moving assembly line

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

Peter Drucker, a highly respected management guru, argued that the source of productivity in a knowledge-driven economy was different from an earlier age of mass production. Then the revolution in productivity, which he credited to Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s system of scientific management, was achieved through the application of knowledge to work.2 It was the organization of factory production based on the moving assembly line that created the mass production of autos, TVs, and washing machines and fueled the consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s. In today’s knowledge economy, Drucker believed that competitive advantage has come to depend on the productivity of knowledge— using existing knowledge to create new knowledge.3 The use of existing ideas to create new ideas also required a change in the role of management from responsibility “for the performance of people” to responsibility “for the application and performance of knowledge.”4 This is why knowledge management has become a key business issue.

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Yet it was the rise of mass assembly-line production associated with the name of Henry Ford that ensured Taylor his place in economic history. Ford drew on a range of innovations that were prevalent at the time, although he denied that scientific management had influenced the creation of the moving assembly line that employed mass ranks of low-skill workers responsible for carrying out the same monotonous tasks. Craft skills were broken down into their most rudimentary form, reduced to a series of simple repetitive operations of the order of punching a hole in metal plates thousands of times a day without moving from the machine.

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In his description of factory life, he talked of “men and machine united in 70 The Global Auction production” in a fashion similar to Herbert Stimpson but recognized a major difference between the two. While both men and machines need repairs and replacements, “machinery wears out and needs to be restored. Men grow uppish, lazy, or careless.”22 Despite such human glitches, the moving assembly line gave management a new weapon in the struggle to impose the techniques and disciplines of mass production on workers. The key challenge for management now became combining materials and humans to produce quality goods at the maximum speed possible.23 The pros and cons of scientific management and Fordist mass production have continued to generate heated debate.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

But in the summer of 1913 Ford began to experiment with moving, electrically driven assembly lines, an idea the company borrowed from meatpacking plants in Chicago, where multiple workers collaborated to disassemble animal carcasses being carried along by an overhead “trolley” system. To begin with, a moving assembly line was used to assemble the Model T’s magneto (part of the ignition system), and over the following year the process was gradually expanded to cover the whole vehicle. A moving assembly line meant workers stayed still and repeatedly performed the same task on an incomplete vehicle as it went past them. This limited how long they could take and forced them to become skilled at performing a particular operation quickly.

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The Model T captured 11 percent of the American car market in its first year on sale, and in the years that followed its market share steadily ticked upwards, from 27 percent in 1911 to 46 percent in 1914 to 55 percent in 1923, while the price ticked steadily downward, from $850 in 1908 to $298 in 1923. By extending car ownership down the income scale, the Model T brought motoring to the masses. Its runaway success stemmed not just from its use of vanadium steel, but also from its low production cost, which in turn depended on the radical new way in which it was built: on a moving assembly line. The Model T did more than just redefine how cars were built. It set the twentieth-century template for mass production of consumer goods of all kinds. Advertisement for the original Ford Model T, 1908. The text, like the car itself, is practical and no-nonsense. ANY COLOR, AS LONG AS IT’S BLACK The idea of what we now call mass production using interchangeable parts had originated in the nineteenth century and was originally known as “the American system of manufactures.”

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This limited how long they could take and forced them to become skilled at performing a particular operation quickly. “The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on a nut does not tighten it,” Ford later explained. In all, the Model T’s construction was decomposed into 7,882 separate tasks. This degree of specialization, combined with the regimented coordination of a moving assembly line, took mass production to new level of efficiency. Production time for a single vehicle fell from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes, with a new car rolling off the line every three minutes. It was noisy and tedious for workers, but it was also surprisingly well paid: from 1914 Ford paid $5 for an eight-hour day, about double the industry’s going rate.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

It is also known as scientific management for this reason. Combining the moving assembly line with the Taylorist principle, the mass production system was born in the early years of the twentieth century. It is often called Fordism because it was first perfected – but not ‘invented’, as the folklore goes – by Henry Ford in his Model-T car factory in 1908. The idea is that production costs can be cut by producing a large volume of standardized products, using standardized parts, dedicated machinery and a moving assembly line. This would also make workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control, because, performing standardized tasks, they need to have relatively few skills.

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Unlike the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, which had been invented by practical men with good intuition, these new technologies were developed through the systematic application of scientific and engineering principles. This meant that, once something was invented, it could be replicated and improved upon very quickly. In addition, organization of the production process was revolutionized in many industries by the invention of the mass production system. The use of a moving assembly line (conveyor belt) and interchangeable parts dramatically lowered production costs. This system of production is the backbone (if not the entirety) of our production system today, despite frequent talks of its demise since the 1980s. New economic institutions emerge to deal with growing production scale, risk, and instability During its ‘high noon’, capitalism acquired the basic institutional shape that it has today – the limited liability company, bankruptcy law, the central bank, the welfare state, labour laws and so on.

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A lot of them are due to improvements in organizational skills – or, if you like, management techniques. In the early nineteenth century, factory productivity was further raised by lining up the workers in accordance with the order of their tasks within the production process. The assembly line was born. In the late nineteenth century, the assembly line was put on a conveyor belt. The moving assembly line made it possible for capitalists to increase the pace of work simply by turning up the speed of the conveyor belt. Outside industries like the automobile industry, in which one continuous assembly line basically decides who does what at which speed, improvements in the design of work flow have been an important source of productivity growth – how different machines are arranged, how different tasks are assigned to different workers, where parts and half-finished products are stored and so on.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

Centuries of craft production were replaced with the advent, first of mass production on the moving assembly line, and secondly the advent of lean production - concepts that have spread to dominate other industries too. It took just 10 years between 1914 and 1924 for 3 manufacturers to grab 90% of the US car market, at the expense of the hitherto dominant craft producers, of which there were hundreds. For the century, innovation within the automotive sector has brought major technological advances, leading to safer, cleaner, and more affordable vehicles. But for the most part, since Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, the changes have been incremental, evolutionary.

