Were at the Detroit Historical museum, and were about to walk into a wonderful exhibit called americas motor city. Detroit has been the motor city capital of the world since at least 1915, when there were over 42 Companies Making cars and another 75 Companies Making parts. So we have been while other towns built cars, we built lots of cars. Prior to 1900, the detroit area enjoyed a wealth of strong manufacturing, a lot of it based in the building of carriage bodies, but also in building iron stoves and building Railroad Cars and building railroads, wheels and the rails that go with them. So detroit understood the manufacture ring process, but they also understood how to deal with steel, deal with iron, deal with would, deal with rubber. Detroit had all of those talents right here. And the designers and the toolmakers and the things that it took to make an automobile. So why dont we go inside and lets see. The first car that traveled on the streets of detroit. So what were looking at here looks very much like a Old Fashioned wagon and we just dont have a horse in front of it. In fact, the horses are sitting inside the vehicle. Its a motorized carriage, a horseless carriage. This was the very first car to operate on the streets of detroit. Charles brady king, not henry ford. Charles brady king was the guy who designed this car, designed the engine that went inside of it. Its an unusual engine. Its a force cylinder engine when at the time most people were using single or double cylinder engines. So real powerful little vehicle. Charles brady king and a buddy, oliver martel, who helped him with the engine, drove this down the streets of detroit in 1896. Henry ford was there. He was on a bicycle about 25 feet behind chasing him. Well, starting in the 1870s, 1880s, people started to understand that, you could take a steam engine or a naphtha engine and apply it to an automobile. Eventually, electricity was also used to do that. Electric cars existed before gasoline engines. But a gentleman from grand rapids also here in michigan, named since developed a gasoline powered engine and took it to the colombian exhibition in 1893. In chicago. And he showed it off to everybody. And a lot of guys from detroit, from lansing, from chicago, milwaukee, cleveland, all of these people saw this gasoline engine and all of a sudden the gasoline engine became the most popular way of powering cars. Probably the biggest problem that these early vehicles ran into was the lack of decent roads. The bicycle folk people who enjoyed riding bicycles had started a moveme cled the goodoads movement to make the roads better. So the bicyclists kind of got some of the roads paved, but once you got outside of the city center, which here in the downtown detroit would have been just a mile or two outside of the the real core of the city. You were back on country roads and in detroit its mostly clay. If it rains, youre in trouble. That was probably the biggest challenge for early motorists. They were constant, only getting stuck in the mud. Charles brady king he went on and started the king automobile company, the king car company, and he put out a number of cars, most of them handbuilt. He hadnt adapted the Assembly Line yet, and eventually he sold that company out and went on to other things. In fact, when the 50th anniversary of his ride down the streets of detroit came up, he had this replica built. So that people could see him and he drove this car down woodward avenue, right down the middle of town to show off. What was his big invention 50 years before . So what youre looking at here is a 1903 olds curved dash runabout made by ransome. Also here in detroit. Ransom had started a company was one of the very first to get in the manufacturing business. Unfortunately, his factory burned down just as he was about to go into production on several different models. And the only one that survived was the curved dash. All started producing it in 1901 and it really became the first mass produced automobile in the United States. He figured out the Assembly Line something most people credit henry ford with both of those gentlemen learned about Assembly Lines from other products that were mass produced. And in detroits case, we learned a lot from the chicago stockyards where they used Assembly Lines to disassemble meat. Ransom also was able to get a patent on the Assembly Line, and he brought it to detroit and down near belle isle, he started mass producing the curved dash poles and it became the most popular and one of the most affordable early cars in detroit and in the United States. While ransome all started, his old motor works here in detroit, he eventually lost the company and it became a an offshoot of the General Motors organization, which was being formed about this time. General motors renamed the company oldsmobile, which of course, was a popular brand in the United States for many, many decades. Ransome olds, not to be outdone, returned to his hometown of lansing and started up real automobiles. Ransome e, olds, re0. Most people would probably recognize that from the Reo Speedwagon model that he produced and a name that was adapted by a band back in, i think, 1970s. There were a number of companies that were trying to get going at this time charles brady, king was trying to get his company going. There was a Company Called loja, which was making beautiful luxury automobiles. Prior to 1910. Curiously, both of those companies were out of business as the rest of detroits automobile business started growing and growing very quickly. Henry ford