enry Ford at one point said " You can have any color you want so long as it is black", because they had no time to paint them. A new way to assemble the same car in a much shorter period of time was needed, so he started to experiment.The original production time at Ford's Highland Park plant for a Model T was twelve and a half man-hours. Normally in Ford's factories men moved around to perform different operations upon completing a vehicle. This process required skilled workers that were able to know almost the complete mechanics of the entire automobile, and was a very lengthy was of producing a car. Ford proposed a method of production in which the workers were stationary and performed only one single operation multiple times. The workers need not be highly skilled because they only needed to know how to do their own simple operation. Not only did this require less training for the workers but saved large amounts of time in the production of Ford's automobiles. This method was officially named the assembly line and test units were developed and tested to see the improvement in production time. Soon a crude moving line was set up and production time dropped to five hours and fifty minutes, a large improvement (Lacey 116). Henry Ford himself defines the term assembly line the best, " The man who places a part does not fasten it, The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut, the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it" (Lacey 117). Finally in late 1914 his assembly line was complete and production time dropped to an astonishing ninety three minutes, the "people's car" could now be made for the people quickly. The Highland Park plants production numbers more than doubled with while actually using fewer workers. The cost and time required to produce a Model T chassis were dropping fast as Ford's genius idea of the assembly line was installed in more of Ford's factories.Ford's new process saved the factory time and the...
