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Henry Ford & Automobile Production Social Essays

HENRY FORD & AUTOMOBILE PRODUCTION Most people think of Henry Ford as the man who invented the automobile, but his influence on the American society was far greater and will last for all time. Ford changed the face of the nation and set the stage for the entrepreneurs of today. He helped develop the infrastructure for automobiles, including roads and gas stations. He set a minimum wage for his workers. He shortened the workday. And, he created a successful assembly line for automobile mass production. He helped to create this nation’s middle class and acted to allow the workingman to realize some dreams. Ford was an autocrat but he believed firmly in the little guy. In 1905, there were more than 50 companies each year trying to break into the automobile business; most of them did not succeed.1 Ford did. He had financial backers who believed the way to maximize the company’s profits was to build cars for the rich, but Ford had another idea — he believed the workers who built the cars should be able to afford to buy one themselves. He thought those workers should be able to take their families out for a spin in their cars on Sunday afternoons. Ford resisted his backer’s demands and followed his own beliefs and eventually just bought out his investors’ interests so he could run the company exactly as he thought it should be run. That move made Ford the father of the 20th century American industry.2 The Model T that rolled out of the plant in 1908 was called Everyman car; it was elegant in simplicity and it was a dream for everyone. Ford initiated industrial mass production in his auto plants but his interest was in mass consumption. Ford said: Mass production requires mass consumption, which means higher wages.3 His philosophy was simply this: if everyone earned a decent wage and he produced more cars in less time for less money, everyone in the country would buy his cars. One of the actions Ford took in 1913 to actualize his vision was to increase the minimum daily wage of workers to $5.00 from the $2.34 for a 9-hour shift that was the average in the auto industry; he also reduced the workday to 8-hour shifts.4 The Wall Street Journal called Ford’s action an economic crime because no one could make that much money without a significant amount of training or education. Critics worldwide called it Fordism, not meant as a compliment.5 Iacocca observed that what the critics of the day failed to understand was that Ford had lowered his costs of building each car so the wages didn’t really matter, in fact, the increase in daily wage made it possible for more people to buy cars. Ford and his investors formed the Ford Motor Company in 1901.6 The first Model A was sold within a month of the company being established. The car was built by ten workmen in a converted wagon factory in Detroit. During the next fifteen months, 1,700 Model A’s were sold.7 He kept improving the car, using the letters of the alphabet for each new design. The first Model T came out of the factory in 1908; it cost $850 and 10,660 cars were sold that first year; the Model T had a top speed of 45 miles per hour and it averaged 25 miles to the gallon; it had a 20-horse-power engine, side-valve, 4-cylinders, and 18-inch wheels with cotton cord tires.8 There was no gas gauge, the driver had to check how much gas was left with a wooden stick lowered into the gas tank. Window wipers were hand operated. The sides of the car were open. The only color available was black. Still, even with what today’s driver would consider a complete lack of amenities, the Model T was a perfect car for the time. The roads were bad, the population lived mostly in rural areas and there were very few repair facilities. The Model T was so well engineered and so simple to repair that if anything went wrong, it took only a screwdriver to fix it. It was also a remarkably versatile vehicle. Farmers could buy tractor wheels for it that replaced the rear axle wheels. The Model T thus became a tractor that the farmer could use to haul, plow, plant and harvest. They could even use the rear axle to power mobile sawmills, electric generators, water pumps and feed grinders. The demand was high for the car but production was slow; each car was handmade. Ford knew that if he was going to satisfy the demand he would have to speed up production. This led Ford to investigate conveyor belts and how he could use them to increase production and lower costs. Ford built an automatic conveyor belt and organized teams that added parts to each Model T as it moved down the line. By 1914, his Highland Park plant was churning out a car every 93 minutes.9 The chassis assembly alone was cut from 12 hours to one hour and thirty-three minutes. Ford spent about $3,500 to build the conveyor belt that would move the cars down an assembly line.10 This was a significant change; rather than the workers moving from one car assembly to the next, the car moved saving time and money. The components needed were funneled to the teams so the workers didn’t even have to waste time moving to parts bins for what they needed. In 1915, mass production had allowed Ford to sell its millionth car.11 By 1927, the year production ended for the Model T, more than 15 million cars had been sold.12 That was half of the world’s output of cars. Ford had designed a car that was easy to manufacture and one that could be owned by a large number of people. Ford’s vision not only created a middle class in this country, he fostered urbanization and rising wages. Consider these demographics: when Ford left his own family farm at the age of 16 and walked eight miles to get his first job in a Detroit machine shop, only 2 out of 8 Americans lived in cities.13 An overwhelming majority of people lived on farms in rural areas. By World War II, 