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Only 4,000 cars were sold in the U.S in 1900, representing approximately one car for every 20,000 residents. At this time, it’s fairly safe to say the car was still a niche product. Henry Ford released the iconic Model T in 1908, but there was still less than one car for every 400 residents. It wasn’t until 1914, one year after Ford’s moving assembly line had been in full swing, that the car became part of the average American experience. By 1914, the U.S. boasted 1.7 million cars, or about one car for every 60 residents. Fast-forward to 1925, and there were more than 20 million automobiles registered — enough for the vast majority of urban households to own a car of their own.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

By 2022, there will be: “Growth of the Internet of Things and in the Number of Connected Devices Is Driven by Emerging Applications and Business Models, and Supported by Standardization and Falling Device Costs,” Internet of Things Forecast, Ericsson.com, https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/internet-of-things-forecast. When Henry Ford proved: “Celebrating the Moving Assembly Line in Pictures,” Ford Media Center, September 12, 2013, https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/features/celebrating-the-moving-assembly-line-in-pictures.html. In 1961, a California start-up: David Laws, “Fairchild Semiconductor: The 60th Anniversary of a Silicon Valley Legend,” Computer History Museum, September 19, 2017. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist: “World Wide Web,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Wide-Web.

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Bezos has created one of the most aggressive and successful implementers of robotics, big data, and AI in history, and while the company has so far been creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, that trend will soon reverse itself as AI and robotics improve and more and more companies around the globe begin to adopt Bezonomics. Think of Bezonomics as the beginning of a new paradigm for doing business. When Henry Ford proved in 1913 that the moving assembly line worked, a handful of other carmakers copied the process and eventually built the largest car industry in the world. Hundreds of small auto shops, filled with skilled craftsmen painstakingly assembling vehicles one at a time, held on for a while, but then closed their doors completely. In 1961, a California start-up named Fairchild Semiconductor started selling the first microchip, an invention that allowed the miniaturization of electronics and led to corporations using computers to expand globally at a level never before seen.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

And while successful firms might offer a marginally higher rate to attract better workers, they weren’t supposed to double the going rate at a single stroke. Ford himself described his plan as “the greatest revolution in the matter of rewards for its workers ever known in the industrial world.”4 Henry Ford’s motivations for the decision were complex. Part of the rationale lay in conditions at Ford’s Highland Park factory: the company’s moving assembly lines had greatly increased the speed with which automobiles could be constructed, and more laborers were needed to keep up with the machines. Another part of the equation was the morale of Ford workers: attrition rates were shockingly high, and Ford sought a way to encourage loyalty to his company.

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Ford had put a rudimentary assembly line in place in 1906, when manager Walter Flanders had had the idea of giving each worker a specific task to perform in the assembly of the Model N and placed the chassis on a truck to be pushed from station to station. But the real breakthrough came in 1912, when William Klann, a foreman at the Ford Motor Company, visited the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Chicago and saw how quickly the packers could “disassemble” pigs placed on a moving trolley overhead. In 1913, Ford introduced the moving assembly line for one part of the Model T, the flywheel magneto that formed the ignition system for the vehicle. Previously, individual workers would assemble entire magnetos from a pile of materials located next to them. A skilled worker could, on average, complete a magneto in twenty minutes. But Klann broke down the assembly process into twenty-nine different tasks and had each worker perform just one of them, with twenty-nine men located along a moving belt in the order in which assembly typically took place.

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When foremen discovered that the process was slowed down by workers having to bend over to reach the trolley, they raised it and reduced assembly times to seven minutes and then five. The simple change—of breaking down assembly into simple, standardized tasks—had quadrupled output. Soon the moving assembly line was introduced into all areas of the plant. By 1914, it had dramatically reduced the time needed to make a Model T. Whereas previously assembling the car’s chassis had taken twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes, in the summer of 1914 it took one hour and thirty-three minutes.22 The Crystal Palace had transformed itself into the most efficient system of production the world had ever seen.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Mar 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT This in turn made many: Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, “Norfolk Four-Course System,” accessed August 18, 2023, britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Assembly lines are dreary: “Moving Assembly Line Debuts at Ford Factory,” History, October 6, 2020, history.com/this-day-in-history/moving-assembly-line-at-ford. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT By the end of the decade: G. N. Georgano, Cars: Early and Vintage, 1886–1930 (London: Grange-Universal, 1985). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the optimal shovel load: For more on Taylor and shovels, see “Frederick Winslow Taylor, the Patron Saint of the Shovel,” Mental Floss, April 27, 2015, mentalfloss.com/article/63341/frederick-winslow-taylor-patron-saint-shovel.

The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 28 Dec 1994

The computer program instructs the machine tool on how to produce a part, and instructs robots on the line to shape or assemble parts into a product. Numerical control has been called "probably the most significant new development in manufacturing technology since Henry Ford introduced the concept of the moving assembly line."31 From the management perspective, numerical control greatly enhanced efficiency and productivity while at the same time diminishing the need for human labor on the factory floor. All of the skills, knowledge, and expertise that were heretofore embedded in the minds of the workers were effectively transferred 68 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION onto a tape, allowing the manufacturing process to be controlled from a distance, with far less need of direct supervision or intervention at the point of production.

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Ford was the first automaker to mass produce a standardized product using interchangeable parts. Because the individual components were always cut and shaped exactly the same, they could be attached to each other quickly and simply, without requiring a skilled craftsman to put them together. To quicken the process of attachment, Ford introduced a moving assembly line to the factory floor-an innovation he first observed in the giant slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards. By bringing the car directly to the worker, he shaved precious time off the production process and was able to control the pace of movement in the factory. By the 1920S Ford was mass producing more than 2 million automobiles a year, each one identical in every detail to the one before and after it on the assembly line. 14 Ford once quipped that his customers could choose any color they wanted for their Model T as long as it was black.

