Detroit – Geeky Girl Engineer

Today my cruise of the Great Lakes stopped in Detroit, and I took an excursion to the Ford Piquette Plant. It is a privately owned museum in the first building Henry Ford owned and operated as a plant. The first Model T’s were built at this plant. The museum has a great selection of early Ford Motors on exhibit including numerous Model T’s and earlier models, which is essentially the alphabet before the letter T. The museum has some old cars that were competitors of Ford Motors also. We had a wonderful tour guide who is a retired Ford Motors engineer and explained how these cars worked. His explanation of how car lights work, which I will not attempt to explain, quite frankly scared me. It just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. One thing I found really interesting was the realization that the cars before the Model T had the steering wheel on the right side. Our guide explained that for a variety of reasons, the steering wheels were all initially on the right side, but with the Model T, the company rethought if it should be on the right and changed it to the left. For about ten years after that, Ford’s were built with the steering wheel on the left, but other companies put theirs on the right. Then at some point, everyone decided to standardize it on the left.

Among the examples of other company’s cars is where a couple designed for women, including the Detroit Electric 75 Brougham, shown below. The car was amazingly electric (considering we still don’t have that many electric cars), and the interior was quite unusual. The driver would sit in the back seat. According to our guide, it was rude for a high class lady to speak to the back of another lady’s head, so the front seat is turned to face the back seat, so all the women are facing each other.

In summary, it is a fascinating museum.