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History: the Web Keepers Belief and View of Events History, the record of human progress, teaches that credit for authorship of important concepts is often clouded and uncertain. One of the best places to settle questions about the invention origin is at the patent office. This statement is the opening paragraph in two engineering refrence works by your web keeper. A skeptic’s view of what is taught as history is to be considered and respected. Lets examine one myth never claimed by the inventor. Henry Ford and the Assembly Line Henry was the son of a successful Michigan farmer. Henry went to Detroit to pursue manufacturing and get a hand on education as both a machinist and especially a watchmaker. In Detroit Ford worked as a lad for low wages and had to work two jobs just to pay his board. Ford investigated stamped watch parts and a possible application watch production. To Ford, good tooling and mass production could produce a low cost watch for the masses. However, unlike many people with a dream he did his own marketing research and found The Waltham Watch Company has been using mass produced interchangeable parts and an assembly line to produce watches at a cost he could not hope to compete with. In fact, the assembly line technique at Waltham dated to the mid 1800s. His education as a watchmaker and study of mass production and marketing led him to look for a product that the masses would want just like the Waltham affordable watch. The concept of applying the mass production and assembly line methods of watches to a standardized design of mass-produced automobile was the result. Lean manufacturing has been around industrial settings for years, but it is a relatively recent addition to the electronics manufacturing and other sectors of the economy. Sometimes known as the Toyota Production System, named after the automaker that first popularized this approach to product assembly, lean manufacturing seeks to eliminate waste and increase value throughout the supply chain. By definition, waste is any activity for which the customer is unwilling to pay. Idle time, overproduction, product defects, inefficient machine processes are just some headaches manufacturers face. In the past, process engineers tolerated idle time and allowed overproduction as the inevitable side effects of mass production. Engineers wrestled with reducing product defects and improving machine process efficiency. However, times have changed to such an extent that manufacturers can no longer suffer any form of waste or inefficiency. A Lesson for Today The writer has no problem with the use of Japanese terms and ideas. Indeed Toyota was faced with producing products with very limited resources after the devastation of WW-II. The Japanese freely adopted statistical process control (SPC) and other methods of producing efficiently that Americans and other nations had developed but failed to follow. Henry Ford is perhaps the greatest single figure of the twentieth century. Ford was unaffected by fear or the idea that anything was impossible. Please take note that Ford took care to study history before proceeding. Ford left a legacy for those who would follow him in his writings as well as Greenfield Village and The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Learn from History Henry Ford left the complex at Greenfield Village not as a moment to himself. He realized that much of what is taught from grade school through advanced university training about technology development concerning manufacturing and invention is fiction. Some Internet links are listed for those interested in the study of the history of Technology. Society For The History of Technology (SHOT) Society for Industrial Archeology.(SIA) The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum Copyright 2002 - 2006 All rights reserved Click Here To Send E-Mail To Dave Smith, your web keeper - all comments are welcome |