25 for 25. Model T (1908)

No more than Eli Whitney intended his cotton gin to give slavery a second wind did Henry Ford intend his Model T to transform the landscape of American life. But Ford’s signature automobile did just that.

Ford originally aimed to build a better tractor. In his youth he saw hulking machines rolling across the fields of eastern Michigan. Powered by steam, they weighed tons and cost fortunes, putting them beyond the reach of all but the biggest, richest farmers. Ford had a populist streak and, having learned to tinker with machinery in his father’s barn, wanted to produce a tractor ordinary farmers could afford.

Part of the solution arrived from Europe in the form of an internal combustion engine devised by Nicolaus Otto and improved by Gottlieb Daimler. Ford encountered one and decided he could modify it and make it more efficient. He also decided he liked city life better than farm life, and that he’d build a motor car rather than a tractor.

He completed his first car in 1892 and drove it hundreds of miles. As he did so he conceived improvements, which he incorporated into a second model, of which he produced three. The response made him think he had a business. A first venture failed, but his second caught on and became the vehicle for Ford’s grand vision.

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he told himself. “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.”

He ran through numerous designs before fixing on the one that met his criteria. Producing the car efficiently was a separate challenge. Taking a page from Eli Whitney’s system of interchangeable parts, Ford determined on mass production. “The way to make automobiles,” he said, “is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike, to make them come through the factory just alike; just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from match factory.”

The first Model T, the car that embodied Ford’s vision, rolled off the assembly line in 1908. It cost $825, far below what other cars cost at the time. Yet Ford wasn’t satisfied. He streamlined both the design of the vehicle and the production process so that the sale price of the car fell steadily, eventually by more than half. Originally the car could be had in different colors. To cut costs Ford reduced the palette to one shade, saying with tongue in cheek, “Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black.”

The Model T was a success from the start, and with each cut in price it grew more successful. A decade after its launch, half of the cars on American roads were Ts. In time, fifteen million were manufactured and sold.

By then cars were changing the face of America. Trains had let people travel, but only on the schedules of the trains. Cars let people travel on their own schedules. Cars expanded personal freedom in a way nothing else had done.

Cars caused the redesign of American cities. Today as much as a third of the land area in cities is devoted to the car, as streets, parking lots and garages. Cars created suburbs, communities in which people require cars for nearly every outing or errand. Cars are responsible for most road congestion, and they have been a huge contributor to the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere these last hundred years—although the pollution per mile has declined in recent decades.

Despite the drawbacks of cars, American life without them is essentially unthinkable. The freedom Ford provided with the Model T has been all but written into the Bill of Rights, and it’s a freedom few Americans will be willing to give up.