school at age 17 and began working in the lumber yards. He then found work selling cigars and – with his natural talent as a salesman – built up enough savings to help found a travel agency. In 1886 he started a business building horse carriages, which he grew into a $2 million enterprise. Finally, in his early 40s, he was encouraged to test-drive a new automobile built by a Scottish immigrant named David Dunbar Buick.
Durant was impressed with the vehicle, but the Buick Motor Company was a mess. It had been moved to Flint in 1903 but then ran out of capital. Sensing an opportunity, Durant bought a controlling stake in Buick and took over its operations. In 1906, he built a new factory for the company which was – at the time – the largest and most modern auto plant in the world.
Seeing the degree of capital required to make an auto-business successful, though, he became convinced that the industry needed to be consolidated. Much like Thomas Edison had done in building General Electric and like John D. Rockefeller had done in building Standard Oil, Durant launched a campaign to build an automaking empire through mergers and acquisitions, buying up Buick’s fledging but promising competitors. He eventually dubbed this empire “General Motors.”
To get it off the ground, he secured financing from the great pontificator of “ruinous competition” at the helm of the Great Merger Movement: J.P. Morgan. And with millions of dollars backing him now, Durant went on an acquisition spree, buying an autobody plant in Flint, a spark plug factory in Detroit, and a number of struggling automakers, including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland (soon renamed for its factory location in Pontiac, Michigan), and Grabowsky (better known today by its initials, GMC).
By 1910, GM was comprised of some 25 different companies, taking on some $7 million of debt in the process. The bankers backing him then cut off Durant from further financing, believing his predictions of a half million cars sold in the U.S. per year was lunacy. So, Durant hit the road, meeting with small banks across the country – dazzling them with his presentations – to raise an additional $8 million to keep the lights on at the Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile factories. But, when they realized how much additional debt he had taken on, the GM Board of Directors dismissed Durant.
As GM worked to avoid receivership, reorganize, and eventually go public, Durant met a French race car driver who had moved to the U.S. and then designed his own engine. His name was Louis Chevrelot. Together, Durant and Chevrolet established a new company in 1911 to build luxury cars. They built a new factory in Detroit where they produced the Classic 6, a car that rode so smoothly that – to market it – Durant invited reporters to place their pencil tips on the hood of the car as he revved the engine. The pencils did not move.
By 1915, the success of the Chevy business gave Durant the capital he needed to retake GM, buying up a controlling stake and ousting its leadership. Chevrolet, who was in France at the time, was furious to learn about it upon his return to the U.S., and the two men had a falling out. Chevrolet was pushed out of the company bearing his name and Durant turned it into another division of GM.
In his second stint as boss, Durant led GM through an incredible transformation, introducing seamless-flow manufacturing principles and vertical integration, setting the company up to become the world’s largest automaker. In the process, he bought up a ball-bearing supplier whose president, Alfred P. Sloan, would go on to become Durant’s successor and a legendary CEO for GM.
But like he did with his travel agency and horse carriage business, Durant eventually got bored at GM. He became a major Wall Street speculator and lost a fortune in the stock market crash of 1921. The GM Board of Directors – always frustrated by Durant’s impulsivity – bailed him out on the condition that he resign from the company he built twice over. In the years to come, he would continue speculating, much to his ultimate demise. As Steven Parissien put it in his book, The Life of the Automobile, Durant “made and lost two fortunes, and on his death was worth a mere $250.”
The other great American car man took a totally different approach. Unlike Durant, he didn’t think it was important to offer customers wildly different vehicles under different brands and at different price points. Nor did he believe consolidation was necessary for a successful auto-business. Instead, he would build his company by putting virtually all his eggs into the basket of mass-production principles.
Henry Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863. His father was a prosperous farmer who implemented many successful mechanical innovations on the farm. But Henry did not get along all that well with his dad, saving his familial reverence for his mother, who had died when he was 13, and he credited her for his later success.
