Henry Ford

            Perhaps one of the greatest ideas of the 1910's was the assembly line, which revolutionalized the way we make goods, especially automobiles. The inventor of the assembly line is a great man named Henry Ford.
             Ford is known by many as the man who invented the automobile. This is not true. Ford invented an ingenious way of making the automobile cheap and affordable to most people. Before Ford, everything was produced by hand, with little help from machines. It required skilled craftsmen with experience, and lots of time. Ford realized that being so inefficient could not yield the low-priced automobiles he envisioned; so Ford and his team came up with the assembly line.
             The assembly line was based on four principals: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort (3). Interchangeable parts means that the same part will fit other parts. A steering wheel will fit onto any steering linkage. An engine mount will screw into any chassis and hold any engine. Having interchangeable parts did, however, mean more advanced machinery to make those parts, so it was developed. Continuous flow means instead of having the workers constantly moving about to the parts they are working on, the parts are moved to them. This alone greatly improved efficiency. Division of labor is basically dividing up the jobs. In Ford's case in the assembly of the Model T, work was divided into 84 distinct steps. Each worker was trained to do just one of the steps, and got very good at it. After the plant was running smoothly, Ford hired an expert from Germany to create the most efficient working environment. They laid out the assembly line in the very best way. They even studied the best movements workers should make with their bodies and hands.
             Standing in the same spot doing the same job hours on end is extremely toilsome to workers, and many quit. Ford was paying his employees the standard rate of $2.