THE footy, the farcical state of NSW politics and, oh, the global financial crisis meant the 100th anniversary of the first T-model Ford slipped by this week without much attention.

Tin Lizzie, as she was affectionately known, the world's

first and most famous mass-produced motor vehicle, an

nounced herself to the world on Thursday October 1, 1908.

Available in any colour so long as you wanted black,

15 million T-models were eventually produced in an

unchanged design that survived until 1927.

The T-model made Ford a worldwide brand.

It made its creator, Henry Ford, one of the most significant people that have ever lived.

Ford coughed up more than a basic car; he gave the

industrial world the moving assembly line when he shifted

production of the T-model into large-scale purpose-built

factories at his rural hometown, Dearborn, in Michigan.

But the moving assembly line and mass production were only one third of the Ford agenda.

The second part was paying Ford workers sufficient wages to afford to buy the very thing they were making.

And the third part was sending teams of counsellors to the homes of Ford workers showing them how to budget, how to save and how to use credit schemes wisely to buy a house and, of course, a T-model Ford to stand in the driveway.

And then Ford encouraged his fellow industrial barons to

do likewise, especially to raise wages so that US workers

could be cashed up consumers.

Why have the techniques of mass production, queried

Ford, if the general public lack the means of consumption?

Henry Ford was a complex character. Evidently he despised the financial dealers on Wall Street and their predatory ways.

Evidently he funded education and training programs

for poor black communities.

Evidently he whipped up considerable anti-Jewish hatred during the 1920s and was an open supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Evidently he grew bitter about American materialism,

the very thing that he was so instrumental in creating.

Which makes me wonder what Henry Ford would think

of the impact of the car on society 100 years after his

T-Model was launched.

What would he say if he could watch us inch our way

each morning onto congested motorways, fight for dear life over rare parking spots, spend more and more of our weekly budgets on petrol as its price soars, and be convinced that our lives are so much the better for having traded up to the new high-performance

turbo-charged whatever?

Phillip O'Neill is professor and Urban Research Centre

director for the University of Western Sydney.