When he was 15, Ford began an apprenticeship at a machine shop owned by some family friends – working with water valves, steam whistles, fire hydrants, gongs, lathes, drill presses, and more – before a stint at the Detroit Dry Dock engine works. He operated his own machine shop from 1882 to 1891, before taking a job with the Edison Illuminating Company. Working at Edison gave Ford important experience with electricity – a critical factor in his later success. It also gave him ample free time and even a little factory floor space to experiment with different machines. And among the machines capturing his imagination in these years were the new motor cars coming out of Germany.
Then, in 1896, Ford built his first automobile: the Ford Quadricycle. It was far from being a great car – it had no roof, no breaks, no reverse gear, and no steering wheel (it was steered by a tiller), and its four wheels were bicycle wheels. But it could get up to a speed of 20 miles per hour, which was pretty fast for its time. Two years later, with some financial assistance from the mayor of Detroit – another family friend – Ford built a better car that included high wheels, padded bench seats, brass lamps and running boards. And then he started his own company: the Detroit Automobile Company, in 1899.
But Ford was so focused on improving his car designs that he never actually produced a finished model. Before long, he stopped coming in to work and the company collapsed within 14 months. He tried again by founding the Henry Ford Company to produce racing cars in 1901, but he was fired by his directors about a year later.
The third time would prove to be the charm. In 1903 he established the firm that would become one of the world’s largest automakers: the Ford Motor Company. Learning from his previous mistakes, Ford began the enterprise with a car design already in mind and he quickly put it into production. The “Model A”, as he called it, was a sturdy, practical car that could come with either two or four seats and get up to a top speed of 28 miles per hour. Though it was only offered in the color red, the Model A proved successful, and it laid the groundwork for Ford to design a real game-changer: the 1908 Model T.
Ford pro mised this “Tin Lizzie” – as it was affectionately known – would be the “motor car for the great multitude”, promising “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”
It was the simplicity of the Model T which made it such an innovative automobile. For one thing, its four-cylinder engine could be produced by a single cast, rather than by assembling several component pieces. It used perfectly interchangeable parts, which both reduced the labor costs associated with precision-fitting individual components and made it one of the best-running machines in the world. It had three gear shifts, including reverse, and it was bare-bones at the point of sale. It came with no speedometer, no windscreen wipers, not even any doors. But it was compatible with many of the thousands of automotive add-ons that customers could easily purchase from a Sears catalogue. Thus, customers could easily personalize their vehicles based on their needs.
And thanks in large part to Ford’s insistence that the alloy vanadium be added to the steel of the car – giving it greater textile strength and lighter weight – the Model T was so reliable that drivers could traverse country roads with it better than with other cars on the market.
By September 1909, sales of the Model T had been so successful that Ford found himself unable to keep up with demand. At this point, he decided to invest in the mass-production principles that would change the automotive industry – and all industry – forever.
Enlisting industrial architect Albert Kahn, the Ford Motor Company began construction of a new factory in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park. This plant would be designed around key concepts of mass-production: division of labor (and de-skilled labor, at that), an integrated supply chain, and – most innovative of all – a metal conveyor belt that moved each Model T along, allowing his workers to remain stationary as they assembled the component parts of each vehicle.
Inspired by the continuous-flow systems of American meatpacking plants, this “assembly line” system brought into existence a degree of scalability that had never before been possible. When the assembly line process was introduced at Highland Park in 1913, production of the Model T quickly doubled. It increased even more the next year, when Ford decided that customers could get the Tin Lizzie in whatever color they wanted, so long as that color was black. In time, he was able to cut his workforce by about 10 percent, as the assembly time for each car fell from 12-and-a-half hours per man to just one-and-a-half. Between 1908 and 1925, the price of a Model T gradually fell from $850 to just $260 – well under the average annual wage. For the first time, the great majority of Americans could afford an automobile.
It was at this point that the idea of “mass-production” really starts taking off in the public imagination – helped along by Ford’s own self-promotion. In fact, I will be releasing a bonus episode later this month in which I will read to you a 1925 essay about mass-production that was penned in Ford’s name. So, stay tuned for that.
Of course, interchangeability, division of labor, vertical integration, and continuous-flow principles had already been seen in other kinds of factories – in some cases going back more than a century. What made the productivity of the Highland Park plant possible was the introduction of electricity. Without it, neither the moving assembly line nor the integrated supply chain within the plant would have been practical.