4 out of 8 Americans lived in urban areas.14 One of the reasons for the increase was the Model T. People flocked to Detroit to obtain jobs in Ford’s factories. Once employed, they could afford to purchase a car, which afforded them great mobility. After the War, even more people moved to urban areas for jobs and more cars were sold. Ford did not invent mass production through assembly lines and moving conveyor belts but he wedded the concept with building automobiles, but it would not have happened if it had not been for the ideas of Alfred P. Sloan, who established General Motors. Sloan understood how to decentralize and mange a large manufacturing organization that resulted from mass production. He also knew how to sell the product. Detroit was already a hotbed of manufacturing by the late 1800s with many marine engine builders who were familiar with how internal combustion engines worked. Hundreds of entrepreneurs who wanted to build cars used this expertise but it didn’t work. Even though these people increased their production output, their costs did not drop as significantly as did Ford’s costs. Their crude, craft-based production techniques left each automobile costing the same amount no matter how many they built. The competing companies did not use standard gauging systems and the tools of the day could not cut hardened steel so all the components were machined and cut to shape, then put in ovens to harden. The very process of heating the parts caused many of the parts to warp, which made them useless. Each vehicle was different from every other one because of the process. Ford did not do this; he made a simple car with standard parts and mass-produced them, which lowered his costs. For his Model T, all parts were the same because he used the idea of interchangeable parts and then made those parts easy to manufacture, easy to repair and easy to drive. He began this process in 1908 with his first Model T. 15 Ford was never satisfied; he analyzed the production process continually always trying to find new ways to increase production and cut costs at the same time. He initially found that it would be faster to have assemblers perform specialized tasks and move from automobile to automobile around the assembly area. By 1913, his line was a magneto assembly line that used all the principles he devised through his analysis and which he continued to refine.16 One of the benefits of the line he built was that the conveyor belt maintained a constant pace. That pace could be speeded up to make the workers work faster. In 1914, Ford built 308,162 cars, which exceeded the number produced by all the other automobile manufacturers put together (Crews, 1998). He also reduced the price of the car to $500, making it even more affordable for the American worker to purchase one (The Economist, 1996). In 1924, Ford reduced the price of his Model T to $290. Mass production also allowed Ford to open international franchises. By 1924, Ford opened operations in Indonesia, Siam, Brazil, China and Argentina. He also opened satellite factories in the United States, such as in Norfolk, Virginia (Crews, 1998). The assembly line was responsible for an enormous increase in the number of people employed in the auto industry. In 1914, 3,000 people worked in auto plants in Detroit. 17By 1919, that number increased to 75,000.18 The reasons was simply Ford’s initial breaking down of tasks to each worker. Ford, himself, improved his own productivity by 90 percent in one year between 1913 and 1914.19 Mass production reached its peak in Ford’s giant Rouge complex in Dearborn complex. Ford had the raw materials coming in on one end and the finished automobile came out the other end. His reasoning for the raw materials was simply that he could build the components faster and more cost-effectively than any supplier could. The assembly line and mass production of automobiles was not the only contribution Ford made to the industry. He knew that if people were going to drive the cars they would need places to buy fuel so he pushed to have gasoline stations open everywhere. He also used his money and power to push for better roads. His efforts led to better roads, which eventually led to an interstate-highway system. Ford also knew that he needed a system to sell and repair cars and he knew the facilities needed to be local. He invented the dealer-franchise system to fill these needs. The facilities were nicknamed Ford’s roadmen. By 1912, there were 7,000 Ford dealers across the country.20 Henry Ford revolutionized not only the manufacturing of automobiles; he established a process for selling the cars. He did not really invent anything; in fact, his strength and vision were in the manufacturing process. He took ideas already available, such as the conveyor belt and improved the idea for use in his automobile production factories. By doing so, he was able to cut the time of producing each car to a fraction of the time before using the assembly line approach. This allowed Ford to produce more cars at less cost. The price of automobiles could be lowered and the wage of workers could then be increased. Between these two acts, Ford created an economic society in which every person employed at a decent livable wage could buy a car. Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY Crews, Ed. Henry Ford’s Model T: The Car that Started it All. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. Scarry, Huck. On the road. New York: Philomel, 1981. Iacocca, Lee. “Driving Force - Henry Ford.” Time Magazine: December 7, 1998 p76-79. Taylor, Timothy. A history of the U.S. economy in the 20th Century. Springfield, VA: The Teaching Company, 1996. Winter, Drew. The mass production revolution: forget the machine: the line changed the world. New York: M.K. McElderry Books, 1992. Word Count: 1945

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