Henry Ford Assembly Line Analysis

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Ford's assembly line and Model T

Henry Ford's assembly line and his automobile, the Model T, revolutionized manufacturing and the development of today's automobiles and engines. The assembly line and Model T caused American industry to expand and also ushered a new American lifestyle.

Ford showed great interest for mechanical and motorized machines at an early age. He was born on July 30, 1863 on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford had five siblings, and his parents raised them all to be disciplined and healthy. Ever since Ford was a little kid, he had great interest in everything that was mechanical and he would rather work on that over anything, especially working on his father's farm. Ford had at all times dreamt of becoming a well known …show more content…

The road to success was bumpy for Ford, and he discovered that it was not going to be an easy task. He established his first company in 1899, the Detroit Automobile Company. The company did not last for long, and Ford gave up on it one year later. He founded the Henry Ford Company in 1901 due to Alexander Winston's victory in Ford's "sweepstakes", making Ford a local hero (Life of Henry Ford np). The third and final company was located in Detroit in 1903 with the name Ford Motor Company. Ford was at this time forty years of age, and he started to see a light in the tunnel. His first introduction to the future world of automobiles was his Model T in 1908. His dream was becoming a reality (Schaetzl …show more content…

The company complex was located along the Rouge River banks in Dearborn, Michigan, also known as Ford's birthplace. The company plant did not only provide for a place to build Ford's Model T, but the complex also included "all the potential elements needed for automobile production" (Schaetzl np). The building included enough room for storage of the product, small factories and mills, and last but not least, the assembly line. Ford owned both a steel mill and a glass factory in the same area, leading to the Ford Motor Company to be a "vertical integration" company (Appleby 197).

The Ford Motor Company's first achieved building product was a "two-cylinder, eight horsepower" car called the Model A (O'Connor np). Ford believed, after building several large and expensive models, that America needed a smaller and lighter car that was cheap enough for the buyer with an average income to purchase. He wanted to build "a standardized car for the people" (O'Connor np). Ford also tried a new type of steel called Vanadium on several of his models. The steel was "light but very tough" and held the car together on the road (O'Connor

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