Electric cars were fairly common in the late 1890s, but their popularity was fleeting thanks to the debut of the Ford Model T in 1908, which all but killed the market for electric vehicles. Henry Ford’s combustion engine car was twice as fast, had twice the range, and was much cheaper than the top-performing EV of the time, the Detroit Electric. By 1921 the base model Ford car cost just $370—about 12 percent of the Detroit Electric’s $2,985 starting price tag.

In 1914 Ford Motor Company decreased work shifts from nine hours to eight and increased the minimum wage of eligible workers to $5 a day (roughly 63 cents per hour), more than doubling the $2.34 average for the car industry. (The U.S. federal government wouldn’t establish a minimum wage until 1938, and then at only 25 cents an hour.) Ford was celebrated as a humanitarian and excoriated as a socialist, but he was simply trying to efficiently run the Ford plants 24 hours a day in three 8-hour shifts.

While many now advocate for the four-day workweek, the standard five-day workweek is just a century old. Henry Ford enacted the five-day workweek in 1926 at Ford Motor Company. Shorter workweeks were not only a key way of keeping more workers employed during the Great Depression, but employers also saw them as ways of reducing absenteeism and improving efficiencies. Henry Ford saw the new schedule as the key to the mass production of the Model T.