Ford cut the time to build a car from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes.
On October 7, 1913, 140 workers stood along a 150-foot chassis line at Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant in Michigan.1 Instead of walking to a stationary car and building it from start to finish, each worker stayed in place while the unfinished vehicle moved to them on rails. The moving assembly line had arrived.
The idea did not originate with Henry Ford. Ransom Olds used a stationary assembly process to build the Oldsmobile Curved Dash in 1901, increasing production from 425 to 2,500 vehicles per year.2 Chicago meatpacking plants had operated "disassembly lines" since the 1860s, moving carcasses past stationary butchers on overhead trolleys. William "Pa" Klann visited a Swift and Company slaughterhouse and brought the concept back to Ford.3
What Ford's team accomplished between 1908 and 1913 was the synthesis of moving work, interchangeable parts, and timed workflow into a single continuous process. Assembly time for a Model T chassis dropped from more than twelve hours to ninety-three minutes.4 By May 1914, three parallel lines produced over 1,200 chassis per eight-hour shift.
The human cost was immediate. Worker turnover at Highland Park reached 370 percent in 1913.5 For every 100 workers Ford wanted to add, the company had to hire 963 to offset the rate at which employees quit. The work was faster, but it was also repetitive, exhausting, and stripped of autonomy.
Ford responded with the five-dollar day in January 1914, more than doubling the prevailing wage.6 The raise was conditional. Ford's Sociological Department sent investigators into workers' homes to verify their living habits, savings practices, and moral conduct before approving the higher pay. The price of a Model T fell from $850 in 1908 to $300 by 1925.
Karl Marx had described the alienation of workers separated from the products of their labor decades before the assembly line existed.7 Ford's innovation made that abstraction physical. A worker who once built a car now attached the same bolt, thousands of times a day, to a vehicle that never stopped moving.