His success not only brought automobile ownership within the grasp of the average person, but it served notice to all types of manufacturers that the assembly line was here to stay. When the total time of assembly for a single car fell from 12.5 labor hours to 93 labor minutes, Ford was able to drastically reduce the price of his cars. Ford openly admitted using the meat-packing lines as a model. The apparent breakthroughs in efficiency and productivity that were achieved by these meat packers were not immediately realized by any other industry until American industrialist Henry Ford (1863 –1947) designed an assembly line in 1913 to manufacture his Model T automobiles. Contrary to most factories ’ lines, in which products are gradually put together step-by-step, this first assembly line was in fact more of a disassembly line, since each worker butchered a piece of a diminishing animal. These slaughterhouses used monorail trolleys to move suspended carcasses past a line of stationary workers, each of whom did one specific task. The assembly line was first used on a large scale by the meat-packing industries of Chicago, Illinois, and Cincinnati, Ohio, during the 1870s. By then, the principles of division of labor and interchangeable parts had been successfully demonstrated by American inventors Eli Whitney (1765 –1825) and Samuel Colt (1814 –1862). By the 1830s, the principle of continuous processing was starting to enter the consciousness of manufacturers, although it was by no means fully embraced until the 1870s in It used a steam engine to power its rollers. What may have been the first powered-roller conveyer system was introduced in 1804 with the British Navy ’s automatic production of biscuits, or hardtack. In the fourteenth century, for example, the shipbuilding arsenal of Venice, Italy, used moving lines of prefabricated parts to equip their war galleys. Miners in medieval Europe also used these bucket elevators, and, by the time of the Renaissance, engineers were becoming familiar with some form of the assembly line. The principle of continuous movement is perhaps the simplest and most obvious fact of an assembly line, dating back to Assyrian times, where there is evidence of a system of bucket elevators called the chain of pots. As one of the most powerful productivity concepts in history, it was largely responsible for the emergence and expansion of the industrialized, consumer-based system in existence today. Introduced in the nineteenth century, it provided the basis for the modern methods of mass production of quantities of standardized, relatively low-cost goods available to great numbers of consumers. Today, assembly lines may consist of workers, computers and robots, or a combination of the two. In the early years of the assembly line, each worker usually controlled one specific part of the job. An assembly line is a manufacturing system of mass production in which a finished product is manufactured in a step-by-step process involving interchangeable parts added in a sequential manner as it moves continuously past an arrangement of workers and machines.
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