Henry Ford and the Significant Others who Pioneered Mass Production at Highland Park

Mass Production at Highland Park

Ford Motor Company plant, Highland Park, Detroit, Michigan (LC)

Model T's coming off the assembly line at the Highland Park plant(LC)

Assembly line at the Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant (LC)

The offshoot of scientific management – mass production – was put into practice for the first time around 1913. Only later in 1926 did Ford articulate it as “focusing upon … the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, and speed.” How mass production fit in with organization and the market was further articulated by Ford in this way:

The interpretation of these principles, through studies of operation and machine development and their coordination, is the conspicuous task of management. And the normal result is a productive organization that delivers in quantities a useful commodity of standard materials, workmanship and design at a minimal cost. The necessary, precedent condition of mass production is a capacity, latent or developed, of mass consumption, the ability to absorb large production. The two go together, and in the latter may be traced the reasons for the former.¹⁷

The assembly line that followed, contrary to popular thought both then and now, was not simply the idea or the result of the efforts of Henry Ford alone. During a tour of Henry Ford’s Rouge, I watched a film on the history of mass production that gave total credit to Henry Ford for both the concept and implementation of this system of manufacturing. The film, shown every day to thousands of visitors, perpetuates a lie; for there were many unnamed individuals who contributed to what became mass production at the Ford Motor Company.  Indeed, James Flink summarized the story as one in which mass production developed upward from the shop floor rather than downward from Henry, with key individuals that included skilled tool makers like Carl Emde and staff members C. Harold Wills, Joseph Galamb, Charles Sorenson, Clarence Avery, William C. Klann, and P. E. Martin.¹⁸It was this group and others, who through experiment and trial and error gradually perfected a way of making automobiles at the Highland Park factory. Fixed workbenches, where the assembly of component parts took place, gave way to a series of positions along a moving line where one small component after another was added.¹⁹

Businessman. Employed by Henry Ford until 1919 when Ford bought Wills' stock for $1.5 million. Created the Wills St. Claire which was produced in Marysville, Michigan from 1921 to 1926. He built 14,000 cars before the company went out of business.

Joseph A. Galamb (3 February 1881 – 4 December 1955).

Charles Sorenson. Charles Sorensen (1881-1968), a Danish immigrant, joined the Ford Motor Company in 1904 as a pattern maker and foundryman. He was instrumental in the development of the moving assembly line, the Model T, the 1928 Model A, and the innovative foundry work that resulted in the casting of the 1932 V-8 engine and crankcase in a single piece. He was in charge of all Ford production from 1925 to 1944. He opposed Harry Bennett’s influence on Henry Ford in relation to Edsel Ford, but he agreed with their opposition to unionization. He became a vice-president and board member in 1941. His inability to reach expected airplane production at the Willow Run plant west of Detroit during World War II ended his tenure at Ford in 1944. http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/Charles_Sorensen.htm      


     

William "Pa" Klann apparently visited the stockyards in Chicago and reported what he found related to the disassembly line to P.E. Martin, head of production at Ford. How the story changed to that attributing the story to Henry Ford is beyond me at this time!

P.E. Martin, d. 1944. In charge of assembly at Ford after 1906.

Clarence Avery was born in Dansville MI, in 1882. He became in teacher op manual training, working in Battle Creek and Ishpeming before becoming director of manual training at the Detroit University School in 1907. In 1912, one of his students, Edsel Ford, introduced Avery to his father.  Henry Ford, seeing potential in Avery, hired him for a summer job. Avery learned quickly, and soon left his teaching job to become Charles E. Sorensen's assistant. Beginning in 1913, Avery and Sorensen focused on developing the moving assembly line. Although the originator of this idea is uncertain, Avery certainly had the biggest hand in developing it. By timing each step to maximize the speed of production, Avery and Sorensen reduced the assembly time of the Model T from 12.5 hours to 2.7. As the company grew, Avery worked as Ford's chief development. engineer, developing a reputation as a problem-solver. He developed methods to increase the clarity of automotive glass, and ran Ford's operations in northern Michigan for a time. In 1927, Avery resigned to join Murray Body Corporation, a automobile body manufacturer (and Ford supplier) that was then recovering from bankruptcy. Avery began as an assistant to then-president William R. Wilson, but quickly became president or Murray and eventually Chairman of the Board. He remained with Murray, successfully steering the firm, until his death in 1949.https://www.historicbostonedison.org/Automobile-Pioneers-of-BE

