Ford Builds Quadricycle: The Auto Age Starts

Henry Ford test-drove his first automobile at four in the morning because the door of his workshop was too small to fit the vehicle through. Ford had built the Quadricycle in a brick shed behind his rented home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, and when the machine was finished on June 4, 1896, he had to smash the door frame with an axe to get it out. His wife Clara held an umbrella against the rain as Ford drove the contraption through empty streets with a friend bicycling ahead to warn the occasional horse-drawn cart. The Quadricycle was primitive even by 1896 standards. Four bicycle wheels supported a lightweight frame with a two-cylinder ethanol engine that produced about four horsepower. The vehicle had no reverse gear, no brakes to speak of, and a tiller for steering instead of a wheel. Top speed was roughly twenty miles per hour. Ford had built it over two years of evenings and weekends while working as chief engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, spending his salary on parts and borrowing tools from machine shops around Detroit. Ford was not the first American to build a gasoline automobile. The Duryea brothers had built and driven one in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893. Ransom Olds, Alexander Winton, and several other inventors were developing competing designs simultaneously. What distinguished Ford was not the Quadricycle itself but the obsession it represented. He immediately began building a second, improved vehicle, and then a third. He was consumed by a single idea: that automobiles should not be luxury toys for the wealthy but affordable machines for ordinary workers. That idea would take twelve more years to realize. Ford founded two companies that failed before establishing the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The Model T arrived in 1908. The moving assembly line followed in 1913, cutting the car’s price from $850 to $260 and putting fifteen million of them on American roads. Every one of them descended from the crude machine that emerged through a broken doorway at four in the morning.