Henry Ford - Father of Assembly Lines

Have you ever wondered how we get so many cars, buses, trucks and bikes on road these days? There are many vehicles which are mass produced by almost all the companies today. Mass production is the only answer to today's increasing demands and all companies are equipped to mass produce most of their products. Ford's innovation is one of the reasons why America is what it is right now.

Germans had a upper hand in the development of the vehicle technology as a whole however it was the Americans who were able to introduce mass production in manufacturing the vehicles by inventing the assembly lines.

Ransom E Olds.

Misconception

There is a common misconception that it was Henry Ford who was the inventor of  assembly lines, it was not Ford. Ransom E. Olds was the inventor of the assembly lines in 1901, he mass produced his car named Oldsmobile Curved Dash. Modern assembly lines are the improvised versions of his assembly lines. By introducing assembly lines in production he maximized the production by four times. Production of the car increased from 425 in 1901 to 2500 in 1902, and there were 19000 produced in total which is remarkable considering the time and technology. 

Assembly Lines

Now moving on to the topic, Henry Ford - Father of Assembly Lines. Why I say him as the father of the assembly line is because he used Olds' concept, tweaked it a little and he introduced his ideas into them which made it a cutting edge concept at the start of the 1900's. Lets first know what are assembly lines. Assembly lines are used to make the manufacturing process faster, easier. efficient and they are time saving. In assembly lines, the parts are added to the vehicle in a sequential manner and the whole line keeps moving which reduces the time to produce the finished vehicle. Also the operators do not move much and the parts are delivered to them. 

Time saving in assembly lines

Here's an example to understand the time saving by using assembly lines

Consider the assembly of the car with the installation of engine, installation of bonet and the installation of the wheels.

The traditional approach will have a separate station for the assembly of one car. And all the assembly will be made in the station. If the engine installation takes 20 minutes and the bonet takes 5 minutes and the wheels take 10 minutes, the car will be assembled in 35 minutes.

In the assembly line, the car is split between several station which allows all the stations working and three cars can we worked at the same time but on different part. First lets take the first car, it takes 20 minutes to fit the engine, and it is moved to the second station to fit the bonet which takes 5 minutes and at last to to the wheel assembly station which takes 10 minutes. If the engine has been mounted, the first station will move on to assemble the other car and the second station will assemble the first car hence we save time. After bonet assembly the car will move to wheel assembly. Now when the second car's engine is mounted it will be moved to bonet assembly while the first car's wheel will be assembled.

Assuming no loss in time while moving car between stations, the car can be assembled in 20 minutes once the first car takes 35 minutes to assemble.

Henry Ford - Introduction

Born on 30th July, 1863 was a Industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company in 1901. He can be regarded as the sole sponsor and developer of the moving assembly line technique, this technology allowed to mass-produce the car and also allowed a common man to own a car.

In his early years, he lived with his parents and he had four siblings. At the age of 15 his father gave him a watch, he used to mend with the watch and he learnt to repair the watch eventually and thus he helped his neighbors fix their clocks and watched and he gained a reputation as a 'watch repairman'

After his mother's death in 1876, he was entrusted with the farm. But he was not interested in farming, he left his farm in 1879, moved to Detroit and joined James F. Flower and Bros as a apprentice machinist. He later worked for Detroit Dry Dock Co. and in 1882 he returned to his farm and that's when he gained substantial knowledge on operating and working of the Westinghouse Steam Engines and later he was hired by the Westinghouse to service the engines.

He married Clara Ala Bryant in 1888 and at this  point of time, he was supporting him by farming and owning a sawmill. Later they had a son named Edsel Ford, he died in 1943 of stomach cancer.

In 1891 he joined Edison Illuminating Company as an Engineer and in 1893 he was promoted as a Chief Engineer, this gave him time and money to work on gasoline engines. On June 4, 1896 he first test drove his automobile called as Ford Quadricycle. Then Ford tried to develop this vehicle by brain storming. Later he attended a meeting with the Edison executives where he was introduced to Thomas Edison who gave him confidence to build another vehicle, which allowed him to complete his second vehicle in 1898. With the financial backing from a lumber baron named William H. Murphy he started Detroit Automobile Company in 1899 after resigning in Edison Illuminating Company, the company dissolved because Ford was not satisfied due to the low quality cars and higher price.

In 1901 he designed a automobile with '26- Horsepower' with the help of C. Harold Willis and then they started Henry Ford Company with Ford as a Chief Engineer, but in 1902 Ford left the company as Murphy brought Henry M. Lealand as a consultant. The company was renamed as Cadillac Automobile Company and later it was acquired by General Motors Company. 

Ford later joined his old friend Alexander Malcomson and started a company called Ford & Malcomson Ltd. to produce automobiles. They leased a factory and a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge for parts. At first the sales was slow and there was crisis when the Dodges' demanded money for their first shipment. Malcomson in return brought another group of investors and convinced Dodge brothers and then they formed Ford Motor Company in 1903 with $28,000 capital.

Henry Ford's Assembly Lines with Interchangeable Parts

In 1908, Henry Ford's T automobile was his 20th design over a five - year period. Ford named his cars alphabetically starting from A. Ford achieved mass production by not only using the continuously moving assembly lines but also his idea of using the interchangeable parts with a common gauging system. By using same gauging system, he eliminated the simple difficulties the fitters faced while assembling the cars like filing the parts.

Ford introduced a single cylinder block for a four-cylinder engine which cut down the time and cost of production and also assembling was easier with a single block for all the four cylinders. This gave him an edge over his competitors because they were using the cast cylinder block separately for each cylinder. 

When he first started to manufacture cars, he used assembly stands where mostly one car was built by one fitter and it took 514 minutes in total. 

His first innovative step was to bring the parts to the workstation and thus fitters need not move to bring the parts. When the parts interchangeability was introduced, Ford decided that one work would perform only a single task and move from vehicle to vehicle, before moving assembly lines and by now the task cycle time for a assembler was reduced from 514 to 2.3 minutes. With interchangeable parts, the worker was not filing the parts and now he was more familiar with the task he was doing, naturally productivity increased.

Even though moving workers increased productivity, there was a problem, faster workers were moving ahead of the slower workers and this caused problems, however, this was eliminated when the moving assembly line was introduced in 1913 at his New Highland Park plant in Detroit. This reduced to task cycle time of a assembler from 2.3 minutes to 1.19 minutes because the worker was not moving now. 

By introducing the parts interchangeability and the moving assembly lines, Ford not only increased the production, but also decreased the stress involved for the workers. The cost of the car dropped dramatically and it sold 2 million identical vehicles a year in the early 1920's.

Ford made the car even more appealing by making the car versatile, the car was designed to fit the farm equipment very easily such that the farmer can use it. And he handed out a 64 paged manual for the owner to solve 140 problems likely to occur in the car.

Thus Ford thrived in the early 1900's, its competitors were of no match to the manufacturing standards and the method employed by Ford. 

Ford was paying his workers $5/day which was very high for that period of time.