As Carl Benedikt Frey put it in his book, The Technology Trap:
“Electric motors permitted the use of machines of greater accuracy and speed, electric craneways reduced labor requirements in handling and hauling, electric light facilitated precision work, and electric fans made the factories healthier and temperatures more bearable. And most importantly, the flexibility offered by electricity allowed for constant reconfiguration of the factory to speed up production.”
Indeed, at the turn of the century, 95% of American factories were still operating with power provided by windmills, watermills, or steam engines. But once Ford’s innovations came along, that would change. By 1929, electric motors supplied 80% of the mechanical power in American factories. Additionally, electricity made factories safer by reducing fire risks and, by extension, made fire insurance cheaper. It also helped reduce local air pollution, and worker sickness rates fell 50% following the introduction of electric light at their worksites.
But, of course, Ford’s system of mass-production was not just a technological triumph. As the historian Peter Stearns put it:
“Growing organizational sophistication involved more than technology... The assembly line became both the symbol and the reality of the increasing application of systematic organization to the workplace... [It] crystalized earlier efforts to measure and routinize work. With the assembly line, semiskilled workers using electrically powered equipment repeated simple operations such as riveting bolts while an engine block or chassis moved by them on a conveyor belt. The goal was, as Ford’s engineers put it, to make workers as much like machines as possible – to remove any need for thought or reflection.”
But while this development raised some pretty big red flags about the dehumanization of industrial labor, Ford was careful to make up for it by raising wages. He had already doled out famously generous wages, bonuses, and benefits packages going back to 1905. Now, in January 1914, he announced a guaranteed wage of $5 per day for every worker, so long as they met production targets. It was significantly higher than any other employer was offering for semiskilled labor. In time, he would introduce a five-day workweek too.
Now, these was not exactly altruistic decisions. They accomplished a few things for Ford. One: He wanted to grow and retain his workforce, drawing workers away from the many other auto plants in the greater Detroit area. Two: He believed his workers would use the higher wages to buy their own Tin Lizzies, allowing him to recapture some of this extra pay. And three: He knew perfectly well that it was good PR.
Of course, in exchange for the higher pay, the workforce really was expected to operate like machines. Workers were forbidden from sitting, smoking, or talking while on the clock. Ford’s “spotters” – managers who essentially spied on the employees – would not only enforce the rules at work, they would also show up at the employees’ homes to check in on their “dietary and recreational habits, financial health and moral well-being.” And if they didn’t live up to Ford’s tough standards, they could be fired for the cause of “malicious practice derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character.” And Ford was infamously opposed to unions in his worksites.
Ford would continue growing his company in the years to come, building an even bigger, more modern plant at River Rouge in 1916, and shaking off efforts by GM to buy him out. In time, Durant’s GM would adopt Ford’s assembly-line idea and – like Durant – Ford would make an acquisition of his own, buying the Lincoln Motor Company in 1922 to add a luxury brand to his auto business. And he’d go on to expand his empire in other ways – including the manufacturing of aircrafts – before his death in 1947.
Not only did Durant and Ford build the two biggest automakers of the 20th century; the cars they produced reshaped physical, social, and economic geography of the whole world.
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There’s a passage from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 that has always stuck with me. Early in the novel, the protagonist, Guy Montag, has a conversation with his 17-year-old neighbor, Clarisse. After she asks him probing questions about his work as a book-burner, she suddenly asks:
“‘Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?... I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,’ she said. ‘If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?’
‘You think too many things,’ said Montag, uneasily.
‘I rarely watch the “parlour walls” or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last.’”
The way cars sped up our reality has no doubt had an impact on us all, psychologically. And it didn’t take long for folks to notice it. In 1911, while painting a portrait of Edith Vanderbilt – the wife of our old friend George Vanderbilt and lady of his Biltmore estate – the artist Giovanni Boldini praised her for having the “repose of a statue” in the American Art News. He explained to the publication that the “increasing popularity of automobile travel had made his subjects restless, and that getting women to pose had become a challenge”, saying “Their features lack the calm necessary to a successful painting.”
