What happened to the sale prices of cars as a result of Fords manufacturing techniques

Henry Ford Changes the Globe, 1908

At the outset of the 20th century the automobile was a plaything for the rich. Near models were complicated machines that required a chauffer conversant with its individual mechanical nuances to drive information technology. Henry Ford was adamant to build a simple, reliable and affordable auto; a automobile the average American worker could afford. Out of this determination came the Model T and the associates line - two innovations that revolutionized American guild and molded the world we alive in today.

Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar; he produced an machine that was within the economic attain of the average American. While other manufacturers were content to target a market place of the well-to-practise, Ford developed a pattern and a method of manufacture that

Henry Ford and his first motorcar
the Quadricycle, which he
built in 1896

steadily reduced the cost of the Model T. Instead of pocketing the profits; Ford lowered the toll of his car. Every bit a event, Ford Motors sold more cars and steadily increased its earnings - transforming the automobile from a luxury toy to a mainstay of American society.

The Model T made its debut in 1908 with a purchase price of $825.00. Over ten thousand were sold in its first twelvemonth, establishing a new tape. Four years afterward the price dropped to $575.00 and sales soared. By 1914, Ford could claim a 48% share of the automobile market.

Cardinal to Ford'southward ability to produce an affordable motorcar was the development of the assembly line that increased the efficiency of manufacture and decreased its cost. Ford did not excogitate the concept, he perfected it. Prior to the introduction of the assembly line, cars were individually crafted by teams of skilled workmen - a slow and expensive procedure. The associates line reversed the process of auto industry. Instead of workers going to the car, the car came to the worker who performed the same task of assembly over and again. With the introduction and perfection of the process, Ford was able to reduce the assembly time of a Model T from twelve and a half hours to less than half-dozen hours.

The Ford Motor Company manufactured its first automobile - the Model A - in 1903. By 1906, the Model Northward was in production but Ford had not yet achieved his goal of producing a simple, affordable machine. He would achieve this with the Model T. Charles Sorensen - who had joined Henry Ford two years before - describes how Ford had him ready a secret room where design of the new car would be carried out:

"Early on ane morning time in the winter of 1906-7, Henry Ford dropped in at the pattern department of the Piquette Avenue plant to see me. 'Come with me, Charlie,' he said, 'I want to show you something.'

I followed him to the third floor and its north cease, which was not fully occupied for assembly work. He looked nigh and said, 'Charlie, I'd like to have a room finished off correct here in this space. Put up a wall with a door in big enough to run a motorcar in and out. Get a good lock for the door, and when you're ready, nosotros'll take Joe Galamb come upwardly in here. We're going to start a completely new job.'

The room he had in listen became the maternity ward for Model T.

It took only a few days to cake off the little room on the third floor back of the Piquette Artery plant and to set a few uncomplicated power tools and Joe Galamb'southward two blackboards. The blackboards were a good idea. They gave a king-sized drawing which, when all initial refinements had been fabricated, could be photographed for two purposes: as a protection against patent suits attempting to evidence prior claim to originality and as a substitute for blueprints. A footling more than a year later Model T, the product of that cluttered lilliputian room, was announced to the world. But another one-half twelvemonth passed before the first Model T was set for what had already become a clamorous marketplace...

The summer before, Mr. Ford told me to block off the experimental room for Joe Galamb, a momentous event occurred which would impact the entire automotive industry. The first heat of vanadium steel in the country was poured at the United Steel Company'due south plant in County, Ohio.

Early on that twelvemonth we had several visits from J. Kent Smith, a noted English language metallurgist from a land which had been in the forefront of steel development...

The 1908 Model T. Two forward
gears, a 20 horsepower engine
and no driver doors.
They sold like hot cakes

Ford, Wills, and I listened to him and examined his information. We had already read about this English vanadium steel. It had a tensile force nearly three times that of steels we were using, only we'd never seen information technology. Smith demonstrated its toughness and showed that despite its forcefulness information technology could be machined more easily than manifestly steel. Immediately Mr. Ford sensed the slap-up possibilities of this shock-resisting steel. 'Charlie,' he said to me after Smith left, 'this ways entirely new pattern requirements, and we tin can go a better, lighter, and cheaper machine as a result of it.'

It was the corking common sense that Mr. Ford could apply to new ideas and his power to simplify seemingly complicated problems that made him the pioneer he was. This sit-in of vanadium steel was the deciding point for him to begin the experimental piece of work that resulted in Model T...