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One enthusiastic supporter in the 1930S exclaimed, "Think of the results to the industrial world of putting on the market a product that doubles the malleable iron consumption, triples the plate-glass 130 THE DEC LIN E 0 F THE G LOB ALL ABO R FOR C E consumption, and quadruples the use of rubber.... As a consumer of raw material, the automobile has no equal in the history of the world."5 The importance of the automobile to the glob~ economy andjobs is unquestionable. From the time Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line, automakers have experimented with thousands of innovations to increase production and reduce labor in the production process. Ford himself took pride in his company's ability to substitute technology for physical labor, and was continually engaged in finding new ways to reduce tasks to simple effortless operations.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

The payment of workers became tied to working hours, and labour was regimented and synchronised via the adoption of clock time. By the twentieth century, industrialisation had provided unparalleled opportunities for managers to co-ordinate the pace and procedures of the labour process. Work was divided down into predictable, routine tasks, and the pace of work was dictated by the moving assembly line. Alertness and punctuality were policed via penalties and surveillance technologies, and workers were reminded, as per Benjamin Franklin’s well-known dictum, that ‘time is money’. Through these combined processes, punctuality, efficiency and productivity became the mottos of the working day (Thompson, 1967).

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As many critics have pointed out, these techniques found their ultimate expression in Taylorism: the set of organisational practices famously developed by the American engineer Frederick Taylor in the late nineteenth century. Capitalism’s unscrupulous pursuit of efficiency and profit meant that no decision about the pace or techniques of the labour process would be left to the worker’s discretion. The developments associated with Taylorism were perfected in Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, which churned out identical Model T cars at a highly predictable rate of production, but not without significant spiritual costs for the worker. As the more uniquely human qualities such as initiative, creativity and cooperation were expelled from the labour process, critics argued that work condemned us to act not as human beings but as impersonal, interchangeable units of labour power.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Mass production was rooted in Eli Whitney’s “uniformity system” for manufacturing first cotton gins and then muskets in the late eighteenth century. Henry Ford took this philosophy to a new level, not only breaking every task down into its smallest component parts but adding a moving assembly line. Long lines of workers now stood at their stations repeating the same mechanical task over and over. Ford built the moving assembly line into a vast system of production and distribution in which everything was designed to boost efficiency and maximize control. Vertical integration meant that his employees made almost everything in-house. A national network of seven thousand dealers meant that Tin Lizzies were available in the smallest towns.

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In nineteenth-century Europe, the production of complicated systems such as guns or clocks remained in the hands of individual master craftsmen. In America, Eli Whitney and other innovators broke down the manufacture of the machine into the manufacture of uniform parts. In 1913, Henry Ford added a moving assembly line, which brought the job to the man. America’s success in producing better machines and smoother production processes has been recognized by even the crudest intellects. Stalin described America as a “country of machines.”8 Hitler claimed that Nazism was “Fordism plus the Fuhrer.” These big forces are supplemented by more subtle ones.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

The roads, the garages, the urban development, the planned communities, the population mobility, the advent of megacities, the burned oil, the mass production, the new American economy, the eight-hour workday. The Model T had a soul and a momentous story, the story of modern civilization. That story couldn’t have been told without Henry Ford’s invention, in 1913, of the moving assembly line, an innovation that dramatically sped up and reduced the cost of manufacturing the Model T. The moving assembly line brought the price of the Model T down from $850 in 1908 to $360 in 1916, helping to push the vehicles out of the realm of the elite and into the garages of the middle class. A century later, Tesla’s Gigafactory, essential to its mass-market hopes, stood to have a similar catalytic effect on the spread of electric vehicles.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

Though design and emotion still matter to all car companies, the core challenge they face is ensuring that every car that comes off their assembly line is built efficiently and as close to its specification as possible. As the technology analyst Horace Dediu points out, all the most important innovations in the history of the car industry have been focused on this fundamental production challenge. The first major production innovation, Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, gave birth to both the industrial age and the first truly global automaker. Though the Model T had undeniable design advantages, its utter dominance of the early car market was a product of Ford’s manufacturing breakthrough, which continuously lowered the price of the car and thus expanded its market.

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Today, Citroën is just one of many purveyors of front-drive unibody cars, slowly losing ground to competitors whose much later mastery of its inventions have not prevented them from eclipsing the pioneering firm. Throughout the history of the auto industry, this pattern has repeated itself again and again. Before Citroën, Henry Ford’s moving assembly line earned the Ford Motor Company a few decades of utter dominance before the entire industry adopted it, removing it as a competitive factor. More recently, GM’s innovation of connected vehicle telematics (OnStar) and Ford’s early voice-control infotainment (SYNC) lead have failed to translate into durable competitive advantages.

The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
Published 1 Jan 2004

Olds had been the first automaker to buy different parts from different manufacturers, instead of making them all itself. Cadillac became the first manufacturer successfully to use standardized components, which cut down on the time and cost of manufacturing. And Ford, of course, revolutionized the industry with the moving assembly line and a relentless focus on producing one kind of car as cheaply as possible. By the time of World War I, there were still more than a hundred automakers in America. But more than four hundred car companies had gone out of business or been acquired, including the Olds Motor Works, which had been bought by General Motors.

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In the first stage of this process, the list of possible solutions is so long that the smart thing to do is to send out as many scout bees as possible. You can think of Ransom Olds and Henry Ford and the countless would-be automakers who tried and failed, then, as foragers. They discovered (in this case, by inventing) the sources of nectar—the gasoline-powered car, mass production, the moving assembly line—and then asked the crowd to render its verdict. You might even see Olds’s publicity stunts as a kind of equivalent to the waggle dance. One key to this approach is a system that encourages, and funds, speculative ideas even though they have only slim possibilities of success. Even more important, though, is diversity—not in a sociological sense, but rather in a conceptual and cognitive sense.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

