Read The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) Online
Authors: Steven Watts
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (27 page)
Ford's success with his new factory system was evident not only in the swelling production numbers—20,700 Model T's in 1910, 53,500 in 1911, 82,400 in 1912—but in the admiring commentary of experts who witnessed the operation. Fred H. Colvin, a respected industrial journalist, wrote a series of articles on the new factory for
American Machinist,
and could barely contain his enthusiasm for its efficiency and productivity. He noted several characteristics that permeated the plant's operation: simplicity in its productive processes, the constant testing of parts to ensure their standard size and interchangeability, an emphasis on speed and accuracy in machine design, use of “motion study” to determine the minimal movements required of a laborer to perform certain tasks, a standard of cleanliness throughout the factory, and constant examination and modification of machines and processes to increase production. “What more could the greatest high priest of efficiency expect?” he noted of Highland Park.
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The tremendous productivity of Ford's new factory—by 1913, this single plant was responsible for half of the entire automobile output of the United States—soon generated publicity throughout the country. Stories about Highland Park appeared in newspapers all over the country. Headlines announced, “Ford Factory Is a Wonderful Place,” “Figures on Ford Production Amaze,” “New Idea in the Big Ford Factory,” “Ford's Gigantic Output Marvel in Auto Industry.” Texts praised every aspect of the plant's operation, from the giant cranes that distributed material throughout the factory to the abolition of stockrooms in favor of delivering material
directly to the production spot where it would be used, from the elimination of wasted motion to the creation of machines especially designed for the requirements of the Model T.
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Popular accounts of the Highland Park facility focused on the links between its efficient methods. “Everything is highly systematized in our factory and every possible waste motion is eliminated,” Ford noted in one piece. “How important it is that the utmost care be used to guard against the loss of a minute of a workman's time, can be realized when it is considered that if each of the 16,000men employed wasted one minute a day the company would be losing about 266 hours a day of productive labor.” The notion of a consistent, efficient flow of material fascinated journalists and readers alike. According to a reporter for the
Christian Science Monitor,
at Highland Park
… the Ford engineers devised a plan whereby there is a steady progression of materials as they enter the factory on the one side in a crude state and, without one backward movement, go straight ahead until the completed car leaves the factory on the other side. The general movement is from north to south.
The process so impressed a movie studio that it convinced the company to set up a special demonstration whereby several teams of workmen assembled an entire Model T in two and a half minutes. “This Remarkable Record Caught in Moving Pictures,” ran the headline. In early 1913, Nor-val Hawkins sang the praises of Highland Park in a Detroit speech that was reported by many newspapers. “Our factory, which now practically covers sixty-five acres, is about as complete and up to the minute as modern architecture and the latest machinery and labor-saving appliances can make it,” he enthused. The resulting productivity was so astonishing, Hawkins concluded, that it could only be compared to a fairy tale such as “Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.”
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The Ford Motor Company added its own voice to the chorus of acclaim for Highland Park. Two years after the factory opened, in 1912, it published
Ford Factory Facts,
a publicity pamphlet for mass distribution. The text led the reader step by step through the entire factory, proudly detailing various architectural features and manufacturing techniques, while accompanying photographs provided striking images. Beginning in the administration building, the tour continued through the power plant and engine room, the foundry, and the craneway. Upon entering the machine shop, a visitor would be “looking into a hopeless tangle of machinery, shafting, and belts,” the pamphlet declared. “It seems incredible that a thousand men are working
calmly and effectively among this maze of whirring, groaning, grinding wheels and gears, but as you walk along the main aisle and study each section carefully, the impression of confusion is dispelled and is replaced by amazement at the perfect system that prevails.” The text concluded with a survey of the experimental laboratory, assembling department, and testing area, where the Model T's were started, inspected, and driven out for shipping. The pamphlet offered a stirring summary: “Today the home of the Ford Model T stands pre-eminent as the most complete manufacturing establishment in the world, devoted to the production of one motor car—a profoundly impressive monument to the creative and constructive genius of Henry Ford and his associates.”
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As events unfolded, however, it became clear that the opening of Highland Park was only the first stage of something much bigger in the evolution of the Ford Motor Company. The gleaming glass of the Crystal Palace constituted but the shell of a truly revolutionary idea that, like a pearl, slowly took shape within before appearing in 1914. American industry, and American history, would never be quite the same.
Even though Highland Park surpassed the expectations of most observers with its production during the first years of operation, company leadership was not satisfied. In the spring of 1913, certain managers and engineers began to experiment with a technique that took production methods into a new realm of efficiency. Henry Ford described it simply: “The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work.”
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What he referred to, of course, was the “assembly line,” which became perhaps the most revolutionary development in industrial history. Rather than having teams of laborers doing many different jobs as they built a car from the ground up, this new process placed workers, each performing a minuscule task, at stationary positions along a conveyor belt that moved the developing vehicle along. The relentless, steady culmination of these tiny jobs, performed incrementally, produced a finished automobile in record time.
