MTFCA Forum

This was posted on a web site today. Ford did not come up with the concept of the assembly line, Elias Howe did many years before Henry was even a little child. Henry was a complex person and a racist , but he and his company "Put America on wheels" Without him, would we all be driving Chevrolt 490s? I never had a big auto collection, having at the most 7 old cars at one time, but out of the 80 autos I have own over the years, 45 were Fords and I own 5 at the persent time, 3 being old ones.
(1910 Touring, 1931 roadster and a 1931 wide bed pickup. )
From the web:
It's the birthday of auto maker Henry Ford, born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan (1863), who created the Model-T and the concept of an assembly line. He said: "We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."

I wouldn't say Henry was a racist. He was an anti-Semite. Unlike most Detroit employers of his day, Henry believed in hiring and promoting blacks, sometimes placing them in supervisory roles over whites, which in those times caused quite a ruckus.

Thank you or this information. You are right.

Mr. Ford did NOT invent the assembly line, this is true... but he DID bring it to the then-juvenile Automotive Manufacturing industry. Wihtout it, we would likely have had to spend upwards of 5+ years wages on a cantankerous, hard to get parts for mode of transportation, or worse, been forced to remain with trains and slow, plodding horses as transportation (although as we now know, there are certain Amish families who are into high speed transportation ...)

ModelT46 wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 30, 2020 12:47 pm

Without him, would we all be driving Chevrolt 490s?

If that were the case, we'd still have a robust, thriving steel industry to turn out the replacement axles the world would need to keep them on the road...

Actually, what the model T did was force the other vehicle manufacturers to find ways to cut costs to compete with Ford's silly-low prices. When you could buy one of his cars for a couple hundred bucks, you didn't need to buy a much more expensive car, so the other manufacturers had to follow suit or lose sales to Henry. And still, he had a good thing going...

So happy 157th, Mr. Ford.

Ever hear of this?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_plant
The Venice Arsenal also provides one of the first examples of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in Venice, Republic of Venice, several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, it mass-produced ships on assembly lines using manufactured parts. The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people.

Ford actually gets credit for the first automated assembly line. Olds had an assembly line before Ford, but the workers had to manually haul the vehicle to the next workstation. Firearms manufacturers did the same as Olds years before the auto manufacturers adopted the assembly line method.

In another story and word found on the Internet:

Who invented the first Automotive Assembly Line?

"Automotive pioneer Ransom Eli Olds deserves credit for patenting the first assembly line process, and for starting the automotive industry in the Detroit area. Henry Ford is usually given credit for inventing the assembly line. What he actually did was to improve the idea by installing conveyor belts."