In 1913, Henry Ford created the first moving assembly line, which used electricity and conveyor belts to reduce the production time per car from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes, while also using less power. According to the historian David Nye, Ford’s famous Highland Park plant was “built on the assumption that electrical light and power should be available everywhere.”6 Once a few factories began this transformation, the entire market was forced to catch up, thereby spurring more investment and innovation in electricity-based infrastructure, equipment, and processes. Within a year of its first moving assembly line, Ford was producing more cars than the rest of the industry combined.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
by A. J. Baime
Published 2 Jun 2014

as FDR’s army chief of staff, [>] meeting with Knudsen, [>] on poorly equipped US Army, [>] Sorensen’s introduction of HF2 to, [>] Martin, Glenn, [>] mass production of aircraft engines, [>] of airplanes, [>], [>], [>] application to genocide, [>] of B-24 Liberator, [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] converting from cars to military production, [>], [>], [>]–[>] and the moving assembly line, [>], [>], [>], [>] successful use of in Nazi Germany, [>], [>]–[>] See also Battle of Production; bomber-an-hour goal; Highland Park factory; River Rouge factory; war production; Willow Run bomber plant Mateer, John, [>] Mayo, William, [>] Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, high-altitude experiments at, [>] McClure (Ford family doctor), [>], [>]–[>], [>] McCormick, Anne O’Hare, [>] McCrary, “Tex,” [>] McDonnell, Anne, [>].

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He lives in Chicago. For more information, visit www.ajbaime.com. To contact the author, visit Facebook.com/ajbaime. Footnotes * The advent of the Manhattan Project was still many months in the future. [back] *** * Charlie Sorensen and others have staked a claim to the idea of the moving assembly line. Nevertheless, history has given Henry Ford the credit. [back] *** * Lochner would later become a major figure in journalism, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for his reporting on Nazi Germany. [back] *** * Not that the investors didn’t make out themselves. One investor who put in $2,500 in 1903 walked away with well over $29 million.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Productivity can be enhanced by relatively simple new gadgets, such as the cotton gin developed by Eli Whitney, which removed seeds and waste from the cotton buds (although, by boosting the cotton crop, this invention perpetuated the US slavery system). But output can also be improved by new ways of organising production, such as the moving assembly line that allowed Henry Ford to produce cars more cheaply. Financial innovation, such as letters of credit, or legal reforms like the creation of the limited liability company, made it easier for traders to take risks and expand their operations. Perhaps the most important area of innovation has been agriculture.

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But his approach was criticised for turning workers into automatons, and he had a dismissive attitude towards them, arguing that the typical ironworker “is so stupid that the word percentage has no meaning to him and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent that himself”.23 Clearly an obsessive, he spent his retirement literally watching grass grow in search of the perfect lawn.24 This concern became even greater when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line in the early 20th century. The workers stayed in one place and the parts were brought to them via the conveyor belt. As Taylor suggested, the worker’s day was filled with simple repetitive tasks. In Modern Times, a 1936 film, Charlie Chaplin satirises the worker’s lot, at one point literally becoming trapped among the cogs of a machine.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Division of labour explains why workers on a car production line each add some 1. http://www.discovery.org/a/2073 Chapter 1 • Adam Smith21 part to the basic chassis, why busy bankers do not answer the phone themselves but have PAs, and even why we buy pork chops at the shop rather than reliving the BBC sitcom The Good Life and rearing our own pigs. For businesses, division of labour has been central to production systems since the Ford Model-T car became the first automobile to be mass produced on moving assembly lines using pre-manufactured parts. More recently this has led to the growth in outsourcing, which both magnifies the specialisation of the job of making individual parts and also exploits different countries’ absolute advantage in what they do. Toyota says that a single car has about 30,000 parts, counting every part down to the smallest screws.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
by Vaclav Smil
Published 4 May 2021

The Runabout, the most popular model, sold for $825 in 1909, but continuous design and manufacturing improvements let Ford lower the price to $260 by 1925. That represented about two and a half months’ wages for the average worker at the time. Today, the average new-car price in the United States is $34,000, or about 10 months’ median salary. In the UK, popular small car models average about £15,000 (about $20,000). Introduction of a moving assembly line at Detroit’s Highland Park factory in 1913 brought substantial economies of scale: by 1914 the plant was already turning out 1,000 automobiles a day. And Ford’s decision to pay unprecedented wages for unskilled assembly labor assured uninterrupted production. In 1914 the rate was more than doubled, to $5 a day, and the working day was reduced to eight hours.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

The remaining challenge was assembling the parts. The solution was found in continuous flow production, which allowed workers to remain stationary as parts were moved to them. A prerequisite for the moving assembly line was the diffusion of electric power throughout the factory to provide light and power machines. Electricity triggered a complete reorganization of production. The moving assembly line introduced at Highland Park, just north of Detroit, Michigan, in 1913 successfully harnessed all of this new technology. Electric motors permitted the use of machines of greater accuracy and speed; electric craneways reduced labor requirements in handling and hauling; electric light facilitated precision work; and electric fans made the factories healthier and temperatures more bearable.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

The relationship between seller and buyer was based on discrete, often anonymous transactions. The sign by the cash register summed it up: “ALL SALES FINAL.” Early retail pioneers like Sears and Macy’s changed the way mass society consumed things, but they had minimal insight into who was actually buying their products or how they were using them. When Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line went into operation in 1913, it was really just an extension of manufacturing principles first put in place during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. The assembly line wasn’t just about maximizing efficiency through discrete repetitive tasks, it was a metaphor for how a company’s product can dictate its supply chains, manufacturing processes, distribution channels, and management layer.

Great American Railroad Journeys
by Michael Portillo
Published 26 Jan 2017

The appearance of the first motor cars at the turn of the century didn’t unduly concern railroad companies, as excessive costs kept automobiles in the realm of the very rich. But the bold decision in 1913 by manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) to mass-produce Ford Model Ts on the world’s first moving assembly line did make an impact. Before this model of automobile stopped being made in 1927, no fewer than 15 million had taken to the road. The arrival of the car, which permitted its owner so much freedom in terms of timing and destination, came just ahead of passenger airlines, which began running after the First World War.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Only one metropolis has suffered more in the last decade, and New Orleans’s disaster was an act of God. Detroit’s is man-made. The consensus is that Detroit is dying because the industry that spawned the city is dying with it. They have it backward: Detroit wasn’t born with the Model T and didn’t end with the SUV. It died the moment Henry Ford perfected his moving assembly line in 1913. They just didn’t know it at the time. A century before, Detroit (a French word that means “the straits”) was a wide expanse in the wilderness ideally situated between two Great Lakes. It started life as a trading hub for Quebecois fur trappers. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, travel times and freight costs to New York dropped to a tenth of what they’d been.

