Henry Ford's Assembly Line

Changing a nation.

Feb 6, 2007 John Crandall

The assembly line concept changed not only how cars and other things were made. It changed the way Americans lived as well.

In 1907 while working on designs for the Model T Ford announced his intention to produce a car affordable to the "multitude." The first Model T was built in 1908, it was the cheapest automobile on the market, but still out of range for most people.

Studying other industries, Ford borrowed the concept of a moving line from the meat packers in Chicago who also exposed him to the concept of division of labor as each worker cut out one specific cut of meat. Add the concept of interchangeably machined parts, and the principles of "scientific management" made popular by men like Frederick Taylor (who Ford hired as a consultant), and you have the modern industrial assembly line.

Ford not only wanted to make the Model T affordable for average people. He wanted to make it affordable to his own workers. He did this in part by paying them the then extravagant wage of $5 a day. That calculates out in the neighborhood of $150/week, or almost $8000 per year. For many that would have been considered a good wage all the way up to the 1950's, and Ford's workers were earning that before 1915. Other big manufacturers called Ford a "traitor to his class" for his progressive ideas.

However, there was something of a tradeoff for the workers. They might have been paid more, but their skills were reduced to a single task out of the 84 steps Ford had divided Model T production into. Machined interchangeable parts made skilled craftsmen unnecessary for most industrial production. The machines might have been more efficient, but they didn't have families to feed. One unskilled machine operator could now do work that would have employed many highly trained men.

The huge success of the Model T, and the high wages, made Ford's workers more than happy with such a tradeoff. His assembly line workers turned out 15 million Model T's over about 2 decades. The success of Ford, and his motor company had a huge impact not only on how 20th Century Americans worked, but on how they lived and traveled as well.

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