Henry Ford set out to build a car which everyone could afford to buy. It was slow, ugly and difficult to drive, and was nick named the ‘Tin Lizzie’. The attraction of the Model T Ford was that its price never increased. It cost $1200 in 1909, but only $295 in 1928. By 1929 Ford was producing more than one car per minute in the River Rouge plant in Detroit, which employed 81,000 men. Ford was able to sell cars cheaply because they were mass-produced and every part was standardised - only one colour and one engine size were available, or as he said, “A customer can have any colour he likes for his car so long as it’s black”. Using an idea he borrowed from the meat-packing industry, Ford invented the idea of using an assembly line to speed up the process of building a car. This meant that workers stayed at a fixed station along the line and the car was brought to them. They would perform their operation on the car and it would then move on to the next station until it was completed. In 1925 Ford explained that “the thing is to keep everything in motion and take the work to the man not the man to the work” or as one worker put it, “the belt is boss.” In 1913 it took 14 hours to assemble a Model T using the old system. In 1914 at Ford’s Highland Park plant in Michigan using the new assembly line it was 93 minutes.
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The Model 'T' |
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The car industry was important because:
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However, there were a number of problems with mass production:
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