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For recent history, I drew most heavily upon James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and Matt Labash’s “The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep” (The Weekly Standard, December 29, 2008), from which L. Brooks Patterson’s quote is taken. The assessment that Detroit died the moment Henry Ford perfected the moving assembly line is Jane Jacobs’s from The Economy of Cities, as is the capsule history of Detroit industry. The snapshot of the city’s transportation history is from Edge City. Christopher Leinberger’s suggestion that the auto industry and its subsidiaries composed as much as a third of GDP is found in The Option of Urbanism.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

The efficiency of the light weight and high-power design was demonstrated when in 1909 a Model T “defeated a stable of heavier, pricier touring automobiles in a 4,100-mile race from New York to Seattle.”88 Ford’s special place in U.S. entrepreneurial history went beyond design, for it was his production innovations that allowed him to reduce the price by so much. At his famous Highland Park factory, which opened on January 1, 1910, he adopted vertical integration, including the making of most parts in house. By 1913, the moving assembly line made mass production a reality, breaking up the labor processes into repetitive motions as the cars slowly moved past each worker performing his task. Also by 1913, Ford had established a network of almost 7,000 dealers and reached small towns having as few as 2,000 inhabitants; 65 percent of Ford dealers were in rural areas.89 After the Model T became ubiquitous, its unique network of dealers and service stations selling tires, batteries, spare parts, and the cars themselves created the same sort of networking advantage that Apple and Android enjoy today in their smartphone duopoly.

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Although the stock market collapse of late 1929 is often cited as a major cause of the Great Depression, the overreliance of households on consumer credit and their increased leverage added to the downward spiral of collapse and deflation once incomes and jobs began to be cut in 1929–30. Few inventions have ever spread as rapidly as did the automobile between 1900, when there were no automobiles on the roads, to 1929, when the ratio of motor vehicles to American households had reached 93 percent. “The installment plan was to consumer credit what the moving assembly line was to the automobile industry.”24 The integral role of finance began with the seasonal imbalance between supply and demand. The assembly line method of production required steady production to minimize costs, but in the early days of open cars, purchases were much higher in the summer than in the winter.

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Similarly, Karl Benz’s invention of the first reliable internal combustion engine in 1879 was followed by two decades in which inventors experimented with brakes, transmissions, and other ancillary equipment needed to transfer the engine’s power to axles and wheels. Even though the first automobiles appeared in 1897, they did not gain widespread acceptance until the price reductions made possible by Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, introduced in 1913. Why did the growth of TFP accelerate so rapidly after 1920, and why was the influence of IR#2 so profound? The saga of the roaring 1920s, followed by the dislocations of the Great Depression and World War II, disguises a rapid pace of innovation and implementation that started in the 1920s and took flight (both figuratively and literally) in the 1930s and 1940s, a story told in chapter 16.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

In fact, it could be argued that two big-bang events, one for each of the countries involved in propelling that surge, should perhaps be identified. Other choices are less controversial. Ford’s Model-T is an obvious choice for the Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass-Production. Nevertheless, the precise dating could be an issue. The truly mass-produced Model-T, from a full moving assembly line, only came out in 1913. However, even without a complete line, the first Model-T in 1908 was already the clear prototype of the standardized, identical products that were to characterize future production patterns. It also prefigured the decreasing costs that would make it accessible to the mass of the population.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Each surgeon’s office was its own business with different systems and practices. Some doctors liked to invest in technology and people, while others were clearly happy spending very little in order to maximize profitability. They just wanted to come in 3.5 days a week and get to their golf courses or boats as fast as possible. It was like a fast-moving assembly line filled with people scrambling to get through each day and little accountability or incentive to improve. We used to joke around as the months wore on that “health care is where good ideas go to die.” We never did accomplish our heady goals, as adoption was painstaking and difficult. I left after four years, having helped build a client base of about a dozen hospitals.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

When the first prototype of the Model T rolled off the factory floor, on October 1, 1908, the market for cars was just emerging. Ford’s success was related less to the design of the cars than to his control of the manufacturing process. Instead of having workers move from one car on the shop floor to the next, he had the workers remain stationary and brought the cars to them on a series of moving assembly lines. This and many other innovations cut the amount of time it took to produce a car by more than half. To solve the problem of the length of time needed for the car’s paint to dry, Ford used his own special recipe for japan black, a lacquer that dried in forty-eight hours, much faster than any other formula or color he tested.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Open innovation uses the web to take to scale a collaborative and social approach to creativity. Most creativity emerges when different points of view are held in reciprocal tension, so that they play off one another, eventually evolving into a new idea. The idea for Henry Ford’s revolutionary moving assembly line did not simply spring to life in his head in a darkened room after months of inner reflection. Ford’s innovation came from a team who borrowed and blended ideas and techniques: from a machine-tool industry that used interchangeable parts; from meat-packing which used a moving line to cut up carcasses; and – for scheduling techniques – from the railroads.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Accept that innovation is inherently uncertain. A healthy amount of variation and divergence is necessary if you want a vibrant ecology of self-renewal. Have the discipline to make bets in good times and bad. WORKFLOW How we divide and do the work; the path and process of value creation. When Henry Ford introduced his moving assembly line in 1913, he changed the flow of work through the factory. The process was divided into eighty-four discrete steps, and none other than Frederick Taylor himself helped to optimize each of them. The build time of a Model T went from twelve hours to just two hours and thirty minutes. Nearly half a century later, Taiichi Ohno and the Toyoda family developed the Toyota Production System, a just-in-time approach to manufacturing that sought to eliminate muri (overburden), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste).

