Thursday, October 11, 2007 — It seems like cars are just a part of everyday life. But, of course, it wasn't always that way. In the early Nineteenth Century, there were no cars because no one had invented an engine that could burn fuel efficiently and move the car along. Once that problem was solved, cars were still too rare and expensive for most people to afford. Making a car took a lot of time and hard work from people with very special skills. So how could anyone make them more efficiently?

On October 1, 1908, Henry Ford introduced a car made in a new way, a way people had never used to manufacture things in factories. The process is what we now call mass production and ninety-nine years later, this month would be a great time to think about how that process has changed our world.

The first cars had to be built by hand. A few people with very special skills would spend a lot of time creating the pieces and putting them together. It really was an art. And that was the way people had made all sorts of things for centuries: clocks and plates and windows and clothes. Henry Ford didn't invent the car. But he made it possible for more people to own and use them because he thought of a way to divide the work of building a car among many people.

People used to build things out of pieces made to fit exactly one item. A gear might fit my watch, but it wouldn't fit yours or anyone else's. That slowed down the building process. Henry Ford decided it would be a better idea to make all the pieces the same so they would fit my car and yours, as long as our cars were the same kind or model of car. That meant that the pieces could be made in advance, with less time and effort. It also allowed many people to build several cars at the same time. Instead of one person building an entire car, one person could attach the same part to many identical cars. The cars moved along an assembly line of workers doing the same part of the process, over and over again. Building the cars required less skill and time, and that meant they cost less to build.

Today, assembly lines produce all sorts of things: toys and computers, air conditioners and telephones, bicycles and furniture. Henry Ford's idea really did change the way the world builds things and made more of those things available to more people.

The first cars had to be built by hand. A few people with very special skills would spend a lot of time creating the pieces and putting them together. It really was an art. And that was the way people had made all sorts of things for centuries: clocks and plates and windows and clothes. Henry Ford didn't invent the car. But he made it possible for more people to own and use them because he thought of a way to divide the work of building a car among many people.