Back then, in 1913, a winch and a rope moved Model Ts through the Highland Park Assembly Plant, where 140 factory workers performed specific tasks toward a completed car. With its advent, the assembly line created hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs, but made others obsolete. It has refined car and truck manufacturing, improved quality and safety of cars around the globe, and duplicated its efficiencies to other industries such as aircraft.
“If you look at the way it changed the cost structure of the industry and the way it changed society, we’d be wrong not to consider it the biggest innovation ever,” said Bruce Hettle, Ford’s executive director of global vehicle manufacturing.
Henry Ford said, “The first step in (mass production) came when we began taking the work to the men, instead of the men to the work,” according to the biography “I Invented the Modern Age.”