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

Just how I reached that surprising conclusion I am unable to state.24 Instead, Ford switched to automobiles, and what a switch. His motor company pioneered the form of manufacture termed “Fordism.” Mass production with repeatable parts made by machines was taken to its most efficient conclusion with Ford’s moving assembly lines, in which the product moves, and the workers stay still. It had taken a long time to get to the stage of Ford’s Model T, the car that motorized the masses in the first decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1760s, the Scottish historian and philosopher Adam Ferguson had written, “Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”25 The automotive historian Andrew Nahum has commented that this could be a “perfect description” of Ford’s factory.26 Yet it took the convulsive developments in manufacturing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, heavily influenced by clock- and watchmaking culture and championed by the likes of John Bennett, before the dream of the perfect assembly line could be realized.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Raised on a farm outside Detroit, he had absorbed the farmer’s obsession for any tool or technique that let you get more bushels or other outputs from the same hour of labor, and he made that principle the centerpiece of his new company. Where rival carmakers were handcrafting luxury sedans for the scions of the Gilded Age, Ford created his Model T to be cheap enough “for the multitudes.” To do this, he not only designed a simple, durable vehicle, but he also created a new system, centered on the world’s first moving assembly line, that let him produce that car in enormous volumes and thus exploit the very powerful efficiencies of scale. As Ford churned out more cars every month, each car’s share of the “fixed” cost of Ford’s factories became proportionately smaller. As Ford’s costs fell, he was able to cut his selling price, thereby attracting more buyers and generating even more volume, leading to even lower prices, and so on.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

His engineers were always coming up with new and improved layouts for the production line, and this meant that the architecture had to be open to change too. Kahn’s building at Highland Park, with its expansive open-plan interiors, allowed this to a certain extent, but within four years of its completion it was obsolete. The birth of the moving assembly line had necessitated a new factory form. Instead of multiple storeys and the gravitational flow of ever-larger components to the finished car on the ground floor, the new building needed to be long and low in order to accommodate the lateral progress of the conveyor, and infinitely extendable in any direction, which made the increasingly built-up suburban setting of Highland Park inadequate too.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

Freeman, Behemoth, 123. 5. As Simon Winchester points out, American armories had geared up mass production lines years earlier. By 1913, sewing machine, bicycle, and typewriter manufacturers had also begun taking advantage of the interchangeable parts revolution to experiment with fast-moving assembly lines. Ford claims, however, that his main inspiration was actually the disassembly of animal carcasses that he had witnessed at the nearby Chicago meatpacking plants, where the knife-wielding meatpackers stood in place while the animals moved by, hanging from chains. 6. Cal Newport, “5-Hour Workdays?

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

It was an ambition reminiscent of Henry Ford’s launch of the Model T car over a hundred years earlier, which had ushered in the motoring age by making cars affordable for the working man. Cars at the time had been luxury items but Ford had been determined to get the price below the average yearly wage. Just as Ford had pioneered the moving assembly line to lower costs, Musk needed to scale up battery production. Tesla would need to increase battery production one-hundred-fold by 2030 – enough to make around twenty million cars a year, he said. That was just for Tesla. By the time of Battery Day, almost every car company in the world – from General Motors to Volkswagen – had pledged to go electric.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

The efficiency of a company’s supply chain could make or break a business. That’s why many of the great business innovations of the last century had to do with improving supply chains and making them more efficient. Henry Ford’s assembly line is a classic example. By adopting a continuously moving assembly line, Ford cut the typical production time of a car from 12 hours to 90 minutes.10 This supply-chain innovation had an enormous impact on the industry. Because it enabled the mass production of cars for the first time, it drove down the price of a good that was once available only to the very wealthy and made it widely available to average consumers.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

As the new century emerged, a crescendo of critics voiced alarm at the growing trend toward Cheap, in particular as it applied to the production of America’s most iconic object: the automobile. Even efficiency guru Frederick Winslow Taylor seemed to think things had gone too far when he scoffed at the mass-produced Model T Ford as “very cheaply and roughly made.” Henry Ford, who famously pioneered the moving assembly line in 1914, could only marvel at this criticism. His assembly plant in Highland Park, Michigan, dubbed the “Crystal Palace” for its abundant windows, was a model of scientific management. As did North before him, Ford broke each step of his production process into individual tasks and assigned workers to perform just one.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal , Tantum Collins , David Silverman and Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015

Taylor could again afford . . . Kanigel, The One Best Way, 253. Taylor told . . . Kanigel, The One Best Way, 227. he portrayed laborers . . . Taylor, Principles, 26. the laying of bricks . . . Kanigel, The One Best Way, 415. Henry Ford’s . . . Ford, “Heritage,” Ford Motor Company, “The Moving Assembly Line.” Accessed July 2, 20014. http://corporate.ford.com/our-company/heritage/historic-sites-news-detail/663-highland-park. Historian A. J. P. . . . See A. J. P. Taylor, War by Timetable (London: Macdonald, 1969). Historian Samuel Haber . . . Kanigel, The One Best Way, 487. the 7,000 ton ship . . .

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

There is an array of challenges wherein the crux points to actions of integration or deintegration. Between 1909 and 1916 the Ford Motor Company reduced the selling price of a Model T automobile from $950 to $360, thereby hugely broadening its base of potential customers. This success was not, as many believe, due to the moving assembly line. There was no more than $100 of labor cost in a 1909 Ford. The greater savings was reducing the cost of materials from $550 per car down to $220 per car.4 This came from a unique setting for industrial engineering that integrated backward into making the automobile’s components. At that time most of its suppliers, for seats, windows, wheels, and so on, were unsophisticated mom-and-pop garage operations.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

There was a growing body of practical knowledge about the interchangeability of parts and absolute standardization, precision machines, and continuous flow production. But no one had achieved the grand symphony that Ford heard in his imagination. As historian David Hounshell tells it, there was a time, April 1, 1913, and a place, Detroit, when the first moving assembly line seemed to be “just another step in the years of development at Ford yet somehow suddenly dropped out of the sky. Even before the end of the day, some of the engineers sensed that they had made a fundamental breakthrough.”65 Within a year, productivity increases across the plant ranged from 50 percent to as much as ten times the output of the old fixed-assembly methods.66 The Model T that sold for $825 in 1908 was priced at a record low for a four-cylinder automobile in 1924, just $260.67 Much as with Ford, some elements of the economic surveillance logic in the online environment had been operational for years, familiar only to a rarefied group of early computer experts.

