The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

As the size of auto manufacturing plants increases, the workers lose more and more time moving from one task to the next and getting into one another’s way. Ford’s rival, General Motors, begins to experiment with assembly lines and Ford soon follows suit, introducing primitive assembly lines for making flywheel magnetos and motors. The time required to make the parts reduces dramatically.

Abner participates in an experiment, overseeing a group of six men assembling a chassis on an assembly line while “men with stopwatches and notebooks [keep] record of every second it [takes] them” (49). In the past, cars were built “on one spot like a house” (49) and building the chassis took 12 hours and 28 minutes of work. Abner oversees “a group of men whose every motion had been calculated by engineers” (50); each of them is responsible for only one task, such as lifting the wheels off the hooks on which they arrive and sliding them onto the axle. Using this process, assembling the chassis takes only 1 hour and 33 minutes.

After having perfected the assembly process, Ford, who always says that he does not believe in competition, but in fact is constantly engaged in competition, moves on to increasing the speed of the assembly line itself.