Actually it took four years and more to develop Model T. Previous models were the guinea pigs, one might say, for experimentation and evolution of a car which would realize Henry Ford's dream of a machine which anyone could beget to buy, which anyone could bulldoze anywhere, and which almost anyone could keep in repair. Many of the world'due south greatest mechanical discoveries were accidents in the course of other experimentation. Not so Model T, which ushered in the motor transport age and ready off a concatenation reaction of machine product at present known as automation. All our experimentation at Ford in the early days was toward a stock-still and, so wildly fantastic goal.

Past March, 1908, we were ready to announce Model T, but not to produce it, On Oct one of that yr the get-go car was introduced to the public. From Joe Galamb's little room on the third floor had come a revolutionary vehicle. In the next 18 years, out of Piquette Avenue, Highland Park, River Rouge, and from associates plants all over the United States came 15,000,000 more than."

A few months later- in July 1908 - Sorensen and a institute foreman spent their days off developing the nuts of the Associates Line:

"What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from i worker to another until it became a consummate unit, then arranging the catamenia of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product. Regardless of earlier uses of some of these principles, the straight line of succession of mass production and its intensification into automation stems directly from what we worked out at Ford Motor Visitor between 1908 and 1913...

Every bit may be imagined, the job of putting the car together was a simpler 1 than treatment the materials that had to be brought to

The erstwhile fashioned style - limousines are
assembled at individual stations
by a Pittsburg manufacturer, 1912

it. Charlie Lewis, the youngest and about aggressive of our assembly foremen, and I tackled this problem. We gradually worked it out by bringing up merely what we termed the fast-moving materials. The main bulky parts, like engines and axles, needed a lot of room. To requite them that infinite, we left the smaller, more compact, lite-treatment material in a storage building on the northwest comer of the grounds. And so we bundled with the stock department to bring up at regular hours such divisions of cloth as we had marked out and packaged.

This simplification of handling cleaned things upwards materially. Only at all-time, I did not like it. Information technology was and then that the thought occurred to me that assembly would be easier, simpler, and faster if nosotros moved the chassis along, showtime at i finish of the plant with a frame and adding the axles and the wheels; then moving information technology past the stockroom, instead of moving the stockroom to the chassis. I had Lewis arrange the materials on the floor so that what was needed at the start of assembly would be at that end of the edifice and the other parts would be along the line every bit we moved the chassis along. We spent every Sunday during July planning this. So one Lord's day forenoon, afterward the stock was laid out in this mode, Lewis and I and a couple of helpers put together the start motorcar, I'one thousand sure, that was always congenital on a moving line.

Nosotros did this simply by putting the frame on skids, hitching a towrope to the front end end and pulling the frame along until axles and wheels were put on. So we rolled the chassis forth in notches to show what could be done. While demonstrating this moving line, we worked on some of the subassemblies, such as completing a radiator with all its hose fittings and then that we could place it very apace on the chassis. We also did this with the dash and mounted the steering gear and the spark scroll."

The basics of the Associates Line had been established only it would take another five years for the concept to exist implemented. Implementation would wait construction of the new Highland Park plant which was purpose-congenital to incorporate the associates line. The procedure began at the superlative floor of the four-story building where the engine was assembled and progressed level by level to the ground floor where the trunk was attached to the chassis.

End of the Line. The Model T'southward torso is joined
to its chassis at the Highland Park plant

"Past August, 1913, all links in the concatenation of moving assembly lines were complete except the last and most spectacular i - the one nosotros had first experimented with one Sunday forenoon just five years before. Once again a towrope was hitched to a chassis, this time pulled by a capstan. Each role was attached to the moving chassis in social club, from axles at the commencement to bodies at the finish of the line. Some parts took longer to attach than others; so, to keep an even pull on the towrope, in that location must be differently spaced intervals between delivery of the parts along the line. This chosen for patient timing and rearrangement until the menstruum of parts and the speed and intervals along the assembly line meshed into a perfectly synchronized functioning throughout all stages of product. Earlier the end of the yr a power-driven assembly line was in operation, and New Year's saw iii more installed. Ford mass production and a new era in industrial history had begun"

References:
Charles Sorensen's account can be found in: Sorensen, Charles, Due east., My Forty Years with Ford (1956); Banum, Russ, The Ford Century (2002); Brinkley, Douglas, Wheels for the globe: Henry Ford, his company, and a century of progress, 1903-2003 (2003).

How To Cite This Article:
"Henry Ford Changes the Earth, 1908," EyeWitness to History world wide web.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2005).

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Source: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ford.htm

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