Henry Ford's Use Of The Assembly Line

The earliest automobiles were powered by steam; however, it was a very poor power source due to its price, weight, start-up times, and tendency to explode. The development of automobiles was limited until a better power source was established. In 1834 the first practical motor was developed by Moritz Jacobi (Doppelbauer). Even though this was a motor the motor wasn’t strong enough to drive an automobile. In 1884 a man named Thomas Parker built the first practical electric automobile (“World's first electric car built”). Over the years, many more inventors continued to improve and develop the electric automobiles and for a while electric automobiles were the preferred type of Automobile because they were quick to start up, lacked pollution, …show more content…
This made the automobile a practical form of transportation to be owned by everyone. The assembly line is an arrangement of machines, tools, and workers in which a product is assembled by having each perform a specific, successive operation on an incomplete unit as it passes by in a series of stages organized in a direct line (“Assembly Line”). The concept of the assembly line goes back to the Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford motor company had great success with the use of the assembly line. Ford had a plan in mind to create an automobile that would be cheap enough that millions of people would be able to afford it. The first automobile he created was the Model T in 1908, which was just a simple automobile with no customization options (Devins, 387). Ford wanted to lower the price of his automobile, so he tried various techniques. The first technique he tried was interchangeable parts. He wanted to create identical parts that would fit in any and all of the Model T’s. But, to pursue this, he needed a significant advancement in machining and creation of parts. Luckily it only took Ford a few years and he was able to create machines that could be easily operated and create identical, interchangeable parts (“Henry Ford Changes the World”). This led to his second experiment which was division of labor. He saw that lots …show more content…
Both the automobile and the industrial techniques were what caused these effects. People saw how well Ford’s assembly line was and eventually the use of the assembly line spread rapidly throughout numerous industries, in fact, it made such a big impact that the assembly line is still used today and is still being improved on. Another big effect the automobile had was the creation of the American automobile culture. The mid 1900’s were all about automobiles, with automobiles being the status symbol of the time. The ability to travel long distances cheaply, quickly, and easily also led to people being able to spread farther and farther apart (“The Automobile – Effects”). This even led to an increased migration of people moving to the suburbs and urban areas. Despite all these great advantages of the automobile it suffers from one major problem, which is pollution. This pollution is due to the large amount of fossil fuels consumed by automobiles, a problem that is resulting in a complete redesign of automobiles, away from the internal combustion engine and back to their roots (“The Automobile – Effects”). In conclusion, the automobile, since its invention has revolutionized our society, both directly and indirectly due to the numerous other inventions that were required to make it a consumer