In Britain, the Vulcan Motor Company was proud to film the way their workers assembled cars:
slowly and carefully by hand. Craftsmen worked in their own way, at their
own pace. The whole process took several weeks from start to finish.
These hand-made cars were so expensive that a wide gulf separated those who built them
from those who bought them. But the days when cars were just luxuries
for the rich were drawing to a close. In 1908, one man's vision would change manufacturing
and create a new market. Henry Ford set out to make the simplest car ever, a car for rural
America, a 20th century equivalent of the horse and buggy.
[Sings}: "The little Ford rambled right along, and the little old Ford rambled right along.
The gas ran out in the big machine, but the good little Ford don't need gasoline.
The big limousine has to back downhill, but the plain little Ford is going up still.
When it runs out of dope, just fill it up with soap, and the little Ford'll ramble right along."
To produce the Model T cheaply, Ford knew he had to change the way cars were built.
That meant changing the way his workers worked.
As he reorganized his factory to turn out Model Ts, he was influenced by the efficiency
expert Frederick Taylor. Taylor complained that hardly a workman can be found who doesn't
devote his time to studying just how slowly he can work.
And then he devoted his life to speeding them up.
When Taylor was brought in, he first timed the workers with stop watches and noted every
movement. In a famous experiment in an iron works, he reorganized a worker named Schmidt.
Previously, Schmidt had hand carried 12 tons of pig iron a day up from a wagon. After Taylor
rearranged things, the tolerant Mr. Schmidt found himself carrying 47 tons, and production
had been raised 300%. Called into an office, Taylor helped the world's
fastest typist type even faster. The new world record of 150 words a minute was achieved
by Margaret Owen, and Taylor claimed much of the credit.
At Ford's factory, Taylorism meant dividing automobile production into simple, repetitive
steps. There would be no need for skilled craftsmen with years of apprenticeship. Men
could learn to do any job quickly. A trained wheelwright no longer made each wheel in its
entirety. Wheel making was broken down into almost a hundred steps, done by different
men at different machines. It was much faster, but workers could still complete only 200
cars a day so, in 1913, Ford introduced his most revolutionary change yet.
In those days, each car was built from the frame up, on stationary wooden horses.
The Ford Motor Company filmed the reenactment of how Henry Ford first tried out his new
idea. Henry Ford watched it for a while, and he had an inspiration. Instead of moving the
men past the cars, why not move the cars past the men? So, on one hot August morning, they
tried it that way. A husky young fellow put a rope over his shoulder, and Henry Ford called, "let's go!"
And at that very moment, as the workmen began
to fasten the parts on the slowly moving car, the assembly line was born.
Soon assembly lines were up and running in Ford's factory. The lines became the key to mass production,
a system that would remain virtually unchanged for most of the century.
A network of conveyors was used to deliver parts to an exact point on the line. The workers
became an integral part of the great machine, and management set the pace, without discussion
or negotiation, for unions were forbidden. The men faced new pressure as the final assembly
line beat out the rhythm for the whole factory. There was no way they could stop or slow it down.
Few stood the pace and din for long. Men tried it for a few weeks , then quit.
But Ford had an answer. The company was making record profits. The time taken to build each
car had dropped to one and a half hours, so he could afford to raise pay. When he announced
he was doubling wages to the unheard of level of $5 a day, the factory was besieged with applicants.
By 1920, Detroit was boom town. Its population had quadrupled since 1900.
Other car makers adopted the Ford method. Ford's recipe - mass production, low cost,
high wages - was creating not only cheap cars but well paid workers. By the mid 1920s, Ford
had built the largest factory in the world. At the River Rouge plant, coal, iron, sand,
and rubber were delivered at one end, and 2500 model Ts a day streamed out the other.
Up to 80,000 men worked there. Above all, it was the constant supply of new men arriving
in Detroit that made it possible. The company set the terms. If they worked fast and obeyed
orders, they got the wages. Over 70% were recent immigrants, so the company had its
own language schools. "I fill the kettle with water."
It was game for which Ford made the rules simple but strict: high pay for hard work.
Ford's private security force, the Plant Protection Service, kept discipline. Anyone who recruited
for the unions was fired. Company spies kept a lookout for those considered to be troublemakers.
Ford stressed all the material benefits high pay could bring. Workers were encouraged to
put part of their wages aside each week to save for their own car through a company-run plan.