While it is true that the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit Michigan is the home of the first known use of the assembly line method for manufacturing automobiles, it is certainly not the first time man-kind has used the assembly line method for getting work done. Most modern historians believe that the real credit for using the assembly line method of production came from Ford Motor Company employees Clarence Avery, Peter E.
Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, and C. Harold Wills. An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which interchangeable parts are progressively added to a larger semi-finished assembly that moves from workstation to workstation in sequence until the final assembly is finished.
Ancient China had been mass-producing metal agricultural implements, ceramics, armor, and weapons using assembly line methods centuries before it appeared in Europe. Starting in the year and lasting all the way until Napoleon conquered Northern Italy in , the Venetian Arsenal employed some 16, workers.
The massive Venetian Arsenal spanned an area of acres, and was said to be able to construct, fit out, arm, and provision a newly built galley in a single day using standardized parts on an assembly-line basis! View of the entrance to the Arsenal by Canaletto, via Wikipedia. There are of course other historians who will claim assembly line methods used by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and even earlier cultures. Bottom line, there is little doubt that the assembly line method of production is ancient.
For the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, the assembly line enabled an enormous increase in production. How enormous? As early as the 12th century, workers in the Venetian Arsenal produced ships by moving them down a canal where they were fitted with new parts at each stop. During its most successful time, the Venetian Arsenal could complete one ship each day. With the start of the Industrial Revolution, machines began to perform work that once required human hands.
With the use of machines, factories sprang up to replace small craft shops. This change was made possible by the concept of interchangeable parts, an innovation designed by Eli Whitney. Before this, firearms were made individually by hand, thus each weapon was unique and could not be easily fixed if broken. Another European craftsman had similar ideas. Naval engineer Samuel Bentham, from England, used uniform parts in the production of wooden pulleys for ships. He was able to use a large unskilled work force and standardized equipment to produce large numbers of identical gun parts at a low cost, within a short amount of time.
It also made repair and parts replacement more suitable. Ransom Olds created and patented the assembly line in Switching to this process allowed his car manufacturing company to increase output by percent in one year. The Curved Dash model was able to be produced at an exceptionally high rate of 20 units per day. The Oldsmobile brand then had the ability to create a vehicle with a low price, simple assembly and stylish features.
Their car was the first to be produced in large quantities. Henry Ford improved upon the assembly line concept by using the moving platforms of a conveyor system. In this system the chassis of the vehicle was towed by a rope that moved it from station to station in order to allow workers to assemble each part. His manufacturing plants would go on to produce over 15 million Model Ts and this is due almost entirely to his assembly line 3.
In order to achieve a production of the Model T at such a high rate, he needed to break down the process of assembling the car to make it as efficient as possible to produce. While still being financially accessible. To do all this Ford went on to break down the building and engineering of his famous Model T into 84 unique steps that would be assigned on the line 4. Not only did he want to build his Model T as efficiently as possible, he also wanted to learn while they were building the vehicle.
In order to build the car in the most sound and practical way, he hired the help of Motion Study expert, Fredrick Taylor 4. Now a sound and practical approach when designing an assembly line, was unhear of when he implemented it.
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