Venice turned out nearly a warship a day centuries before Ford
At its height the Venetian Arsenal employed 16,000 people and launched almost one ship every day, assembling vessels from prefabricated parts in what has been called the world's first factory. Mass production, it turns out, is far older than the car plant. What the nineteenth century added was machine tools precise enough to make parts that truly matched.
Mass production means making large quantities of standardised goods in a continuous flow, usually by passing half-finished items along a line where each worker performs a single step. It sits beside job production and batch production as one of three basic ways to make things. Long before engines, the idea turned up repeatedly. Crossbows with bronze trigger mechanisms built from interchangeable parts helped the first Qin emperor arm the huge forces that unified China, and the Terracotta Army guarding his tomb is thought to have been cast in standard moulds. Carthage built warships in bulk at moderate cost to hold the Mediterranean.
Printing belongs in the story as well. Bi Sheng devised movable type in Song dynasty China, Korea printed the book Jikji with metal type in 1377, and Gutenberg's press later made mass-produced books ordinary in Europe, spreading literacy. In the industrial era, the engineer John Penn of Greenwich filled an Admiralty order for 90 sets of gunboat engines during the Crimean War in 90 days. Chauncey Jerome was producing up to 20,000 cheap brass clocks a year by 1840.
A neat summary of the method is that the skill is built into the tool. Instead of a craftsman measuring every part against a plan, jigs guaranteed each piece would fit, and later computer-controlled machines did the same job. That makes the approach hungry for capital and energy: the presses and robots are so costly that a manufacturer needs confidence the product will sell. Once lines were running, supply could overtake demand, pushing firms to compete in new ways.
The phrase itself was popularised by a 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica supplement article drawn from correspondence with Ford Motor Company. Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management fed into it, although Henry Ford downplayed that influence. The difference, roughly, was that Taylor concentrated on making workers efficient, while Ford went further and replaced labour with carefully arranged machines wherever he could.
Source: Mass production