It has been 140 years since Carl Benz won his patent for the first viable automobile. In that time, it has proven to be one of the most consequential inventions ever.
For starters, automobiles provided individualized speed of transportation that was critical for economic development in the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Unlike the railroads, which were expensive to build and geographically limited to straight lines, automobiles allowed for the free and fast movement of peoples and goods across wide areas. During the 1890s, rural voters across America struggled to pay their mortgages, and so they railed against the capitalist domination of national politics. This aligned them politically with anti-Republican southerners, urban proletarians, and immigrants alike. But with the introduction of the automobile, that angst and frustration soon fell away. The costs of moving their goods to urban markets – and the costs of moving urban-produced goods to their rural consumer markets – fell significantly, allowing the continent’s vast internal economy to expand like never before.
Contributing to this growth was public investment in roads suitable for automobiles. When Carl Fisher – an industrialist who made bright car headlights – conceived of a “Lincoln Highway” allowing automobiles to drive coast-to-coast – he asked Henry Ford to contribute to a fund to help build it. But Ford refused, arguing that such roads should not be like the private turnpikes of old or like the contemporary private railways but, rather, they should be public resources constructed and maintained by government. In the 1900s, public road construction in the U.S. contributed to an incredible leveling of the nation’s wealth. Because the “rents” for using such roads were collected through taxes and driver licensing fees, they did not accumulate in the hands of capitalist investors. Meanwhile, construction workers earned good wages for building more and more and more of these roads over the course of the century.
Indeed, with the economic potential made possible by cars, it is little wonder why governments of all stripes – social democracies, neoliberal democracies, fascist regimes and communist dictatorships alike – encouraged the building and dissemination of these private vehicles.
Cars also allowed individuals and their families to experience a sense of freedom they had not had before. This was especially seen in America’s car culture, in which the automobile became a symbol of autonomy. Tourism within the country increased, as highways like Route 66 came into existence. In time there were drive-through restaurants and drive-in movie theaters. As the spatial geography of the country changed, more people turned away from small, local grocers and toward the convenience of supermarkets.
Over time, though, the widescale dissemination of cars also created problems. Up until this point, cities had grown in density, which could not easily accommodate the congestion brought by all these automobiles. Not only did traffic jams become more frequent, but urban landscapes had to be reimagined for parking all of these cars within cities, especially in city centers. They allowed more and more people to move out to the suburbs to commute to work, which served to gradually separate rich from poor and create pockets of concentrated poverty – in which, crime soared and social mobility faltered. Urban decay slowly set in.
The freedom of the car also led to a decline in social relations. With people spending so many hours per year commuting alone in their cars, the primacy of the individual over the community became more and more reflected in our political ideology.
Then there were all the environmental concerns. Suburban sprawl led to a decline of wilderness. Air pollution increased. The impending climate crisis accelerated.
Oil dependency, meanwhile, shifted our geopolitics. Hitherto under-industrialized countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia suddenly become fantastically wealthy, giving them greater political clout than they would have ever had before. Other countries like Iraq, Nigeria, and (ahem) Venezuela experienced violent neocolonialism at the hands of Europe and the U.S., which sought to redirect the economic gains of petroleum resources into the hands of their own oil companies.
There was also a more obvious problem with cars: They are very big and fast machines. They are dangerous to operate. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1,190,000 people died in motor vehicle incidents in 2023 alone. In most places, governments have responded by siding with drivers over pedestrians. Thanks to lobbying by automakers in the early 20th century, American cities began passing jaywalking ordinances, giving automobiles an almost exclusive use of public streets. “Jay” was a pejorative term back then that basically meant “rube” or “country bumpkin”, suggesting that people still walking in the streets were dumb hillbillies and it was their own damn fault if they got hit by a car. From now on, if you wanted to cross the street, you would need to do so at designated crossing points at designated times.
It wasn’t just cars that made such seismic changes.
Scottish American engineer Alexander Winton invented the semi-trailer truck in 1898. And even though it would take many decades to have the impact it has – thanks to a bunch of mid-century developments I will spend an episode on when we get to the Third Industrial Revolution – the semi-truck has massively transformed freight transport. Motorcycles started coming onto the scene even earlier than cars did. Soon, automakers specializing in these vehicles began taking off in the U.K. and U.S. Autobuses soon replaced the horse-driven trams of the cities.
