The Invention Of The Assembly Line - 1948 Words

Introduction: The degree of engineering production has substantially increased over the last one hundred years. There exists numerous reasons why the world has been able to progress so quickly in the last one hundred years than the few thousand years before. The main answer lies in the invention of the assembly line. Prior to the assembly line, production rate was dependent on the precision of specific parts for an item and a worker’s ability to assemble the specific parts together. The assembly line eliminated the idea of a worker who must be trained to build every part of a machine or item. Instead, the assembly line focused more on small independent jobs for lesser trained employees. With the assembly line, an employee would†¦show more content†¦Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, which astounded the public due to its simplicity and reliability, according to History.com. While the Model T was inexpensive, Ford didn’t find his product to be as inexpensive as he wanted. Ford challenged himself to find a way to make his dream of supplying the whole nation with affordable cars a reality. Ford realized that he must change his methods of production in order to decrease the price of his automobiles. His invention of the assembly line actually started before the Model T came out, but Ford did not know it at the time. The Model N was built prior to the Model T. The workers on the Model N automobiles placed the parts in order along the floor while the â€Å"under-construction† auto was on skids and moved down the line. The workers placed their respective parts on the machine as it passed by. For the Model T, Ford tried to make his process even better. He broke the assembly process into 84 small steps. On top of this, workers were trained for only one of the 84 steps. By having a machine that could make interchangeable parts faster than any human, the process accelerated quickly and there was no shortage on supplies. With the c ombination of the new parts machine, line of workers trained per step, and an order of parts, the assembly line was born. Figure 1 below shows the wheels and hubcaps of Model T cars being assembled using the assembly line. The excessive amounts