stumbled kind of through it. He had three different companies, the first to kind of went out of business. The first one went really out of business. The second one was taken away from him and eventually adapted into the cadillac motorcar company. So with his third ed company, Ford Motor Company, he started developing several different models, not far from this museum over on piquette avenue. And he each one of them had had a letter denomination. And so he was doing the as and bs and fs and ends and eventually he got to what would be the model t, but it was a Long Time Coming before his Business Manager said henry, you know, youve got a good car here. Lets market it. Lets sell it. And he did. And they actually made most of the model. Ts up in Highland Park, just north of the museum here. And they were turning out thousands, millions of cars during that decade. There was a point 1915, 1920, when half the automobile bills on the roads of the United States were made by the Ford Motor Company in Highland Park. So by the time henry ford was making model ts, a lot of other companies were starting up and had decided this was a great idea. And some of them were companies that werent necessarily involved initially in automobile manufacturing. The folks who ran the detroit news decided to start their own company. The guys who had the biggest music store and penny piano manufacturer in detroit just started to start a an automobile company. The Hudson Company, which was a basically detroits Large Department store, think macys or marshall fields. The Hudson Company decided to start its own auto manufacturer with roy chapman kind of at the lead of that. And the hudson motors for many years was a real hard charging leader of the automobile business here in detroit in 1950. Detroit had 42 manufacturing Companies Making automobiles and another 70 some making parts. We also saw in the latter part of the 19 teens we saw a lot of organizations coming together. General motors at this time was buying up other companies and incorporating them into the General Motors brand. Ford had kind of consolidated his plant up in Highland Park and it was develop in the future. The rouge plant, which became the largest industrial manufacturing facility in the world. And we also had walter chrysler, who was picking up the maxwell and briscoe names and coordinating those into the chrysler brand. So two or three of them really bubbled to the top. They eventually became the big three that detroit is so well known for. The ford motor Motor CompanyGeneral Motors and chrysler. Detroits early Industrial History prior to the turn of the last century brought in many immigrants, mostly from western europe. And they settled here and they took good jobs and they helped build the industries that they were involved in. Following the turn of the 19th century. We had had quite an influx of people from mediterranean countries, from Eastern Europe that really helped build detroit into this wonderful melting pot of various neighborhoods, very, very polish neighborhoods, serbian, lithuanian, russian, hungarian. And there were lots and lots of folks that were living amongst each other. And working together in the car companies. In fact, ive heard the rouge plant described kind of as the tower of babel because there were so many different languages from cyrillic to the arabic being spoken on the same Assembly Line. Many of those people who came here settled in their families have worked in the plants for years. Many generations. One after another, in the 1920s, 1930s, the great migration brought both white and black workers into the factory arena. Black workers tended to be in kind of the dirtier and tougher jobs in the foundries, in the wheel work, things like that. The white workers tended to get the the Assembly Line jobs during World War Two. Much of this changed a lot of younger guys took off to go fight in the war and the whole process within the plant started to include Older Workers and started to include women. It started to include handicapped workers. And there was a whole there was a real change in kind of the dynamic on the factory floor. This dynamic is reflected today in the people who are still working in the business. We still have immigrants coming into detroit to work in the automobile business or work for many of the suppliers that are either were started here or have satellite offices here because of the strength of the automobile business, detroit is still a very, very dynamic town as far as the folks who live here and the different backgrounds. And its really its really given detroit a a Stronger Community sometimes there are some battles, sometimes theres some lack of acceptance. But over time, weve worked to try to get through those problems. What we see behind me here now is an Assembly Line, a real Assembly Line. This is the body drop portion of the cadillac. Clark Street Assembly plant. When the plant was closed, cadillac, dont did this to us and we brought it into the museum, set it up and you can now watch an actual 1970 era body drop in operation that the Assembly Line was an idea that had already been established. Detroit manufacturers merely took advantage of it, and they took advantage of it to a wonderful degree. Ford, when he got going with his model t, he had efficiency experts that came in and made sure that his move in Assembly Line was the most efficient way to make a car and i think they they took the number of hours necessary to build an automobile from somewhere near 30 down to about two. I mean, it was it was a tremendous