Good morning, Whitewater.
A new month begins with partly cloudy skies and a high of sixty. Sunrise is 6:52 and sunset 6:35, for 11h 42m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets this evening at 6:00 PM.
On this day in 1908, Henry Ford reveals a production model car that will transform American and global transportation:
On October 1, 1908, the first production Model T Ford is completed at the company’s Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford would build some 15 million Model T cars. It was the longest production run of any automobile model in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
Before the Model T, cars were a luxury item: At the beginning of 1908, there were fewer than 200,000 on the road. Though the Model T was fairly expensive at first (the cheapest one initially cost $825, or about $18,000 in today’s dollars), it was built for ordinary people to drive every day. It had a 22-horsepower, four-cylinder engine and was made of a new kind of heat-treated steel, pioneered by French race car makers, that made it lighter (it weighed just 1,200 pounds) and stronger than its predecessors had been. It could go as fast as 40 miles per hour and could run on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (When oil prices dropped in the early 20th century, making gasoline more affordable, Ford phased out the hemp option.) “No car under $2,000 offers more,” ads crowed, “and no car over $2,000 offers more except the trimmings.”
The design was revolutionary:
The Model T was designed by Childe Harold Wills, and Hungarian immigrants Joseph A. Galamb[17] and Eugene Farkas.[18] Henry Love, C. J. Smith, Gus Degner and Peter E. Martin were also part of the team.[19] Production of the Model T began in the third quarter of 1908.[20] Collectors today sometimes classify Model Ts by build years and refer to these as “model years“, thus labeling the first Model Ts as 1909 models. This is a retroactive classification scheme; the concept of model years as we conceive it today did not exist at the time. The nominal model designation was “Model T”, although design revisions did occur during the car’s two decades of production….
The Model T had a front-mounted 177-cubic-inch (2.9 L) inline four-cylinder engine, producing 20 hp (15 kW), for a top speed of 40–45 mph (64–72 km/h). According to Ford Motor Company, the Model T had fuel economy on the order of 13–21 mpg-US (16–25 mpg-imp; 18–11 L/100 km).[21] The engine was capable of running on gasoline, kerosene, or ethanol,[22][23] although the decreasing cost of gasoline and the later introduction of Prohibition made ethanol an impractical fuel for most users.
The ignition system used an unusual trembler coil system to drive the spark plugs, as used for stationary gas engines, rather than the expensive magnetos that were used on other cars. This ignition also made the Model T more flexible as to the quality or type of fuel it used. The need for a starting battery and also Ford’s use of an unusual AC alternator located inside the flywheel housing encouraged the adoption of electric lighting, rather than oil or acetylene lamps, but it also delayed the adoption of electric starting.
Here’s the Thursday game from Puzzability:
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This Week’s Game — September 28-October 2
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Blended Wines
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We have some lovely pairings this week. For each day, we’ve taken the name of a wine, added a letter, and scrambled all the letters to get a new word. The answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the wine followed by the longer word. The clue includes the lengths of the answer words in parentheses.
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Example:
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Person attending a party in honor of a dry red wine (8,9)
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Answer:
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Cabernet celebrant
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What to Submit:
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Submit the phrase, with the wine first (as “Cabernet celebrant” in the example), for your answer.
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Thursday, October 1
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