The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (28 page)

Avery and his team designed, modified, and finalized the new chassis assembly line over a three-month period during the fall of 1913. By April 1914, three complete lines were in operation, fed by a tributary system of subassembly lines. Avery always modestly insisted that Henry Ford deserved the credit, because he had insisted that “the cars should move, rather than the men and the stock. It was my privilege …to put into operation many of the ideas he so carefully outlined.” But whatever the origin of the technique, the production result proved astonishing. Under the old, stationary system, the best time for assembling a chassis had been twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes. By the summer of 1914, the new assembly line was accomplishing this task in one hour and thirty-three minutes.
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The first professional critique of Ford's new assembly system came from two mechanical experts who visited Highland Park in early 1914. Horace L. Arnold and Fay Leone Faurote, both trained engineers and technical
writers, spent several weeks examining assembly-line production for a series of articles printed in
Engineering Magazine.
The following year, the pair gathered the pieces into a book and published
Ford Methods and the Ford Shops.
This text provided an exhaustive look at the entire Highland Park operation and offered many valuable insights into Ford's revolutionary methods.
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The preface, written by the editor of
Engineering Magazine,
Charles B. Goings, dramatically framed the book's theme. “Ford's success has startled the country, almost the world, financially, industrially, mechanically,” he wrote, by achieving “an absolutely incredible enlargement of output reaching something like one hundred fold in less than ten years.” Arnold and Faurote then examined every detail of the plant's operation, consulted with company managers and engineers, observed every facet of the factory's labor, and interviewed Henry Ford at length. “The urgent demand for maximum production is the dominant condition which governs every activity of the Highland Park shops,” they discovered. This impulse dictated both the organization of the factory and its development of highly specialized machinery. Once, a representative of an Eastern manufacturing concern came to Highland Park to consult with Ford engineers about building a certain machine, Arnold and Faurote reported. After looking at the blueprints, the visitor pointed out a mistake: it specified an output of two hundred parts per hour, whereas obviously the goal was two hundred parts per day. The Ford experts affirmed that the original specification was correct. The outsider pointed out that, since forty units per day was considered a good production, the Ford expectation was impossible. A heated debate ensued, and the machine's designer was summoned and told by the visitor that this output was impossible. “Well,” he replied, “if you will go down into the machine shop on the main floor, you will find a machine doing it—we built one to try it out, and it is doing what we thought it would.” Needless to say, the discussion ended there.
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After a painstaking analysis, Arnold and Faurote concluded that the key to Ford's rising output was its new method of “moving assembly.” Fascinated by the assembly line, they examined it in every detail and concluded that it represented a complete overhaul of traditional, stationary methods. It brought “remarkable labor-saving gains,” “great reductions in floor space required for assembly operations,” and “almost unbelievable reductions in assembling time.” Moreover, the authors concluded that Ford's assembly line had much broader implications for American industry because the principles of “moving assemblies in progress, and of minutely dividing assembling operations,” could be applied to nearly every kind of manufacturing.
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The most spectacular expression of the assembly line, of course, came
with chassis construction of the Model T. Arnold and Faurote were awestruck by the sight:

By 1914, publicity about Ford's new technique had begun to engulf the public as journalistic accounts of this production miracle appeared all over the United States. The magazine
Interstate Motorist,
published in Sioux City, Iowa, proclaimed that the “Ford Factory Is an Ideal”; an essayist for the Boise, Idaho,
News
wrote, “What I saw at the Ford factory impressed me as being even more wonderful than the world-renowned falls at Niagara.” Writers scrambled for metaphors in trying to convey the significance of the assembly line. According to a reporter for the Houston
Chronicle,
a visitor watching this process “thinks of chickens hatching by wholesale in an incubator.”
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Most journalists were stunned by the volume of cars pouring off the assembly lines and into American households. A September 1913 article in the Washington
Times
described the “Ford Production Industrial Marvel” that had produced 185,000 automobiles during the previous twelve months. Newspapers published stories of Ford speed records for assembly, as when a Ford team put together a complete Model T from a pile of preassembled components in two and a half minutes. A nationally reprinted story in the spring of 1914 explained that a Model T “is born every twenty-four seconds during the month of April.” For customers, of course, the great payoff of the speed and volume of the assembly line was the declining price of Ford automobiles. The extraordinary production at Highland Park had allowed Ford to reduce the price of the Model T to $500, as another widely reprinted article announced in August 1913.
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On August 8, 1913, one of the most celebrated photographs in American industrial history appeared in papers all over the country under a compelling headline: “The Most Expensive Picture That Was Ever Taken.” Ford amassed twelve thousand of his sixteen-thousand-strong workforce in
a large open area outside the Highland Park factory—the factory had to be closed for two hours to do this, hence the expense—and the photographer snapped an unforgettable image of a great sea of laborers. Another story explained how the vast scale of the Ford workforce required that wages be paid out daily to some portion of it. The most striking measure of Ford productivity, of course, could be seen around the country. The Model T was appearing everywhere on American roadways. As one headline noted succinctly, “Half Million Fords in Use—Every Third Car a Ford.”
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Henry Ford was delighted to feed the popular hunger for news about his new production methods. In the midsummer of 1915, the company presented an exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In a brilliant publicity move, a truncated version of the assembly line was constructed, complete with conveyor chain to pull along a Model T chassis while stationary workmen attached various components until the vehicle rolled away under its own power, completely equipped. Trucks replenished the stock supply with new batches of parts every morning, between 1 and 6 a.m. “The crowds seem never to tire of watching a rear axle grow into a complete motor car,” reported a local newspaper. They flocked to see the spectacle, breaking the restraining railing on the first day and forcing a temporary shutdown while Ford workmen sank the support pipes even deeper into the floor.
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Thus a series of successful experiments at Highland Park in 1913–14 brought to life the vision of “moving assembly.” A bird's-eye view of Ford's factory would have revealed a systematic but complex picture. Rather than one great assembly line snaking through the factory, taking the vehicle from lumpen metal to finished automobile, a kind of industrial river system appeared. A number of subassembly tributaries, each of them producing components, ran through various areas of the plant before feeding the main assembly line, where all the already assembled systems, along with a host of specialized parts, were placed on the chassis to produce a completed Model T. Every few seconds, one of these sturdy automobiles rolled off the line tobe started, inspected, and driven onto the storage lots to await shipment.

