Showing posts with label mass production. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mass production. Show all posts

October 14, 2013

Why the Assembly line emerged in 1913 in the US

After the American Century

The American Assembly line is now more than one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen were strung out in a line, on an October day, with the cars moving past each work station, and it turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods.


The American Assembly line is one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen strung out in a line, with the cars moving past each work station, turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods

The assembly line seems in retrospect to be an obvious technology. Why didn’t the manufacturing technique of subdividing the tasks of production and lining them up in the order of assembly emerge much sooner? There are many interconnected factors that explain why the assembly line emerged when it did and not before, but three were particularly important.

First, parts much be absolutely interchangeable, or else they do not fit together. Machine tools that made parts had to be extremely accurate before this was possible. Eli Whitney envisioned the advantages and convinced Thomas Jefferson to support his efforts to make identical parts for muskets. However, American armories and other manufacturers such as those making sewing machines struggles for most of the nineteenth century to achieve the precision necessary for an assembly line.

Second, in order to arrange machines and processes in an assembly line order the source of power must be extremely flexible. This was not the case in steam-driven factories, where power came steam pipes and from from overhead line shafts, belts and gears. The further steam was from its source, the less powerful it became. As a drive shaft and gear system grew longer, more and more energy was needed just to keep it turning at all. The power train in such a factory was not flexible, and therefore steam power was not well suited to experiments in manufacturing design. In contrast, electric motors, furnaces, and lights could be placed anywhere, and machines in an electrified factory could be placed in any order desired.

Third, an assembly line is expensive to set up, and it makes no economic sense to invest so much capital in one unless a large market exists, a market willing to purchase a single product.  The United States developed such a mass market, in contrast to Europe, where trade barriers balkanized the market. In France, Britain and Germany, there was a “class market” that demanded differentiated products that appealed to different segments of a smaller pool of consumers.  After 1914 European manufacturers visited Detroit to study the assembly line, but few industries could build comparable factories because Europe was not yet a mass market.

Aside from these three factories, an assembly line required sub-division of the labor into tasks of equal length, which deskilled much of the work force. It demanded that workers repeat a few actions, and annual Ford employee turnover rose to over 300 percent in 1913. In response, the company introduced the $5 Day, doubling the average wage. Not only did the higher wages keep people on the job, but workers with higher wages could afford to buy the products of mass production.

By the early 1920s half of all the automobiles in the world were Fords, Henry Ford was a billionaire, and his factory workers were among the highest paid in the world. Thus emerged a system of production that almost miraculously was able to increase production, raise profits, and pay higher wages, all at the same time. Henry Ford’s ghostwritten My Life and Work became an international bestseller. It briefly seemed that the assembly line would lift humanity to a new level of leisure and prosperity. The Boston department store owner, Edward Filine declared.

Mass production is not simply large-scale production. It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying, and that the greatest total profits can be obtained only if the masses can and do enjoy a higher and ever higher standard of living. For selfish business reasons, therefore, genuine mass production industries must make prices lower and lower and wages higher and higher, while constantly shortening the workday and bringing to the masses not only more money but more time. . . .         Edward Filene, Successful Living in This Machine Age, 1931

The story of the assembly line in subsequent decades was not quite what Filene imagined, for it was also an efficient method for producing tanks and bombers. Moreover, as the assembly line was adopted worldwide it often drove down wages rather that raising them. In the Cold War, the assembly line became a symbol of American prosperity, yet at the same time many feared technological unemployment. Meanwhile, Japanese corporations reinvented the assembly line as lean production, which was then re-exported to the United States.

The assembly line is still evolving as a system of production, today largely monitored and controlled by computers and “manned” by robots. It has become inseparable from central political and social issues such as automation, unemployment, American competitiveness, resource depletion and global warming. At its centennial, the assembly line is being reconceived as a green technology based on recycling and alternative energies.

These and other topics are further explored in America’s Assembly Line.

February 18, 2013

Centennial of the American Assembly Line, 1913-2013

After the American Century

 The assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It has spread to every industrial nation and has become the most familiar form of mass production. Some corporations that adopted it made enormous profits; others went bankrupt. It has been praised as a boon to all working men and women, yet it has also been condemned as a merciless form of exploitation. It has inspired novels, poems, popular songs, and even a short symphonic work, but it has also inspired satire and visions of apocalypse. It was embraced by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, yet Americans believed that the production lines of Detroit ensured the victory of democracy in both World War II and the Cold War. More recently, it was reinvented in Japan and exported back to the United States as lean production.

