Category: Today

In 1913, Ford Motor Company launched a new manner of production for the Model T: a continuously moving assembly line.

Earlier in the year, Ford employees had assembled magnetos using this technique, improving efficiency to a marked degree: “Instead of each worker assembling his own magneto, the assembly was divided into 29 operations performed by 29 men spaced along a moving belt,” explains History.com. “Average assembly time dropped from 20 minutes to 13 minutes and soon was down to five minutes.”

The chassis was added on such a line on October 7, so that “all the major components of the Model T were being assembled using this technique,” which, when combined with high wages, came to be known as “Fordism.”

The consequence? A complete commercial success for Henry Ford, so much so that “by 1916 the price of the Model T had fallen to $360 and sales were more than triple their 1912 level. Eventually, the company produced one Model T every 24 seconds, and the price fell below $300.”

On October 6, 1683, immigrant families found Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the first major immigration of German people to America. More Americans, today, consider themselves as deriving from German ethnic stock than from any other ethnicity.

On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.

On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning for Mojave Aerospace Ventures the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.

On October 3, 1789, George Washington proclaimed Thursday November 26, 1789, a Thanksgiving Day. On the same date in 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

On October 2, 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion — making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, archly referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”

His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.

The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a stroke of luck.

---

On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.

On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars — the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.

Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on September 30, 1882. Dubbed the Vulcan Street Plant, it was established on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, and was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891.

On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.

On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).

On September 28, 2008, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first private spacecraft to go into orbit around planet Earth.

SpaceX has achieved many records since.