DETROIT (Michigan News Source) – On this day in history, 110 years ago, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to mass produce automobiles. The new organization reduced the time it took to build a car from 12 to 1.5 hours and ushered in an era, as Ford put it, where “about everybody will have [an automobile].”
The first assembly line was installed on December 1, 1913, at Highland Park. Ford’s second Illinois factory had been constructed after the original Detroit plant due to high demand for the Model T automobile.
MORE NEWS: Ottawa County Board of Commissioners Votes to Give Themselves a Hefty Raise
Long before he introduced the assembly line, Ford had been on the hunt for ways to make automobile production more efficient. He had borrowed the continuous-flow production methods from flour mills, breweries, and meat-packing plants, which had increased production from around 10,000 automobiles in 1909 to 170,000 four years later.
His great innovation, however, was the moving chassis assembly line, which kept production rolling at a steady pace without workers having to pass materials and projects down the line.
Ford workers found the repetitive work that came with assembly lines stifling, dreary, and often dangerous. Accidents became more frequent, with one year racking up more than 200 severed fingers and 75,000 burns, cuts, and puncture wounds. Workers tripped over each other as they worked. Quality standards for assembly line cars plummeted, with cars missing parts as the assembly line moved on before workers were finished.
“The machine I’m on goes at such a terrific speed that I can’t help stepping on it in order to keep up with the machine,” one contemporary Ford worker told a journalist. “It’s my boss.”
Frustrated by these conditions, employees began accepting jobs with Ford competitors. Turnover quickly hit 380%, and Ford was forced to hire far more workers in a year than his firm employed at any given time.
To solve the growing employee retention problem, Ford soon implemented a second radical change: The five-dollar workday.
A host of non-employment obligations, leftover from earlier company policy, were enforced with the pay raise. Ford’s Socialization Organization sent committee members to employees’ homes to make sure they were avoiding the ills of gambling and excessive drinking, and to force recent immigrants to learn English.
These rules may have been a holdover from an old economic doctrine dating back to early Industrial Revolution Europe, which held that workers who earned more than what was required to subsist would dissipate their extra income on vice and become morally corrupt.
Social worries aside, it was widely expected that the new pay system would bankrupt Ford Motor Company. As Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute points out, even if every Ford employee was enabled to buy one a Model T, the increase in sales would be insufficient to offset the increase in wage costs. But Ford overruled objections, reportedly calling the five-dollar workday “the best cost-cutting measure ever undertaken.”
With higher pay came reduced hours, which allowed Ford to squeeze in a third shift and start round-the-clock production with well-rested workers.
The strategy took time to pay off. In 1913, Ford produced more than 170,000 automobiles, and the number did not increase significantly in 1914. But by 1915, total production had more than doubled, kicking off dramatic growth that culminated in over 2,000,000 automobiles produced by 1923. Prices for Model Ts plummeted, and low-skilled workers were catapulted into America’s middle class.
Employee turnover rates, unsurprisingly, dropped dramatically thanks to the new philosophy Ford declared: “We believe in making 25,000 men prosperous and contented rather than [following] the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment multi-millionaires.”
Michigan residents interested in automobile history can visit the Henry Ford Museum, which is the largest indoor-outdoor museum complex in the country at 250 acres and is visited by nearly 2 million people each year.
Museum events taking place on the assembly line’s 110th anniversary, December 1, include an exhibit on the history of drag performances, a paper airplane construction course for children, and an exhibit on Nelson Mandela, among others.
Leave a Comment
COMMENTS POLICY: We have no tolerance for messages of violence, racism, vulgarity, obscenity or other such discourteous behavior. Thank you for contributing to a respectful and useful online dialogue.