Henry Ford didn’t invent the assembly line—it had been used
for decades in the meatpacking industry and elsewhere before he made it famous.
Ford did create a first when he converted his entire Model T
Ford manufacturing process to the moving, mechanized assembly line in October
1913. Actual production time for a single car was cut from 12.5 hours to six
hours in short order, and ultimately was reduced to 93 minutes. Ford’s men working
on a single line could build 15 cars every day. More than 15 million were built
between 1908 and 1927.
Roughly, the introduction of the assembly line boosted
production efficiency by a little more than 700 percent.
Henry Ford got a lot of press (good and bad) in 1914 when he
started paying his assembly workers $5 a day, about twice the going rate. He
gets a lot of good press now for this “enlightened” move. (p.s. he didn’t do it
because he was a nice guy, he did it to reduce staff turnover).
Of course, Ford never passed on most of the cost savings
from that huge jump in productivity. I wonder if he ever dreamed for a moment
about bumping his workers’ pay to $20 a day?
Another point of interest: one could argue that the advent
of the assembly line finally did away with any remaining vestige of handmade craftsmanship
that went into the construction of the Model T.
I wonder if the Model Ts that rolled off the line in 1927
were made to the same quality standards that were evident in the 1908 models?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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