NARRATOR: Back in Detroit, Henry Ford wondered how he could bring the price of the Model T down to where everybody could buy it. He figured that the more cars he made and sold, the cheaper he could sell each one, and he went to work on this idea. In those days, each car was built from the frame up on stationary wooden horses. There was a different crew for each car, and the same crew stayed on a car until it was finished. That meant duplication of effort and a lot of time wasted. So they tried moving the men from car to car. Each man had a special job to do, and as soon as he finished it, he moved on to the next car and did the same thing there. That was better, but it still took 12 and 1/2 hours to assemble each Model T.

Henry Ford watched it for a while and he had an inspiration. Instead of moving the men past the cars, why not move the cars past the men? So on one hot August morning, they tried it that way. A husky young fellow put a rope over his shoulder and Henry Ford called, let go. And at that very moment, as the workmen began to fasten the parts onto the slowly moving car, the assembly line was born-- a technique that was to revolutionize mass production all over the world. Once they found that the idea would work, they began to improve it-- refine it. They rolled a chassis down a single line of track, pushing it from crew to crew, and the more expert they became at this new method, the faster the cars came off the assembly line, and the price of the Model T began to drop.

They tried the same idea on all the various parts of the car and created what were called sub-assemblies. Each man on the line became a specialist-- he did one thing and he did it perfectly, and passed the work along to the next man. Minute by minute, production was winning the battle against wasted time and wasted effort. Parts were fed to the workmen by gravity slides so they wouldn't have to stop and wait for new parts.

Then they put the parts on moving conveyor belts. This was a great step forward because now they could regulate the flow of work and keep it moving at a constant rate of speed. And the conveyor belts grew longer and more complex as they moved the work from place to place in the huge shops. They became fantastic masterpieces of planning and engineering, but the battle against wasted time and wasted effort was being won. The cars began coming off the assembly line at the rate of 1 every 40 seconds, and what Henry Ford had foreseen happened. Mass production and the assembly line drove the price of the Model T down from $850 to $300. Now everybody could have one.

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