Mass Production
The Model T proved that making the same thing on a moving line brings the price down. The touring car that cost $850 in 1909 was $490 by 1914 and $290 by 1925 — a third, in sixteen years. The moving assembly line began in April 1913 on sub-assemblies and spread to the chassis itself on 7 October. Assembly time went from 728 minutes to 93. Ford did not, however, invent it. His own engineers testified that they took the model from the disassembly lines the Chicago meatpackers had been using since the 1860s, and they called what they were doing a disassembly line run in reverse. Turn the order of taking apart upside down and you get putting together. Incidentally, «any colour so long as it is black» is genuine — but black-only ran from 1914 to 1925 and no further. Early Model Ts came in blue, red, grey and green, and colour returned in the latter half of 1926.
The myth, corrected
The five-dollar day was so that workers could afford the cars they built
Ford wrote this in his own autobiography: «There was no charity in any way involved. The payment of five dollars a day for an eight hour day was one of the finest cost cutting moves we ever made.» What Raff and Summers (1986) point to is a labour crisis — annual turnover of 370 per cent. It was not that nobody would come. There were queues at the hiring gate. The problem was how fast they left. That said, it is also true that Ford himself later spoke proudly of the effect of workers becoming customers. The part that was never the real reason became the most famous.