Although the assembly line changed forever the nature of industrial production, its roots have remained rather tangled and obscured. Conflicting stories about the origins of the assembly line circulated widely as Ford operatives, given the great success of this technique, later scrambled to take credit for it. Henry Ford's own version of things changed. At one point, he declared that the inspiration came from observing the overhead trolley that
Chicago packers used in dressing beef at the slaughterhouses. Another time, he claimed that he got the idea from observing a watch factory where parts sat on a moving belt and assemblers took them off as required. Others offered different stories. William C. Klann, foreman of motor assembly at the Highland Park facility, asserted that the conveyors used to transport sand in the factory foundry inspired the idea of using a similar method in the assembly process. Charles Sorensen, in a memoir written many years later, averred that as early as 1908he and several subordinates had arranged stock parts sequentially on the floor of the old Piquette Avenue factory, put a tow rope onto a car chassis with wheels, and pulled it from pile to pile, attaching appropriate components one after another. “Over several weeks we developed it as well as we could,” Sorensen wrote. “Then we laid it away and put it on the shelf until we were ready to use it.”
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But whatever the exact inspiration or point of origin, it seems clear that the Ford assembly line did not appear suddenly or wholly formed. Like most innovations in the industrial world, it was the product of various influences, numerous people, and extensive experimentation. Once initiated, however, it spread rapidly throughout most production sectors in the Highland Park plant. Evidence suggests that the first actual use of the assembly line came on April 1,1913, when workers in the flywheel-magneto department stood alongside a waist-high table with a smooth metal surface and were instructed by foremen to install one part and then slide the component along to the next worker, who would add something else. This soon led to the idea of pulling the evolving component along at a set rate with a chain, a move that steadied the process by speeding up the slow workers and slowing down the speedy ones. By tweaking this system in various small ways over the next few months, Ford supervisors were able to cut the man-minutes required for assembling the flywheel magneto from twenty to five. This quadrupling of productivity caught the attention of nearly all Ford production engineers, and they began to develop the technique in various areas.
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Klann, for example, brought the assembly line to the building of the Model T engine. He established in 1913 a conveyor system that took a cylinder block past a number of men who installed various parts, including the crankshaft, bearings, and bearing-cap bolts. The primary parts were very heavy, of course, and at one point the process demanded that the cylinder be clamped down while the crankshaft was turned over with a three-foot metal bar. The system worked well for a day, but on the second day disaster struck. In Klann's words, a workman
… forgot to tighten his clamp and when he turned over the crankshaft with the three-foot long bar, he threw the cylinder block off
the bench and the cylinder block hit his leg and he was sent to the doctor. They found his leg was broken above the knee….
We continued working, but at four PM that afternoon Mr. James Couzens came out to see the “Goldberg job,” as he called it. He said to me, “If you are just going to break legs, let's shut this thing off.”
Klann consulted with P. E. Martin and Charles Sorensen, however, and they instructed him to install safety precautions and try again. The foreman did so, the line continued, and within several weeks it was working smoothly. As in other sectors of the plant, production increased dramatically.
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The assembly-line technique was adopted quickly for transmission assembly. Using a chain conveyor rather than a belt conveyor, construction of this major system for the Model T added gears, clutch, and drums to the back side of the flywheel, and each of these components demanded a number of pins, disks, screws, and springs. This complicated process culminated with the attachment of sixteen magnets to the front of the flywheel, which involved the installation of sixteen sets of spacers, screws, and clamps. By November 1913, Ford production engineers had put the entire engine assembly on an integrated assembly line. As in other areas, production time plummeted, with requirements dropping from 594 man-minutes to 226 man-minutes for engine assembly. Within months, the assembly line had been adapted to making the body, pistons, and upholstery for the Model T.
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Then came the most dramatic step of all. By the fall of 1913, Ford was facing a happy problem created by the boost in productivity from the first assembly lines. As Klann explained, “We found that we were making parts a hell of a lot faster than they could put them together on cars.” In an effort to catch up, production managers decided to use the new method in Model T chassis construction. This was a spectacular success, and in the public mind, it became
the
Ford assembly line, with its image of a conveyor belt some hundred yards long, relentlessly moving the chassis along as nearly two hundred workers performed a series of tasks, each adding parts and components to the whole, until, at the end, the radiator was filled, the engine started, and the completed car driven off to the holding lots.
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The mature form of the assembly line was influenced particularly by Clarence W. Avery, a Ford production engineer. Avery had studied at the Ferris Institute and the University of Michigan before taking a position as director of manual training at the Detroit University School. There he encountered Henry Ford's son, Edsel, as a student. In 1912, Edsel helped bring Avery into the company, where he became Charles Sorensen's assistant. This thoughtful and articulate young man (he was only thirty-one in
1913) took a special interest in problems of mass production, and he soon gravitated toward the emerging technique of the assembly line. Working closely with Klann in putting together the transmission and engine subassembly lines, he became an advocate for putting the entire chassis assembly onto a conveyor system. He was, according to one associate, the “guiding light” of this concept. Avery organized a series of experiments. The chassis was pulled along by various means at various speeds while assembly operations were timed, the workers' physical movements were analyzed, and methods of work division were assessed.
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The process was refined in a series of steps, which Avery described many years later:
The first continuous assembly line had no mechanical means of movement. The wheels of the car were assembled at a very early stage and channel iron tracks provided for them. At intervals, giving sufficient time for the operations to be performed, the foreman blew a whistle and all hands pushed the cars forward to the next position, and then returned to their original locations to perform their next operations.
In the next stage we provided rigid spacers between the cars, and introduced a pusher chain about three cars long at the beginning of the line. This worked well for a few weeks. The cumulative resistance, however, was too close to the safety factor. One day the complete line buckled and pushed a section from the side wall of the building. It was then that the continuous chain was intro-duced.
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