An interview with Sarah Colt, producer/writer/director for "Henry Ford." Premiering January 29, 2013 at 9/8c on PBS.

For many years, Henry Ford took annual camping trips with the "vagabonds" - his close friends Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and John Burroughs - with an entourage of servants, photographers, friends and family often in tow. On several occasions a president even joined along - President Harding in 1921 and Coolidge in 1923. Here, the group dined around a giant lazy Susan during their 1923 trip.

Inspired by the moving lines used at meat-packing plants, Ford’s factory tested an assembly line in the flywheel magneto department. Rather than having one person build a coil at a time, the supervisor broke down the individual tasks into a sequence driven by a conveyor. The new system reduced the time it took to make a magneto from twenty minutes to thirteen minutes, ten seconds.

In October of 1908, Henry Ford introduced the newest addition to his alphabet line—the Model T. It had a four-cylinder, 20 horsepower engine, a vastly improved transmission and an ingenious magnetic generator that provided power for an ignition and lights. At a time when the average car cost more than two thousand dollars, the Model T sold for just eight hundred and fifty.

The River Rouge factory complex took 10 years to build and was compromised of 93 buildings which housed 120 miles of conveyors. There were 15 miles of roadways and 100 miles of railroad within the plant just to move things around. Water pumped from the Detroit River supplied the complex with 700 million gallons a day—as much water as consumed by Detroit, Cincinnati and New Orleans combined.

When Goethals replaced Stevens as Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal, the bulk of the work still lay ahead. Goethals shifted priority to excavation of the Culebra Cut, making it a 24-hour operation. As many as 6,000 men were at work on the cut at any given time. Without any warning, landslides would occur and wipe out months of work in an instant, destroying machinery and burying workers alive.

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation pulled abolitionists like the former slave Frederick Douglass and the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison into full support of the war.

Would President Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation? Abolitionists were unsure.

By 1859, the conflict between North and South challenged Garrison's "peace man" status.

In 1859 John Brown went on trial for the raid on Harpers Ferry. The raid itself had failed, but Brown successfully brought attention his cause.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott, a slave who sought freedom via the courts. With the ruling the Court radically altered not just the battle over slavery, but the status of every black person in America.

The Mexican-American war (1846-1848) changed the slavery debate. It almost doubled the size of the United States and began a debate, between Northerners and Southerners, over what to do with the newly acquired land.

In his 1845 book, Frederick Douglass told the truth about his life as a slave, despite the risk.

Map history with American Experience! You can relive the history of the abolitionist movement on American Experience's Mapping History iPhone app and explore places central to the nation's anti-slavery effort. Dozens of museums, institutions and PBS stations have partnered with American Experience to bring you archival images, documents and videos related to abolitionism.

In 1859 John Brown seized a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, but failed to incite a revolution. Authorities found a link between Brown and Frederick Douglass.

John Brown put little stock in the idea of abolition through peaceful means. In 1855, he gathered his arsenal and left his home for the slave state of Kansas where he would begin his bloody struggle.

A wave of resistance to slavery led to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which imposed the rule of Slave states onto Free states.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and changed American opinions on slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin reached a vast audience, and made millions of Americans see slavery, for the first time, through the eyes of its victims.

By 1850, Frederick Douglass begins to doubt that a peaceful end to slavery is possible, putting him in opposition to white abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison.

The 1839 book 'American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses', written by Theodore Weld, his wife Angelina Grimke, and her sister Sarah Grimke, documented slavery's horrors.