…

The variant of industrial capitalism that rose to dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a specific kind of moral milieu that we sense intuitively even when we do not name it. Industrial capitalism was marked by the specialized division of labor, with its historically specific characteristics: the conversion of craft work to mass production based on standardization, rationalization, and the interchangeability of parts; the moving assembly line; volume production; large populations of wage earners concentrated in factory settings; professionalized administrative hierarchies; managerial authority; functional specialization; and the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work. The list is illustrative, not exhaustive, but enough to remind us that industrial civilization was drawn from these expressions of the economic imperatives that ruled industrial expansion.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

This only reinforces the importance of strong civic engagement in promoting and defending political democracies that can hold the state to account. Fear of the unemployment line. Humans are ingenious: we are good at making more out of what we’ve got, or making the same from less. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in his Michigan automobile factory in 1913, car production rose fivefold almost overnight; if there had not been a growing market for his Model T car, he would have needed far fewer workers. In an expanding economy workers laid off by one business can hope to find jobs elsewhere, but when economy-wide demand does not keep up with productivity growth the result is widespread unemployment.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

They’ll be happening all the time. It means, of course, that flying cars are just the beginning. More Transportation Options Autonomous Cars A little over a century ago, another transportation transformation was under way. The triple threat convergence of the internal combustion engine, the moving assembly line and the emerging petroleum industry was together driving—pardon the pun—the horse-and-buggy business out of business. The first bespoke cars hit the roads around the tail end of the nineteenth century, but Ford’s 1908 introduction of the mass-produced Model T marked the real tipping point.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

On the eve of the New Deal, Alfred Sloan’s policy had been that there was no need for labor unions at General Motors; as he drily noted in his memoir, “We were largely unprepared for the change in political climate and the growth in unionism that began in 1933.” As factory jobs for unskilled workers went, GM’s were well paid—meaning, at the time, as much as fifty cents an hour—so it was impossible for Sloan to see the depth of the anger generated by such GM policies as relentlessly ever-moving assembly lines, no employee rights whatsoever, frequent unpaid layoffs, and unsafe working conditions. It was only in 1937, after a series of sit-down strikes—essentially, temporary worker takeovers of factories—that GM signed its first contract with the United Auto Workers. When the war ended, demand for automobiles soared, and the end of price controls set off a large increase in inflation; GM was eager to sell cars, and the UAW members were afraid that inflation would make their incomes fall while the company’s profits increased.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

But the same technology that is helping to create a single global market in services is undermining the Western knowledge worker at home, too, via so-called Digital Taylorism. “If the twentieth century brought mechanical Taylorism—mass production where the knowledge of craft workers is captured, codified and re-engineered in the shape of the moving assembly line—the 21st century is the age of Digital Taylorism. This involves codifying, standardising and digitising knowledge into software prescripts, platforms and packages that can be used by others regardless of location,” write Brown and Lauder.6 New technologies, they point out, have increased the potential to translate knowledge work into working knowledge, leading to the standardization of an increasing proportion of technical, managerial, and professional jobs.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Ford goes on to write that, anyway, the repetitive nature of work on his assembly lines wasn’t so different from the repetitive work done by bankers and businessmen. “Here he veers off into fantasy,” writes Richard Snow in his excellent biography of Ford, I Invented the Modern Age: Bankers and businessmen rarely walked off their jobs in disgust after five days. Just when the efficiencies of the moving assembly line had proved themselves at the end of 1913, the Ford managers discovered that they were having to hire 963 workers to be assured 100 of them would stay with their jobs long enough to learn them. You read that right: during the first year of Ford’s assembly line, turnover at the Crystal Palace was 378 percent.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

No network of roads and fueling stations yet existed. By 1893, Benz had sold a measly 69 vehicles; by 1900, just 1,709. Twenty years after Benz’s patent, there were still only 35,000 vehicles on German roads. The turning point was Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T. His simple but effective vehicle was built using a revolutionary approach: the moving assembly line. An efficient, linear, and repetitive process enabled him to slash the price of personal vehicles, and the buyers followed. Most cars at the time cost around $2,000. Ford priced his at $850. In the early years Model T sales numbered in the thousands. Ford kept ramping up production and further lowering prices, arguing, “Every time I reduce the charge for our car by one dollar, I get a thousand new buyers.”

Policing the Open Road
by Sarah A. Seo

The Fourth Amendment Tool in Criminal Patrol Epilogue ABBREVIATIONS NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX Introduction The horseless carriage was just arriving in San Francisco, and its debut was turning into one of those colorfully unmitigated disasters that bring misery to everyone but historians. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit (2001) ON APRIL 11, 1916, eight years after the Model T’s debut and just two years after the perfection of its moving assembly line, the Tucson, Arizona, sheriff’s office received a call around midnight about a robbery and assault at Pastime Park, a pleasure resort just north of the city. Three officers jumped into a “public service automobile” and, on their way to the scene of the crime, saw a car that seemed to be heading toward them suddenly turn around.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

In 1906, Ford produced his Model N, a 1,050-pound car that he sold for the bargain price of $500, and he sold so many of them (over 8,500) that he leaped into the front ranks of the automotive industry. In 1908, Ford introduced his Model T at the bargain price of $825 (about $19,000 in 2010 currency). Five years later, Ford started producing the Model T on a moving assembly line, which increased his factory’s speed and efficiency. Of course, the process of mass industrialization—dividing complicated manufacturing processes into small, straightforward tasks—long predated Ford. In 1776, Adam Smith was extolling the efficiencies created by the division of labor in a pin factory.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

