Before the
Industrial Revolution, most manufactured products were made individually by hand. A single
craftsman or team of craftsmen would create each part of a product. They would use their skills and tools such as
files and
knives to create the individual parts. They would then assemble them into the final product, making cut-and-try changes in the parts until they fit and could work together (
craft production).
Division of labor was practiced by
Ancient Greeks,
Chinese and other ancient civilizations. In Ancient Greece it was discussed by
Plato and
Xenophon.
Adam Smith discussed the
division of labour in the manufacture of
pins at length in his book
The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). The
Venetian Arsenal, dating to about 1104, operated similar to a
production line. Ships moved down a canal and were fitted by the various shops they passed. At the peak of its
efficiency in the early 16th century, the Arsenal employed some 16,000 people who could apparently produce nearly one ship each day and could fit out, arm, and provision a newly built
galley with standardized parts on an assembly-line basis. Although the Arsenal lasted until the early Industrial Revolution, production line methods did not become common even then.
Industrial Revolution The
Industrial Revolution led to a proliferation of manufacturing and invention. Many industries, notably
textiles,
firearms,
clocks and watches,
horse-drawn vehicles,
railway locomotives,
sewing machines, and
bicycles, saw expeditious improvement in materials handling, machining, and assembly during the 19th century, although modern concepts such as
industrial engineering and
logistics had not yet been named. was the first manufactured product to become fully automated, at the
Portsmouth Block Mills in the early 19th century. The automatic
flour mill built by
Oliver Evans in 1785 was called the beginning of modern
bulk material handling by Roe (1916). Evans's mill used a leather belt bucket elevator,
screw conveyors, canvas belt conveyors, and other mechanical devices to completely automate the process of making flour. The innovation spread to other mills and breweries. Probably the earliest industrial example of a linear and continuous assembly process is the
Portsmouth Block Mills, built between 1801 and 1803.
Marc Isambard Brunel (father of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel), with the help of
Henry Maudslay and others, designed 22 types of machine tools to make the parts for the rigging
blocks used by the
Royal Navy. This factory was so successful that it remained in use until the 1960s, with the workshop still visible at
HM Dockyard in
Portsmouth, and still containing some of the original machinery. One of the earliest examples of an almost modern factory layout, designed for easy material handling, was the
Bridgewater Foundry. The factory grounds were bordered by the
Bridgewater Canal and the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The buildings were arranged in a line with a railway for carrying the work going through the buildings.
Cranes were used for lifting the heavy work, which sometimes weighed in the tens of tons. The work passed sequentially through to erection of framework and final assembly. , pictured in 1839, one of the earliest factories to use an almost modern
layout, workflow, and material-handling system The first flow assembly line was initiated at the factory of
Richard Garrett & Sons, Leiston Works in
Leiston in the
English county of
Suffolk for the manufacture of
portable steam engines. The assembly line area was called '
The Long Shop' on account of its length and was fully operational by early 1853. The
boiler was brought up from the foundry and put at the start of the line, and as it progressed through the building it would stop at various stages where new parts would be added. From the upper level, where other parts were made, the lighter parts would be lowered over a balcony and then fixed onto the machine on the ground level. When the machine reached the end of the shop, it would be completed.
Interchangeable parts During the early 19th century, the development of
machine tools such as the
screw-cutting lathe,
metal planer, and
milling machine, and of toolpath control via
jigs and
fixtures, provided the prerequisites for the modern assembly line by making
interchangeable parts a practical reality.
Late 19th-century steam and electric conveyors Steam-powered
conveyor lifts began being used for loading and unloading ships some time in the last quarter of the 19th century. Hounshell (1984) shows a sketch of an electric-powered conveyor moving cans through a filling line in a canning factory. The
meatpacking industry of
Chicago is believed to be one of the first industrial assembly lines (or disassembly lines) to be utilized in the United States starting in 1867. Workers would stand at fixed stations and a pulley system would bring the meat to each worker and they would complete one task.
Henry Ford and others have written about the influence of this
slaughterhouse practice on the later developments at Ford Motor Company.
20th century assembly line was the first. Olds
patented the assembly line concept, which he put to work in his
Olds Motor Vehicle Company factory in 1901. At
Ford Motor Company, the assembly line was introduced by William "Pa" Klann upon his return from visiting
Swift & Company's slaughterhouse in Chicago and viewing what was referred to as the "disassembly line", where carcasses were butchered as they moved along a conveyor. The efficiency of one person removing the same piece over and over without moving to another station caught his attention. He reported the idea to
Peter E. Martin, soon to be head of Ford production, who was doubtful at the time but encouraged him to proceed. Others at Ford have claimed to have put the idea forth to
Henry Ford, but Pa Klann's slaughterhouse revelation is well documented in the archives at the Henry Ford Museum and elsewhere, making him an important contributor to the modern automated assembly line concept. Ford was appreciative, having visited the highly automated 40-acre
Sears mail order handling facility around 1906. At Ford, the process was an evolution by trial and error of a team consisting primarily of
Peter E. Martin, the factory superintendent;
Charles E. Sorensen, Martin's assistant;
Clarence W. Avery;
C. Harold Wills, draftsman and toolmaker;
Charles Ebender; and
József Galamb. Some of the groundwork for such development had recently been laid by the intelligent layout of
machine tool placement that
Walter Flanders had been doing at Ford up to 1908. The moving assembly line was developed for the
Ford Model T and began operation on October 7, 1913, at the
Highland Park Ford Plant, and continued to evolve after that, using
time and motion study. Producing cars quicker than paint of the day could dry, it had an immense influence on the world. In 1922, Ford (through his ghostwriter Crowther) said of his 1913 assembly line:
Charles E. Sorensen, in his 1956 memoir
My Forty Years with Ford, presented a different version of development that was not so much about individual "inventors" as a gradual, logical development of
industrial engineering: As a result of these developments in method, Ford's cars came off the line in three-minute intervals or six feet per minute. This was much faster than previous methods, increasing production by eight to one (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower. ==Improved working conditions==