An especially important form of automobile was the tractor. Like with cars, several steam-powered models had been invented as far back as the First Industrial Revolution by guys like our old friend, Richard Trevithick. But it became much more practical with the introduction of the internal combustion engine. The first gas-powered tractors were built in the 1880s and 90s and the first commercially viable one was introduced by British industrialist Dan Albone in 1901. Once of the most successful was the Fordson, built by Henry Ford, whose interest in automobiles was spurred in part by his familiarity with the Westinghouse threshing engines he had seen on his father’s farm.
The tractor revolutionized agriculture. In the old days, farmers needed to set aside several acres of their land to grow the feed necessary to maintain their horses and other plough animals. Tractors allowed them to add the produce of these acres to their crop surplus instead. And in time, they would greatly increase the productivity of their work.
Yet it took decades to convince these farmers to make the switch. This was in large part due to their emotional attachment to their horses.
In fact, back then, this was generally recognized as the greatest consequence of automobiles – these machines (be they cars, trucks, buses, or tractors), were rapidly replacing the horse in daily life. Horses today occupy a place of nostalgia in our minds as we think back to the days of knights on horseback or the days of the cowboy. And now, these animals are mostly used for entertainment like horseback riding on vacation or placing bets at the Kentucky Derby.
But before the automobile, horses were a hugely important beast of burden, and they were everywhere. In the U.S. alone, there were about 20 million horses by the turn of the 20th century, one for every four people. Not only were they doing farm work, they were found all over the cities. As I mentioned back in Chapter 31, the introduction of railways actually led to a boom in horse transportation, as they were needed to move visitors from the rail stations to their final destinations. They also hauled the carts used to deliver food, milk, firewood, beer, ice, laundry, and other goods to homes and businesses. They were even used to pull snow ploughs.
So, while cars take up a huge amount of space in our cities today, the same was true of horses back then. And they required their own fuel, which meant up to a third of American farmland – about 88 million acres – was dedicated to growing the hay and oats needed to feed them.
And they produced a form of pollution much grosser than that of automobiles. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine and up to 50 pounds of manure per day. And when you consider the thousands of horses per city, you get a sense of just how dirty the streets really were. In 1900, New York City’s horses produced over 100,000 gallons of urine and 4 million pounds of poop in the city’s streets on a daily basis.
But the replacement of horses with automobiles created plenty of disruptions. There’s a great song by the Scottish folk singer Matt McGinn about this transport revolution from the perspective of a street cleaner. After a couple of cheeky verses about the pleasures of following behind the horse with a shovel and sack – “it was all for the rent and the beautiful scent” – the worker gets to the moment at hand.
Many of the early automobile customers struggled to learn how drive, in part, because they were so used to riding horses. During the early test drives, auto-dealers had to constantly remind drivers to use the break pedal rather than say “whooooa” to the vehicle.
And disposing of a car when it broke down did not produce much of a windfall for you. But when horses died, there were all sorts of practical uses for them. Their hoofs were used to make glue. Their bones could be ground down for use in fertilizer, as could all those pounds of their manure. Their hides went into leather production. And their flesh provided meat for dog and cat food.
So beloved were horses that many people resisted the transition to automobiles. As one naysayer of the time put it, no one wanted to travel by “sitting on top of an explosion.” The Horse Association of America – formed to fight back against the proliferation of the tractor – even argued that the new machines were threatening national security because the military would always need a horse-mounted cavalry. It wasn’t until 1945 that the HAA finally admitted defeat.
But as much as automobiles themselves changed things, the means by which they were produced was equally consequential. New technologies and practices of organizing workers in the factories boosted productivity like never before. And in the Progressive Era, ideas about how to scientifically manage these processes were becoming so important that it was morphing into an entire philosophy. And that’s what we’ll be discussing next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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In fact, we’ll be discussing this philosophy in the next chapter, and we’ll get to hear some of it in this month’s bonus episode. So be sure to come back to the podcast for both. Thanks again!