As Henry Ford and his staff developed the Model T and produced it in large numbers, many managers and engineers contributed to the company's explosive growth. But none loomed larger than a man who had stood beside the company owner for more than a decade. He had spent many long, cold evenings lending mechanical expertise to Ford in the development of his early race cars. He had been around during the dark days when the Detroit Automobile Company and the Henry Ford Company first sprang to life, then withered and died. Now he moved into the spotlight, an industrial
magician who helped shape the factory churning out tens of thousands of Ford's modest little car.

In November 1915,
Ford Times
featured an arresting photograph. Seated on one side was the company's owner and namesake, while facing him sat its chief designer and engineer. The caption read, “Mr. Henry Ford and Mr. C. H. Wills, the two men who have developed the Ford car.” This photo publicly acknowledged what company insiders had known for a long time: though James Couzens served as Henry Ford's mainstay on the business side of things, Wills stood as his right-hand man on the mechanical, production side. As the company developed and mass-produced the Model T, no one played a more critical role than this talented, headstrong engineer.

Childe Harold Wills was born on June 1, 1878, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was named after Lord Byron's epic poem “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.” The Wills family moved to Detroit in 1885, and by his teenage years, young Harold (he hated the name Childe and refused to use it) had shown an aptitude for commercial drawing and mechanics. He served an apprenticeship at the Detroit Lubricator Company from 1896 to 1899, and within a few years had risen to the status of journeyman toolmaker and started supplementing his practical training with night courses in metallurgy, chemistry, and engineering. Then he took a job with the Boyer Machine Company, and within a few months became its chief engineer.

Meanwhile, in 1899, he had made the acquaintance of Henry Ford, and began working for him in the evenings, drawing a small salary and assisting him with drafting and design. In 1900, Wills labored part-time as a draftsman for Ford's Detroit Automobile Company, and when it failed, continued to do so with its successor, the Henry Ford Company. He also assisted his employer with the development of the 999 and Arrow race cars. By 1902, Wills was working for Ford full-time, and the following year, when Alexander Malcolmson provided the necessary capital for a new venture, he became chief engineer, designer, and metallurgist for the Ford Motor Company.
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Perhaps the most striking aspect of Wills' early career at Ford was his close personal and professional relationship with the founder. During their earliest collaboration, when Henry Ford was developing his racing car, Wills worked with him every evening in the small machine shop at 81 Park Place. There was no heat in this facility, and after long hours spent drafting plans and machining parts in the frigid climate, the pair would often become too cold to work. As Wills liked to tell acquaintances in later years,
they “would put on boxing gloves and flail each other until they felt warm.” The pair also shared misadventures. While they were repairing a large gas tank for the racer in the alley outside the shop, an explosion from trapped fumes blew Wills and Ford backward and flat onto their backs, also putting a hole in the wall. A few years later, Ford and Wills, continuing to work closely, in the experimental room of the Ford Motor Company, created its earliest automobile models. The highly trained Wills complemented Ford's instinctive but less articulate mechanical talents. Ford had difficulty understanding designs that were not put into a three-dimensional model, so Wills read and translated blueprints for him.
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In addition, they seem to have been genuine friends who shared a number of traits. Like Ford, Wills had a deep love of outdoor life and pursued hobbies of fishing, hunting, and boating. Both men displayed a gift for quickly grasping and solving mechanical problems. Perfectionists, Ford and Wills worked obsessively on refining a product until it was exactly the way they envisioned it. Perhaps most important, Ford and Wills shared a hard-nosed approach to the world. Oliver Barthel, an associate in Ford's earliest automobile projects who had much contact with Wills, described the engi-neer's difficult temperament. “He had the right kind of disposition to get along with Mr. Ford,” Barthel added. “In order to get along with Mr. Ford, you had to have a little mean streak in your system.”
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