By 1890 factories in the middle west of the United States were making parts for a new machine –
the automobile. The car parts were transported to workshops where workers put them together to
make cars. But it took a worker twelve hours to assemble one car and, since cars took so long to build,
the people who made them had to charge their customers a lot of money to buy them. So only people
with a high income could afford to buy a car. Then a man from Michigan named Henry Ford thought
of a way to make cars more quickly. Henry Ford was from a farmer’s family. He left school at the age
of fifteen to work on his father’s farm but he disliked farming and spent his spare time trying to build a
petrol-driven motor-car. His first car, finished in 1896, was built in his garden and was named Tin
Lizzie. In 1909 Ford decided to manufacture only one type of car, the Model T. At first it took fourteen
hours to assemble a Model T car but, by improving his mass production methods, Ford reduced this to
one hour and 33 minutes.
Henry Ford’s idea was to use many workers instead of just one to build each car. He divided the job of
building cars into hundreds of steps, and he hired one worker to do each step. Then he set up a moving
belt that carried a line of unfinished cars past each worker. As each car reached each worker, the belt
would stop moving. It would stop just long enough for the worker to do his one task. Then it would carry
the car along to the next worker. This way of building cars became known as ‘the moving assembly
line’.
Workers on the moving assembly line only had to stand in one place and do the same job over and over
again. Most workers could learn their job in almost no time. Working together on the assembly line, they
could build a car in an hour and a half. By using this new moving belt technology, Ford was able to
reduce the cost of each car and between 1908 and 1916 the sale price of a Model T car fell from 1000 to
360 US dollars. About one million Model T cars were produced in 1921 and, in less than twenty years,
the automobile took the place of the horse-drawn carriage. Henry Ford produced an affordable car, paid
high salaries to his workers and helped to build a middle class in America. He left his mark on the
history of the USA.
