At the beginning of the 20th century the automobile was a
plaything for the rich. Most models were complicated machines that required a
chauffer conversant with its individual mechanical nuances to drive it. Henry
Ford was determined to build a simple, reliable and affordable car; a car the
average American worker could afford. Out of this determination came the Model
T and the assembly line - two innovations that revolutionized American society
and molded the world we live in today.
Henry Ford did not invent the car; he produced an automobile
that was within the economic reach of the average American. While other
manufacturers were content to target a market of the well-to-do, Ford developed
a design and a method of manufacture that Henry Ford and his first car the Quadricycle, which he built
in 1896steadily reduced the cost of the Model T. Instead of pocketing the
profits; Ford lowered the price of his car. As a result, Ford Motors sold more
cars and steadily increased its earnings - transforming the automobile from a
luxury toy to a mainstay of American society.
The Model T made its debut in 1908 with a purchase price of
$825.00. Over ten thousand were sold in its first year, establishing a new
record. Four years later the price dropped to $575.00 and sales soared. By
1914, Ford could claim a 48% share of the automobile market.
Central to Ford's ability to produce an affordable car was
the development of the assembly line that increased the efficiency of
manufacture and decreased its cost. Ford did not conceive the concept, he
perfected it. Prior to the introduction of the assembly line, cars were
individually crafted by teams of skilled workmen - a slow and expensive
procedure. The assembly line reversed the process of automobile manufacture.
Instead of workers going to the car, the car came to the worker who performed
the same task of assembly over and over again. With the introduction and
perfection of the process, Ford was able to reduce the assembly time of a Model
T from twelve and a half hours to less than six hours.
DEVELOPING THE
MODEL T
The Ford Motor Company manufactured its first car - the
Model A - in 1903. By 1906, the Model N was in production but Ford had not yet
achieved his goal of producing a simple, affordable car. He would accomplish this
with the Model T. Charles Sorensen - who had joined Henry Ford two years
earlier - describes how Ford had him set up a secret room where design of the
new car would be carried out:
"Early one morning in the winter of 1906-7, Henry Ford
dropped in at the pattern department of the Piquette Avenue plant to see me.
'Come with me, Charlie,' he said, 'I want to show you something.'
I followed him to the third floor and its north end, which
was not fully occupied for assembly work. He looked about and said, 'Charlie,
I'd like to have a room finished off right here in this space. Put up a wall
with a door in big enough to run a car in and out. Get a good lock for the
door, and when you're ready, we'll have Joe Galamb come up in here. We're going
to start a completely new job.'
The room he had in mind became the maternity ward for Model
T.
It took only a few days to block off the little room on the
third floor back of the Piquette Avenue plant and to set up a few simple power
tools and Joe Galamb's two blackboards. The blackboards were a good idea. They
gave a king-sized drawing which, when all initial refinements had been made,
could be photographed for two purposes: as a protection against patent suits
attempting to prove prior claim to originality and as a substitute for
blueprints. A little more than a year later Model T, the product of that
cluttered little room, was announced to the world. But another half year passed
before the first Model T was ready for what had already become a clamorous
market...
The summer before, Mr. Ford told me to block off the
experimental room for Joe Galamb, a momentous event occurred which would affect
the entire automotive industry. The first heat of vanadium steel in the country
was poured at the United Steel Company's plant in Canton, Ohio.
Early that year we had several visits from J. Kent Smith, a
noted English metallurgist from a country which had been in the forefront of
steel development...
THE 1908 MODEL T. TWO
FORWARD GEARS, A 20 HORSEPOWER ENGINE AND NO DRIVER DOORS.
They sold like hot cakesFord, Wills, and I listened to him
and examined his data. We had already read about this English vanadium steel.
It had a tensile strength nearly three times that of steels we were using, but
we'd never seen it. Smith demonstrated its toughness and showed that despite
its strength it could be machined more easily than plain steel. Immediately Mr.
Ford sensed the great possibilities of this shock-resisting steel. 'Charlie,'
he said to me after Smith left, 'this means entirely new design requirements,
and we can get a better, lighter, and cheaper car as a result of it.'
It was the great common sense that Mr. Ford could apply to
new ideas and his ability to simplify seemingly complicated problems that made
him the pioneer he was. This demonstration of vanadium steel was the deciding
point for him to begin the experimental work that resulted in Model T...
Actually it took four years and more to develop Model T.
Previous models were the guinea pigs, one might say, for experimentation and
development of a car which would realize Henry Ford's dream of a car which
anyone could afford to buy, which anyone could drive anywhere, and which almost
anyone could keep in repair. Many of the world's greatest mechanical
discoveries were accidents in the course of other experimentation. Not so Model
T, which ushered in the motor transport age and set off a chain reaction of machine
production now known as automation. All our experimentation at Ford in the
early days was toward a fixed and, then wildly fantastic goal.
By March, 1908, we were ready to announce Model T, but not
to produce it, On October 1 of that year the first car was introduced to the
public. From Joe Galamb's little room on the third floor had come a
revolutionary vehicle. In the next eighteen years, out of Piquette Avenue,
Highland Park, River Rouge, and from assembly plants all over the United States
came 15,000,000 more."
Birth of the Assembly Line
A few months later- in July 1908 - Sorensen and a plant
foreman spent their days off developing the basics of the Assembly Line:
"What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving
the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then
arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a
moving final assembly line from which came a finished product. Regardless of
earlier uses of some of these principles, the direct line of succession of mass
production and its intensification into automation stems directly from what we
worked out at Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1913...
As may be imagined, the job of putting the car together was
a simpler one than handling the materials that had to be brought to
The old fashioned way - limousines are assembled at
individual stations by a Pittsburg manufacturer, 1912it. Charlie Lewis, the
youngest and most aggressive of our assembly foremen, and I tackled this
problem. We gradually worked it out by bringing up only what we termed the
fast-moving materials. The main bulky parts, like engines and axles, needed a
lot of room. To give them that space, we left the smaller, more compact,
light-handling material in a storage building on the northwest comer of the
grounds. Then we arranged with the stock department to bring up at regular
hours such divisions of material as we had marked out and packaged.
This simplification of handling cleaned things up
materially. But at best, I did not like it. It was then that the idea occurred
to me that assembly would be easier, simpler, and faster if we moved the
chassis along, beginning at one end of the plant with a frame and adding the
axles and the wheels; then moving it past the stockroom, instead of moving the
stockroom to the chassis. I had Lewis arrange the materials on the floor so
that what was needed at the start of assembly would be at that end of the
building and the other parts would be along the line as we moved the chassis
along. We spent every Sunday during July planning this. Then one Sunday
morning, after the stock was laid out in this fashion, Lewis and I and a couple
of helpers put together the first car, I'm sure, that was ever built on a
moving line.
We did this simply by putting the frame on skids, hitching a
towrope to the front end and pulling the frame along until axles and wheels
were put on. Then we rolled the chassis along in notches to prove what could be
done. While demonstrating this moving line, we worked on some of the
subassemblies, such as completing a radiator with all its hose fittings so that
we could place it very quickly on the chassis. We also did this with the dash and
mounted the steering gear and the spark coil."
IMPLEMENTATION
The basics of the Assembly Line had been established but it
would take another five years for the concept to be implemented. Implementation
would await construction of the new Highland Park plant which was purpose-built
to incorporate the assembly line. The process began at the top floor of the
four-story building where the engine was assembled and progressed level by
level to the ground floor where the body was attached to the chassis.
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