Early example of moving assembly line
As the assembly line spread, its effects varied. Between 1914 and 1940 a few nations and some industries embraced it rapidly, others slowly, and some not at all. European nations adopted it more slowly, even after World War II, preferring the flexibility of skilled workers over the standardization of semi-skilled work on assembly lines. In more recent decades, mass- production industries have gradually moved away from the expensive labor markets of Western Europe and the United States to less costly venues in Asia and Latin America. Once the engine of US prosperity, the assembly line now increasingly drives competing economies elsewhere. Its complex social and economic effects have become global.
Bomber production during World War II


The assembly line emerged in a specific place (Detroit), at a specific time (between 1908 and 1913), in a specific industry (the automobile industry). But it also expressed trends in American society that can be discerned during the nineteenth century. It was the culmination of decades of labor-saving devices, new management ideas, improvements in metal alloys, increasing precision in machine tools, and experimentation with production. Yet that this form of production should be invented in the United States was not inevitable. The elements that came together to form the assembly line could also be found in France, in Germany, and in Britain. Any of the other industrial nations might have hit upon it first. Nevertheless, the United States proved particularly suitable for its emergence. A cultural context either fosters or resists a new technology. Before Henry Ford was born, speed, acceleration, innovation, interchangeable parts, uniformity, and economies of scale already were valued in the United States, where the values that the assembly line would embody were woven into everyday life. 

The assembly line was created at Ford’s factories was not a final result, but a part of an ongoing cultural process. America's Assembly Line is a centennial history of this central technology and its effects on work, leisure, and everyday life.

David E. Nye, America's Assembly Line    MIT Press
Feb 15, 2013
0262018713  978-0262018715

"To make sense of their twenty-first-century world, people need to understand the profound influence of the twentieth-century technology known as the assembly line. David Nye's sweeping analysis of the origins and development of 'the line' is the place to start." -- Robert Casey, former Senior Curator of Transportation, Henry Ford Museum


"It is hard to think of a manufacturing technology that has had a greater economic and social impact than the moving assembly line. In America's Assembly Line, David Nye shows us how this new technology emerged, expanded, stalled, and was reinvented, setting in train the age of mass production and consumerism as well as many of the subsequent environmental problems we experience today. Nye's beautifully nuanced and perceptive treatment of the subject indicates why he is one of the most distinguished historians of technology and culture working today." -- Merritt Roe Smith, Cutten Professor of the History of Technology, MIT


"Crafted with immense erudition, America's Assembly Line is a fascinating cultural history, combining extensive archival research and theoretical sophistication. Nye shows how America's growing economy in the twentieth century was powered by the assembly line and how deeply this 'general purpose technology' was intertwined with American culture, from the exuberance of the Rockettes to the dysphoria of the American worker. He offers a lucid, historically informed reading of the problems that beset America today, in a changed global economy that has adapted assembly-line technology to its advantage even as the American worker has been marginalized." -- Miles Orvell, Temple University, author of The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community

Available at these and other booksellers:

September 26, 2012

Technology: America's Assembly Line

After the American Century

The assembly line will be 100 years old in 2013. The precise date will probably forever remain unknown, as the assembly line was not a self-conscious project. The managers at the Ford Motor Company did not explicitly set out to create it. Rather, a group of talented men, some machinists and some formally educated, some inexperienced enough to have new ideas and others seasoned veterans of many different industries, came together in a new industry that was growing explosively. Consumer demand for cars outstripped traditional methods of production. Cars were built up from the floor, much as wagons had been, and a factory with 1000 workers could scarcely produce 1000 cars in a year.

Ford had decided to focus on making an inexpensive car for as many customers as possible, so the old artisan methods clearly would not do. The company built a new factory at Highland Park in 1910, one that was designed to move parts right inside on railway cars and hoist them to wherever they were needed using overhead electric cranes. The new factory was not built specifically for the purpose of inventing the assembly line, but its management was quite open to experimentation. They began to subdivide work, and they discovered all sorts of small savings by adjusting the lighting, the height of tables, the positions of things, and anything else they could think of. 

The first work process that looked something like an assembly line put together just one part, the flywheel magneto, and this experiment apparently began about April 1, 2013. Apparently. no one used the phrase "assembly line" in that month. But one experiment led to another, and by the fall of that year the managers were trying out car assembly with a moving line of sorts. It was still experimental, but by then the goal had emerged. 

Since 1913 assembly lines have spread to all parts of the world, and made possible a consumer revolution. Not only could cars be made for less, but almost anything else as well, from toasters to refrigerators to lawnmowers to clothing to children's toys.

This was not a simple story of progress, however, for the assembly line could also be used to strip workers of their previous authority on the shop floor, to push workers to labor so hard it damaged their bodies and numbed their minds, and to reduce the number of workers needed, creating both unemployment and abundance at the same time. The assembly line was, paradoxically, celebrated by Lenin's Soviet Union, by Nazi Germany, and by the United States during the Cold War. More recently, it has been the central means of production in emerging economies, notably in China. 

For decades some engineers dreamed of automation, of robot assembly lines, of production without workers, which, depending on your scenario, led to leisure for all, or enormous profits for a few, or some combination of both,  In Japan after World War II, however, further development of Ford's original ideas led to lean production, which doubled productivity without recourse to robots or lots of automatic equipment. Then it was the Americans turn to play catch up, a task that became more complicated as computers also became central parts of production.

The social history of the assembly line is examined further in:

David E. Nye, America's Assembly Line   MIT Press
0262018713  978-0262018715
Kindle edition available.

Available at these and other booksellers: