Primary Sources
An excerpt from “The First Assembly Line”, an essay by Henry Ford
"Ford car contains about five thousand parts—that is counting screws, nuts, and all. Some of the parts are fairly bulky and others are almost the size of watch parts. In our first assembling we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house. When we started to make parts it was natural to create a single department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman performed all of the operations necessary on a small part. The rapid press of production made it necessary to devise plans of production that would avoid having the workers falling over one another….
The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work. We now have two general principles in all operations—that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over. …In short, the result is this: by the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did only a comparatively few years ago. That line established the efficiency of the method and we now use it everywhere. The assembling of the motor, formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four operations—those men do the work that three times their number formerly did." |
This source talks about when the Ford Company started out, it could only produce a car about every 12 hours. Henry Ford wanted to make his cars affordable by the people. Ford figured that in order to lower the price of his cars, he would just have to find a way to build them more efficiently. When he installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of an entire automobile, the time it took to build a car went from 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes. This genius combination changed the automobile industry forever, guiding many other industries to mass produce this way.
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An ad for the Ford Model T that appeared in Life magazine on October 1, 1908.
This advertisement from 1908 is for the Ford Model T, considered to be the world's most influential car of the 20th century. The Ford Model T was the first real affordable automobile that opened travel to the common middle-class American. Using the efficiency of the assembly line, Henry Ford was able to connect people to each other and kick start a new era of human life.
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Henry Ford's Mirror of America 1962
"Compilation of images and sequences from the Ford Film Collection, with excellent footage of United States history, culture, industry and daily life between about 1915 and 1930. Highlights include Coney Island, the increasing pervasiveness of the automobile in American life, and early manufacturing footage."
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This source showcases not just how Henry Ford changed society as a whole through his industrial revolution but also shows that world that he lived in. It was a time of innovation and change, where war gave new life to America after a crippling depression. This source is great because it captures Ford's invention changing the utility of transportation for everyone.
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