If the ideas were good, the innovators got rich, but they also got imitated, which made them less rich than they might have been. It was great for everyone else, though. The competition lowered prices and increased quality; the new ideas spread and were improved upon. The mail-order catalogue, the moving assembly line, the decentralized corporation, the frequent-flier mile, the category-killer store - none of these radical ideas were patented.” The ultimate monopolistic fate of the American publishing industry is discussed in the excellent historical review by Hesse (2002). 25. http://www.riaa.com/issues/piracy/default.asp (accessed, June 10, 2007). 26.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

The computer program instructs a machine on how to produce a part and directs robots on the factory floor in shaping or assembling parts into products. Numerical control was quickly perceived as “probably the most significant new development in manufacturing technology since Henry Ford introduced the concept of the moving assembly line.”10 Computer numerical control led to a dramatic boost in productivity and was the first leg in the long process of steadily replacing human labor with computerized technology, programmed and managed by small professional and technical work forces. The Chicago management consulting firm Cox and Cox sized up the significance of substituting the computer and IT for workers, announcing that with numerically controlled machine tools, a “management revolution is here. . . .

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

Free markets are about the constant process of turning scarcities into abundances, making today’s luxuries into tomorrow’s commodities and necessities. A little more than a century ago, the automobile was a toy for the rich, one that cost the equivalent of more than $100,000 today. Henry Ford’s moving assembly line turned this rich man’s toy into something every working person could afford and into an instrument that vastly raised the world’s standard of living. Thirty years ago the cell phone was as big as a shoebox, had a short battery life, and cost $3,995. Today there are more than 5 billion cell phones around the world.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

Improving designs competed in newly popular races—the first one in July 1894 from Paris to Rouen (126 km), the next year Paris to Bordeaux, a round trip of nearly 1,200 km (Beaumont 1902)—but remained far too expensive. That situation changed with the introduction of Ford’s Model T in 1908, which went on sale on October 1, 1908 (McCalley 1994). Its engine could develop nearly 15 kW (about 20 hp), and design adjustments and manufacturing advances (most notably moving assembly lines) made the car widely affordable. When its production ended in 1927 the company delivered 15 million units. Concurrent development of trucks was accelerated once diesel engines (deployed for the first time in trucks in Germany in 1924) had become the prime mover of choice for all heavy water and land transportation as well as all construction and off-road machinery (Smil 2010a).

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Now, they can afford the assistant. Let us focus on this last example more carefully. Historically, the complaint about machines and automation was that they rendered the craftsman redundant. For example, it is well known that Henry Ford added tremendously to his workers’ productivity by manufacturing cars in a moving assembly line. The assembly line broke car assembly into multiple sequential tasks, allowing each worker to specialize in only one of many tasks. Equally important, and less well known, is that Ford insisted parts be honed to high tolerances so that they were interchangeable, that each part did not have to be specially machined to fit the car.

In the Age of the Smart Machine
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 14 Apr 1988

They just sit at the computer and watch for alarms. One weekend I found a tank overflowing in digesting. I went to the operator and told him, and he said, "It can't be; the computer says my level is fine." I am afraid of what happens if we trust the computer too much. At least since the introduction of the moving assembly line in Ford's Highland Park plant, it has been second nature for managers to use tech- nology to delimit worker discretion and, in this process, to concentrate knowledge within the managerial domain. The special dilemmas raised by information technology require managers to reconsider these assump- tions.

Why the Allies Won
by Richard Overy
Published 29 Feb 2012

The centrepiece was the main assembly hall, ‘the most enormous room in the history of man’, a vast L-shaped construction that eventually housed an assembly line 5,450 feet long, and covered an area of 67 acres. Ford’s aim was to break down the construction of the aircraft in such a way that the components could be fed into a continuous moving assembly line. With a car this could be done relatively easily, for it averaged fifteen thousand parts; but the B-24 had thirty thousand different parts, and a total of 1,550,000 parts in all. To mass-produce something so complex was to push mechanised production to its very limits.44 The project was so difficult that it almost collapsed.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

In Ford’s recollection, he experimented with his first assembly line in April 1913. The trial involved radiators that dangled overhead and moved along the factory floor as workers welded, bolted, and hammered them along to a finished assembly. As to his source of inspiration, Ford credited as the unlikely pioneer of the moving assembly line “the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef,” the efficient dissection of dangling cows now inverted to making cars. The results from the assembly of just one component, the flywheel, astonished Ford: With one workman doing a complete job, he could turn out thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or twenty minutes to an assembly.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

In Ford’s recollection, he experimented with his first assembly line in April 1913. The trial involved radiators that dangled overhead and moved along the factory floor as workers welded, bolted, and hammered them along to a finished assembly. As to his source of inspiration, Ford credited as the unlikely pioneer of the moving assembly line “the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef,” the efficient dissection of dangling cows now inverted to making cars. The results from the assembly of just one component, the flywheel, astonished Ford: With one workman doing a complete job, he could turn out thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or twenty minutes to an assembly.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

He portrays a world where the unions were in charge of recruitment, which they tried to keep ‘in the family’ (ie of workmates and their kin) as much as possible; where although in theory there was an elaborate system of apprenticeships, in practice almost all the training took place on the job itself; and where the demands of ‘the track’ made a potential mockery of the craft traditions so important in Coventry’s earlier industrial history. ‘By the 1950s some of the major skilled crafts, like hand tin-hammering and wooden joinery body building, had effectively vanished,’ he writes. ‘Even in the most conservative firms, moving assembly lines were now the normal practice.’ It was, in short, a deskilled world of what one former car worker described as ‘very monotonous, terribly monotonous, repetitive work’. Or, in the words of another, ‘It was just pure drudgery. You became a wage slave, nothing else – the only thing you could see at the end of the week was your wages and that was it.’