Wealth Of Nations By Henry Ford

Widely seen as the father of the assembly-line, Henry Ford implemented one of the first systems of mass production assembling automobiles. After conducting extensive studies under the leadership of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Ford created the first conveyor-belt based assembly-line in 1913 (“A Science Odyssey”). The creation of such a system of mass production was hugely impactful in terms of the democratization of design and of access to products. Starting in the automobile industry (at least in its first initially-successful form) and permeating through most other manufacturing sectors, the assembly-line revolutionized not only the production process but also the economics of the manufacturing industry in terms of cost optimization and wage-rates

As Adam Smith eloquently points out in his Wealth of Nations, the division of labor in the creation of a pin dramatically improves efficiency in that process; rather than one worker creating a pin from start to finish, ten workers divide the process of creating a pin and can produce, say, one-hundred times as many pins as the solo-worker would have been able to in the same amount of time (Smith 2). Adam Smith’s simple, yet profound observation on the drastic impacts of the division of labor was certainly a precursor to the development of an assembly-line method of manufacturing. According to Smith’s idea of the division of labor, a group of workers would work together to produce a final product with each worker performing a single task repetitively. This would minimize the lost time from switching from one task to the next and thus increase production

Its positive aspects included the democratization of design and access to products as goods could be produced in greater abundance at lesser costs. Still, critics argued that it removed the creativity from design and limited consumer choice. Some companies, such as General Motors, were able to implement “flexible mass production” techniques that allowed for minor variation in general product designs to allow consumers to fine-tune objects for their specific use. This alleviated some of the concern, but still was a point of criticism in the design