My Life and Work
mentally--even if they are physically--capable of making a good living.
That is, they are not capable of furnishing with their own hands a
sufficient quantity of the goods which this world needs to be able to
exchange their unaided product for the goods which they need. I have
heard it said, in fact I believe it is quite a current thought, that we
have taken skill out of work. We have not. We have put in skill. We have
put a higher skill into planning, management, and tool building, and the
results of that skill are enjoyed by the man who is not skilled. This I
shall later enlarge on.
We have to recognize the unevenness in human mental equipments. If every
job in our place required skill the place would never have existed.
Sufficiently skilled men to the number needed could not have been
trained in a hundred years. A million men working by hand could not even
approximate our present daily output. No one could manage a million men.
But more important than that, the product of the unaided hands of those
million men could not be sold at a price in consonance with buying
power. And even if it were possible to imagine such an aggregation and
imagine its management and correlation, just think of the area that it
would have to occupy! How many of the men would be engaged, not in
producing, but in merely carrying from place to place what the other men
had produced? I cannot see how under such conditions the men could
possibly be paid more than ten or twenty cents a day--for of course it
is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the
product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the
production so that the product may pay the wages.
The more economical methods of production did not begin all at once.
They began gradually--just as we began gradually to make our own parts.
"Model T" was the first motor that we made ourselves. The great
economies began in assembling and then extended to other sections so
that, while to-day we have skilled mechanics in plenty, they do not
produce automobiles--they make it easy for others to produce them. Our
skilled men are the tool makers, the experimental workmen, the
machinists, and the pattern makers. They are as good as any men in the
world--so good, indeed, that they should not be wasted in doing that
which the machines they contrive can do better. The rank and file of men
come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few
days. If they do not learn within that time they will never be of any
use to us. These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is
required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially
able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space
they occupy. They do not have to be able-bodied men. We have jobs that
require great physical strength--although they are rapidly lessening; we
have other jobs that require no strength whatsoever--jobs which, as far
as strength is concerned, might be attended to by a child of three.
It is not possible, without going deeply into technical processes, to
present the whole development of manufacturing, step by step, in the
order in which each thing came about. I do not know that this could be
done, because something has been happening nearly every day and nobody
can keep track. Take at random a number of the changes. From them it is
possible not only to gain some idea of what will happen when this world
is put on a production basis, but also to see how much more we pay for
things than we ought to, and how much lower wages are than they ought to
be, and what a vast field remains to be explored. The Ford Company is
only a little way along on the journey.
A Ford car contains about five thousand parts--that is counting screws,
nuts, and all. Some of the parts are fairly bulky and others are almost
the size of watch parts. In our first assembling we simply started to
put a car together at a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the
parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a
house. When we started to make parts it was natural to create a single
department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman
performed all of the operations necessary on a small part. The rapid
press of production made it necessary to devise plans of production that
would avoid having the workers falling over one another. The undirected
worker spends more of his time walking about for materials and tools
than he does in working; he gets small pay because pedestrianism is not
a highly paid line.
The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to
the men instead of the men to the work. We now have two general
principles in all operations--that a man shall never have to take more
than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever
stoop over.
The principles of assembly are these:
(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.
The net result of the application of these principles is the reduction
of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction
of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one
thing with only one movement. The assembling of the chassis is, from the
point of view of the non-mechanical mind, our most interesting and
perhaps best known operation, and at one time it was an exceedingly
important operation. We now ship out the parts for assembly at the point
of distribution.
Along about April 1, 1913, we first tried the experiment of an assembly
line. We tried it on assembling the flywheel magneto. We try everything
in a little way first--we will rip out anything once we discover a
better way, but we have to know absolutely that the new way is going to
be better than the old before we do anything drastic.
I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea
came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers
use in dressing beef. We had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto
in the usual method. With one workman doing a complete job he could turn
out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or about twenty
minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into
twenty-nine operations; that cut down the assembly time to thirteen
minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight
inches--this was in 1914--and cut the time to seven minutes. Further
experimenting with the speed that the work should move at cut the time
down to five minutes. In short, the result is this: by the aid of
scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did
only a comparatively few years ago. That line established the efficiency
of the method and we now use it everywhere. The assembling of the motor,
formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four
operations--those men do the work that three times their number formerly
did. In a short time we tried out the plan on the chassis.
About the best we had done in stationary chassis assembling was an
average of twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes per chassis. We tried
the experiment of drawing the chassis with a rope and windlass down a
line two hundred fifty feet long. Six assemblers traveled with the
chassis and picked up the parts from piles placed along the line. This
rough experiment reduced the time to five hours fifty minutes per
chassis. In the early part of 1914 we elevated the assembly line. We had
adopted the policy of "man-high" work; we had one line twenty-six and
three quarter inches and another twenty-four and one half inches from
the floor--to suit squads of different heights. The waist-high
arrangement and a further subdivision of work so that each man had fewer
movements cut down the labour time per chassis to one hour thirty-three
minutes. Only the chassis was then assembled in the line. The body was
placed on in "John R. Street"--the famous street that runs through our
Highland Park factories. Now the line assembles the whole car.
It must not be imagined, however, that all this worked out as quickly as
it sounds. The speed of the moving work had to be carefully tried out;
in the fly-wheel magneto we first had a speed of sixty inches per
minute. That was too fast. Then we tried eighteen inches per minute.
That was too slow. Finally we settled on forty-four inches per minute.
The idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work--he must have
every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second. We have
worked out speeds for each assembly, for the success of the chassis
assembly caused us gradually to overhaul our entire method of
manufacturing and to put all assembling in mechanically driven lines.
The chassis assembling line, for instance, goes at a pace of six feet
per minute; the front axle assembly line goes at one hundred eighty-nine
inches per minute. In the chassis assembling are forty-five separate
operations or stations. The first men fasten four mud-guard brackets to
the chassis frame; the motor arrives on the tenth operation and so on in
detail. Some men do only one or two small operations, others do more.
The man who places a part does not fasten it--the part may not be fully
in place until after several operations later. The man who puts in a
bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not
tighten it. On operation number thirty-four the budding motor gets its
gasoline; it has previously received lubrication; on operation number
forty-four the radiator is filled with water, and on operation number
forty-five the car drives out onto John R. Street.
Essentially the same ideas have been applied to the assembling of the
motor. In October, 1913, it required nine hours and fifty-four minutes
of labour time to assemble one motor; six months later, by the moving
assembly method, this time had been reduced to five hours and fifty-six
minutes. Every piece of work in the shops moves; it may move on hooks on
overhead chains going to assembly in the exact order in which the parts
are required; it may travel on a moving platform, or it may go by
gravity, but the point is that there is no lifting or trucking of
anything other than materials. Materials are brought in on small trucks
or trailers operated by cut-down Ford chassis, which are sufficiently
mobile and quick to get in and out of any aisle where they may be
required to go. No workman has anything to do with moving or lifting
anything. That is all in a separate department--the department of
transportation.
We started assembling a motor car in a single factory. Then as we began
to make parts, we began to departmentalize so that each department would
do only one thing. As the factory is now organized each department makes
only a single part or assembles a part. A department is a little factory
in itself. The part comes into it as raw material or as a casting, goes
through the sequence of machines and heat treatments, or whatever may be
required, and leaves that department finished. It was only because of
transport ease that the departments were grouped together when we
started to manufacture. I did not know that such minute divisions would
be possible; but as our production grew and departments multiplied, we