A specialist form of art (UPDATE: Model R or S?)

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Two well-dressed ladies about to set off for far horizons. One problem, though, how to start the Model N? We don’t know if the young lad (Click!) voluntarily turns the crank or not. We do have some comments though, as hand cranking is a specialist form of art. First the boy should have planted his feet more firmly on the ground, one foot left and the other on the right of the crank. Too bad we can’t see how he holds the crank. If he does it the right way he has his thumb on the same site of his fingers, because if the engine backfires, the reversing crank can cause him a broken wrist or arm. Don’t laugh, it happened lots of times. In those days doctors even called it the ‘Ford Fracture’. (photo from the collections of The Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company).

Update III from Scott Barton: “…the car shown is either a Model R or S runabout. Both these models had full running boards with edged fenders. The N had step plates with simple ploughshare fenders. Only the shape of the turtledeck will distinguish between the R and S; the former being completely round to accommodate a spare tire, and the latter had a pointed deck like the N. (Editor RB: Scott could very well be right. When we received this photo it was labelled by Ford as a 1908 Model T. We then checked with Hugh Nutting who worked with the Ford Archives long before it was called The Henry Ford. He told us that many photos were misfiled and mislabelled. “Some of it was due to the fact the original Archives was housed in the Rotunda which burnt in the early 1960s. There were handwritten notes added in the rush to save and move what was left. In the early days of the Archives all the photos were in filing cabinets in brown envelopes. When they got requests for photos by model date, the staff (which was very small) would go to these envelopes and take out what ever body style was asked for. In the 1970s there was still stuff that had never been unwrapped from the fire at the Rotunda years before. There were handwritten notations "save for Mr. Ford" with no dating. They could have been written by department heads years ago or by employees cleaning up the fire.”)
Update II by George Irish: “My father was a doctor and he referred to this type of fracture as a "Chauffeur's Fracture". I believe it is recognised as such in the British medical textbooks of the time such as Gray's Anatomy.“
Update I comes from Tim Bailye: “Perhaps the small boy came as an optional extra for those not wanting to risk their forearms for such a menial task? Do other contributors find it as uncomfortable as I do to try and crank without using your thumb? How do lefthanders cope?”

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