Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed.
Any time I see a comment like this, I know for a fact that someone does not understand what an assembly line is, nor why the invention of one was important.
An assembly line is a method of production where workers stand still, and the parts that they need come to them at the rate that they will be putting them together. This is vastly superior to previous modes of production because you eliminate all of the time people spend walking around trying to find the next thing that they need. Before the introduction of the assembly line, workers normally spent more time walking than assembling. After the introduction, workers spent more time assembling.
That said, the assembly line was not entirely a novel production. The closest predecessor was in the Chicago meatpacking industry where it took the form of a disassembly line - cows went in one end and standard cuts of meat came out the other. But using it for assembly of complex machinery was still a significant innovation, and Henry Ford deserves full credit for it.
It certainly was not simply applying widely known standardization techniques with interchangeable parts such as was pioneered in the rifle industry and had been predicted by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations with an example involving pins.
Comments
Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed.
Any time I see a comment like this, I know for a fact that someone does not understand what an assembly line is, nor why the invention of one was important.
An assembly line is a method of production where workers stand still, and the parts that they need come to them at the rate that they will be putting them together. This is vastly superior to previous modes of production because you eliminate all of the time people spend walking around trying to find the next thing that they need. Before the introduction of the assembly line, workers normally spent more time walking than assembling. After the introduction, workers spent more time assembling.
That said, the assembly line was not entirely a novel production. The closest predecessor was in the Chicago meatpacking industry where it took the form of a disassembly line - cows went in one end and standard cuts of meat came out the other. But using it for assembly of complex machinery was still a significant innovation, and Henry Ford deserves full credit for it.
It certainly was not simply applying widely known standardization techniques with interchangeable parts such as was pioneered in the rifle industry and had been predicted by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations with an example involving pins.
Going back to "nothing new under the sun" there are even some earlier precursors to assembly line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Arsenal
Thanks. That is an excellent example and I learned something interesting!