change. And it made it possible for henry ford, who had started selling his model. Ts at about 800 bucks to bring that price down to about 500. So that it made it much more affordable for the normal working man to be able to get an automobile. While the Assembly Line was great for the manufacturing process, for actually turning out a car very quickly, Assembly Lines were very, very tough on the workers who had to be in the factories and the factories themselves changed when the automobile business got started here. Most of the factories were kind of built along the old New England Mills style of architecture, and they found that that just wasnt going to work for all of the oil that was going on, for all the big heavy machinery stamping machinery that they needed. They needed a different kind of architecture and albert kahn kind of became the foremost industrial architect in the United States by building a feasible floorplan for automobile plants. And they got big. And the the Assembly Line kind of took over these big plants. And they would employ thousands of people up in Highland Park. We got the great postcards were about every three years. The number of people working there goes up by 10,000 to the point where hes got 50,000 employees working in one major plant. And these people are working hard and its dangerous work. Its very repetitive. Theyre doing the same thing every day today. They kind of try to change up jobs. Theyve come up with a ergonomic ways of of designing the machinery. Back then, it was none of that. Initially, these jobs paid living wages, but then henry ford decided that one of the best things he could do if he wanted to get the best workers was to raise the wages. And in 1915, he instituted what was known as the 5 a day wage. Now, not everybody got 5 a day. You had to be a very good worker. You had to sign some papers and agree to do some things. Ford. Ford would actually send people out to look at your house and make sure that you were living in good conditions and that you were taking care of your children and maybe even going to church. So the 5 day wasnt for everyone, but it really did change the dynamics of working detroit. Once people heard about these jobs, they started flowing into town to take them. Initially, the people who got those jobs were very often people who worked in other industries. They might have worked in the stoves Manufacturing Industry or the shipbuilding industry, which was big in detroit. And because the automobile jobs paid better, they were pulling workers away from those industries to the detriment of those other industries. Many of them went away in the 1920, 19, 24 period. The federal government kind of shut down immigration. They put kind of a closure on it. It did. They didnt close it all together, but they made it harder for Automobile Companies to get those valuable employees. And so the Automobile Companies were starting to recruit down south. They were going down to the appalachian area and recruiting whites, and they were pulling blacks off of the the the scramble farms, hardscrabble farms down in georgia and mississippi and bringing those folks up here that very much changed the dynamic of the city of detroit. We had a large number of immigrants, many of whom didnt speak english or were first generation english speakers. We also had a lot of blacks and whites from the south who brought some of their own baggage with them. Some of it was good. The music, the food was wonderful. Some of the other baggage not so great. Of course, the United States south has had a long history of Racial Discrimination and in the 1920s, the people who the whites would come out of the appalachian states brought that with them, and detroit had a huge contingent of the ku klux klan here, probably second only to the southern states. We were we were the northern stronghold. And they would have marches down woodward avenue that would include 10,000 people in white robes. They burned crosses on the front lawn of the city hall and the front lawn of the courthouse. They really helped get a really bad mayor elected. There was there were there were some serious baggage that came up with those folks. And it took many, many years until well after World War Two to even start to address some of those issues and some of those issues. Were still living with today. Labor unions are a voice, a bargaining agent, a source of protection. The formation of unions within automobile factories and plants came relatively late. There were enough immigrant here in detroit and people coming in constantly that it was pretty easy to replace either poor workers or workers who who fought the corporation for pay and days off and things like that. Most workers worked six days a week and sometimes would even go in for the seven, stay for the extra money. It was during the the depression when the times were toughest in detroit that really the automobile manufacture hiring workers started pushing back. And it was in the 1934, 35, 36 time period when the growth of the uaw, the growth of the Teamsters Union here in detroit, really kind of changed attitudes within the plant. And the big the big strikes were the flint sit down strike. But soon after that, there were strikes at kelsey hayes at chrysler and ford being the last one to go was really quite a contentious change. These were not happy times. Union workers were fighting very hard against automobile management that didnt want to give up any kind of control within the plant. They wanted worker bees to get paid and go home and not talk back. And the