Ford's moving assembly line was inspired by a Chicago slaughterhouse
The idea behind the Model T production line came from a place that took things apart. After watching carcasses glide along a conveyor at a Chicago meatpacker, with each worker cutting the same piece again and again, Ford's William Klann wondered what would happen if the process ran in reverse.
An assembly line moves an unfinished product from station to station while parts are added in sequence, so goods get built faster and with less labour than when workers carry parts to a stationary item. Conveyors, forklifts or gravity handle the moving; each worker usually repeats one simple task. Designing a line is a known mathematical puzzle, the line balancing problem: tasks must be shared among stations without breaking their order, since you cannot fit a screw before drilling its hole, and without exceeding the time the product spends at each station.
The concept has deep roots. Around 1104 the Venetian Arsenal floated ships down a canal past specialist workshops, and at its early 16th-century peak some 16,000 workers could turn out nearly a ship a day. Oliver Evans's 1785 flour mill used bucket elevators and conveyors to automate milling entirely. At Portsmouth, Marc Brunel's block mills of 1801 to 1803 made rigging pulleys for the Royal Navy on 22 kinds of machine and stayed in use until the 1960s. By early 1853 Richard Garrett and Sons ran a flow line for portable steam engines in Suffolk, and Ransom Olds patented the approach for his Curved Dash cars in 1901.
Klann carried his slaughterhouse observation to Peter Martin, soon to head Ford production, who was sceptical but let him try. The moving line started at the Highland Park plant on 7 October 1913. Split into 45 steps, a Model T took 93 minutes instead of 12.5 man-hours, and cars rolled off every three minutes. Paint became the bottleneck; only japan black dried fast enough, so colour choices vanished until quick-drying Duco lacquer arrived in 1926. Ford's production chief Charles Sorensen later argued that Henry Ford was the sponsor of mass production, not its father.
Cheaper building meant cheaper cars. A Model T cost about 825 dollars in 1908 and around 575 by 1912, and in 1914 a line worker could afford one with four months' wages.
Source: Assembly line
