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How Model Ts were made…
- samatman 15y agoThe first thing that struck me is how white everyone is. When did Ford racially integrate? Wikipedia's got nothing.
- zeteo 15y agoYou must have a pretty racist world view if the first thing that strikes you in a tech story is the skin color of the people involved.
- samatman 15y agoWell, that's possible. Or, I could be from the Detroit area, and be well familiar with the current racial makeup of the UAW. I've seen a modern GM assembly line. The whiteness of this historical assembly line is... quite striking.
- hugh3 15y agoDetroit wasn't always a "black" city. It's just that almost everyone else has left nowadays. Your average assembly line back then would have been 90% white, since that would have been roughly the racial makeup of America. Henry Ford was actually much more open about hiring black employees than most of his contemporaries: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=19 http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=19 (Jews, on the other hand, were out of luck)
- pchristensen 15y agoThe boom in industrial manufacturing work is what drove a lot of the migration of southern blacks to the Northeast and Midwest. These early Ford plants were at the beginning of that movement.
- zeteo 15y agoThere are so many interesting things in this video. Why would you choose to concentrate on race before anything else? There are some subjects where skin color is a very important dimension of the analysis, such as the political history of the post-Reconstruction US South. And there are other issues, such as the production of the world-changing Ford Model T automobile, where race played at most a very minor role.
- GoodIntentions 15y agoPerhaps he was expecting to see evidence of racism due to Henry Ford's connections with anti-semitism. Google "henry ford racism". If you want a dead tree source, I think Anthony Sutton's "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" had references. Been a while since I've read it. Pretty sure it is out of print, but PDFs are online.
- Semiapies 15y agoOr he could be an adult in a multiracial society who isn't cripplingly defensive over issues of race.
- zeteo 15y agoWe are all adults in the same society. Do you think it's possible to look at the history of technology before 1960 without looking at, say, Einstein's skin color?
- Semiapies 15y agoAnd some of us are more absurdly defensive than others. You pick a great example, actually. Skin color is a crucial ethnic divider in the US, but not the only one in the world. A history of technology up to 1960 that carefully avoided mentioning why all those Jewish scientists and engineers up and left Germany for the US would be weird and suspect.
- zeteo 15y agoHave you even read any technological surveys? You'll find plenty of respectable histories of technology that don't even mention that Einstein was Jewish. See http://books.google.com/books?id=XvB1ZcsrDFAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=vaclav+smil+20th+century&source=bl&ots=UeTybwd1Jd&sig=7-VLiilosE1wetFCbYQAl1gsbvU&hl=en&ei=Q761TZ6dNYXu0gGNjKmrCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=XvB1ZcsrDFAC&printsec=f... for example. The reason it's not mentioned is very simple: it's not relevant. Just as the skin color of the workers was not relevant to the development of the mass production process.
- Semiapies 15y agoHave you actually tried searching for "Jewish" in that book? It comes up. Nazis, Hitler, anti-Jewish laws, etc. Now, if you want to continue being a whiny, defensive white guy freaked out because someone noticed that an early 20th-century film only had white guys in it, you're going to do so without any further responses from me.
- rmason 15y agoActually the Ford plants were pretty integrated from the beginning. The info I found stated that there were 5000 blacks working for the various car manufacturers in 1910 and that had increased to over 120,000 by 1930. http://bit.ly/hQVpgp http://bit.ly/hQVpgp Here's an early picture showing blacks working on the Ford assembly line: http://bit.ly/gCfdjT http://bit.ly/gCfdjT
- pitdesi 15y agoIf you enjoyed this, you should definitely visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mi... They take apart and reassemble a model T everyday in the museum. My favorite part of the museum is the Rouge factory tour. Completely integrated manufacturing, the type that I don't think exists anywhere in the world. Essentially you had coal and iron ore come in one side of the factory and Model A's being pumped out 48 hours later on the other side. An incredible site (now it's just a Ford Truck Assembly, but you can see amazing videos of the past) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex Another must visit factory is Boeing in Everett, Wa http://www.boeing.com/commercial/tours/index.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/tours/index.html
- bane 15y agoSomething that struck me as interesting is that not only did the assembly line concept enforce consistency in mass manufacturing of parts and product, and isolating assembly into simple repeatable processes (hook this up here, turn this, repeat), but the literal line itself doesn't ever stop. It enforces efficiency from the workers. You had to get your part onto the vehicle before it moved onto the next station or the vehicle would simply move on. No longer was manufacturing dictated by the speed of the worker, the process dictated the speed to the worker. The increase in efficiency alone must have been astronomical. I wonder if in some ways, some of the plants I've seen (like VWs newer plants), that don't have this kind of enforced production schedule are really a step back.
- asolove 15y agoThere is an enormous school of thought around that question, and current opinion leans against you. The question is: is the bigger problem workers occasionally being slow, or workers doing things to a fixed schedule such that they can't identify and resolve problems right away? See the Wikipedia page on lean manufacturing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
- bane 15y agoI can't recall off the top of my head, how do Toyota plants operate? Does the line stop at each worker's station until the worker signals "done"? (excluding the fully mechanized parts of the line of course)
- GoodIntentions 15y agomost modern plants keep the vehicle in motion at a manageable rate. At the low end, from 45 sec, to over 2 minutes for a low volume line, per pitch. Tasks are theoretically balanced across stations so that each employee gets their task(s) complete before the body pitches into the next station. If there is a critical task not done, they can halt the line. (and get all kinds of help and motivation they'd probably like to avoid) Lines are broken out into business units with small buffers between each so that a short stoppage in one area doesn't stop any other. tl;dr lines keep moving
- rmason 15y agoWhat amazes me is how much credit Henry Ford got for things he didn't do: Henry didn't design the Model T or the Ford logo it was C. Harold Wills his first employee Henry didn't come up with the concept of the $5 a day wage it was his lieutenant James Couzens who later became a US senator from Michigan. Yet history books generally give him all the credit. The book Henry's lieutenants details the accomplishments of these executives.
- tricky 15y agoAlong those lines, my history classes in HS said Henry Ford was the first manufacturer to find success using interchangeable parts. Not true. The rifle industry got there first.
- Semiapies 15y agoTo be blunt, US history textbooks generally suck. A lot of simplified public mythology makes it to classrooms to be regurgitated.
- flexd 15y agoI can't be the only one that immediately thought you were talking about terminators. This is really cool regardless.
- allwein 15y agoWhat impressed me were the videos of people taking the Model T "off-roading". I would never attempt to drive my current car into a ditch like that.