Carl F. Emde (1869-1944). Born in 1869 Carl Emde graduated from technical school as an engineer and travelled to Johannesburg, South Africa where he established a mining engineering business. In 1898 he married Helene Stampe and returned to Germany where he attended the Ilmenau School of Technology graduating as a Master of Mechanical Engineering. He emigrated to the United States in 1903 and worked briefly in the St. Louis area before moving to Detroit in 1905 where he was joined by his wife and 3 children, Clare, Ludwig, and Hermann. A daughter, Margaret, was born there in 1909.  In 1907 Carl went to work with the recently formed Ford Motor Company. As a chief design engineer he worked to develop the methods and machinery used in mass producing the revolutionary Ford Model T automobile. During WWI he is credited with designing a machine that helped make possible the mass production of the Liberty Motor. And was also involved with production of the Eagle Boat. Carl left Ford in the early 1930's to head up his own design firm and retired by 1940. For the last several years of his life he lived with his daughter Margaret and family in Naperville, Illinois where he died in 1944 at the age of 74.Based on an obituary published in the The Naperville Clarion newspaper, Tuesday, October 13, 1944.        

            The impact of the assembly line at Ford was staggering, as the volume of production was unprecedented and cost reductions unparalleled. Once governed by skilled mechanics, scientific management and the assembly line conquered the shop floor. This process was nearly completed by 1914. 

            Joyce Shaw Peterson has described the creation of the assembly line as a series of processes that began with arranging production in an orderly sequence and ended with the development of overhead conveyors. By 1913 an assembly line operated at Ford, and by 1916, helped by Ford’s openness to journalists and visitors, it was institutionalized in various forms throughout the automobile industry. The gradual perfection of the assembly line inaugurated a second phase of automobile production between 1908 and 1925, producing the Model T in volume. It entailed rigid standardization, extensive division and subdivision of tasks, and progressive line production. It was an inflexible process, as opposed to a more flexible mass production system that emerged in the late 1920s. Under Fordism, semiskilled/unskilled workers operated highly specialized machines. In 1910, nearly 75 percent of all jobs were classified as skilled work, but by 1924 expert work declined to 5 to 10 percent.²¹The development of machine technology was crucial to the control of the production process because it eliminated the need for strength or training. James Flink explained that, “Fordism meant that neither physical strength nor the long apprenticeship required for becoming a competent craftsmen were any long prerequisites for industrial employment. The creativity and experience on the job that had been valued in the craftsmen were considered liabilities in the assembly-line worker.”²²Furthermore, Flink lamented that “the American myth of unlimited individual social mobility, based on ability and the ideal of the self-made man, became a frustrating impossibility for the assembly-line worker.”²³Dexterity, speed, and concentration replaced craft and experience. 

            By 1913, a majority of workers were semiskilled or unskilled and operated a highly specialized machine that nearly eliminated the “human element.” The process is evinced in Arnold and Faroute’s observations in Ford Methods and the Ford Shops: “When the moving-assembly line was placed in work with 29 men, splitting the one man operations into 29 operations, the 29 men began turning out 132 magneto assemblies per hour, or 1,188 per 9-hour day, one man’s time producing one fly-wheel magneto assembly in 13 minutes 10 seconds, a saving of 7 minutes time on each assembly or more than one-third of the best one-man time.”²⁴

            In addition to descriptions of the production process, Arnold and Faroute took iconic photographs of Ford’s workers, but their “classic” observations were about machines, not laborers. In a description of “Assembling the Steering and Front Axle,” they wrote, “there are two operations to be performed: (1) to press the arm in its seat in the sub-axle hub boss; (2) to screw the nut on the threaded end of the steering arm.”²⁵No attempt was made to describe the three men in the photograph.