The Horseless Carriage Becomes an Industry, Michigan and the Automobile

In eighteen ninety-six, a thirty-two-year-old engineer named Henry Ford drove a gasoline-powered vehicle he called the Quadricycle out of a brick shed behind his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. It had four bicycle wheels, a two-cylinder engine, and a tiller instead of a steering wheel. There was no reverse gear.

Ford had to remove the doorframe of the shed to get the thing outside because the Quadricycle was wider than the door. Within twenty years, the automobile would transform Michigan more completely than any other force since the glaciers. Ford was not alone.

Ransom Olds, working in Lansing, had produced a gasoline-powered vehicle in eighteen ninety-six and organized the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in eighteen ninety-seven, the world's first dedicated automobile factory. The curved-dash Oldsmobile, introduced in nineteen oh one, became the first mass-produced American automobile. Flint, meanwhile, was evolving from a carriage-manufacturing center into the home of Buick and, eventually, General Motors, which William Durant incorporated in nineteen oh eight, the same year Ford introduced the Model T.

What Michigan had was infrastructure. The carriage and wagon industries that had clustered around the state's wood and metalworking resources gave the new automobile companies an existing base of skilled machinists, suppliers, and capital. Detroit and its surrounding towns could build cars faster than anyone else because they had been building vehicles for a generation already.

The Model T put Michigan on a different plane. Ford's Highland Park plant, opened in nineteen ten, introduced the moving assembly line in nineteen thirteen, reducing the time to build a Model T from over twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. By nineteen eighteen, half of all the cars in the United States were Model Ts.

Michigan cities that had been mid-sized regional centers in eighteen ninety became major industrial metropolises by nineteen twenty. The state's population nearly doubled in thirty years. The auto industry made Michigan, for most of the twentieth century, the wealthiest industrial state per capita in the country.