Henry Ford

As we already know, engineers are the creators of everyday tools that people use in order to make life easier. The perfection of the automobile over the last century has been known as one of the greatest inventions of mankind. The man that catalyzed not only the production of automobiles, but of almost every mass-produced product to this day, is Henry Ford.

Henry Ford was the inventor of the mass-production technique known as the Assembly line. He used this technique to mass-produce cars quicker, and more affordable than ever before, thanks to the utilization of man-power.

Assembly lines function as the product moving down a line, and each person who helps in assembling the product has one specific job to complete for each product that passes down the line. For example, one person may need to attach the doors to the car, while another person would be putting the engine block into car. Having multiple people putting in specific parts of the car only, allows for the rate of production to increase, because the cars are produced a lot quicker. Wikipedia cites the average production rate of a Ford Model-T to be one every 93 minutes, which is almost eight times faster than methods used in the past (twelve and a half hours).

The creation of the assembly line is built off of three main principles According to Henry Ford and they are as follows.

(1) Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in the process of finishing.

(2) Use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman completes his operation, he drops the part always in the same place—which place must always be the most convenient place to his hand—and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman for his operation.

(3) Use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are delivered at convenient distances.

This technique has now worked for over one hundred years in mass-producing everything from cars, to electronics, to toys; although, in the past one hundred years, a few things have definitely changed. The main change in the assembly process has been machinery. Over the last ten years, we have seen much of the assembly process be taken over by automated machinery to complete individual tasks as done by man beforehand. From a production standpoint, machinery lowers costs for wages and risks of injuries, as well as speed up the rate of production.

Overall, the creation of the assembly line has been evolutionary in the mass-production of many of the things we use today. The perfection of the assembly came from the ingenuity of Henry Ford, who looked to maximize efficiency and affordability of his cars for people.