The moving assembly line began as an experiment on one small part. On about 1 April 1913, at Ford's Highland Park plant, workers who had each been building a whole flywheel magneto, the component that supplied the Model T's ignition current, were lined up along a waist-high platform. Each man now added one piece and slid the work to the next. A magneto had taken one worker about twenty minutes. The first line turned one out every thirteen minutes, and further adjustments brought that down to five. Henry Ford later said the idea came in a general way from the overhead trolleys Chicago meatpackers used to move carcasses past their butchers. The engineers, among them Charles Sorensen, Clarence Avery and Peter Martin, spent that summer applying it to engines and transmissions, and in August to the complete chassis. Chain drives replaced sliding. Building a Model T chassis fell from more than twelve hours to about an hour and a half. Albert Kahn had designed the plant in 1908 with long, well-lit floors, and it was the largest factory in the world when it opened in 1910, at 102 acres. The human cost showed up quickly: annual labour turnover at Ford reached 370 percent, and the company's answer, the following January, was the five-dollar day. Part of the complex survives on Woodward Avenue, a National Historic Landmark since 1978.
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42.4105, -83.0996
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