Mass Production and Consumption

Assembly-Line Production

In an assembly line, the good that is the end of production is constructed in a step-by-step fashion, in which successive components are put together and specific operations performed (e.g., the parts of a car are fitted together, paints are sprayed onto the body, and so on). The components are standardized, so they can be fitted into place without needing more work. Individual workers are stationed at specific parts of the assembly line along which the product that is being assembled is moved. They repeat the same operations on a succession of part-assembled products. In principle, they can become highly skilled in these specific operations, without having much understanding of the whole production process. This contrasts with traditional craft work, where one person might take a product through many stages of its creation. Mass production introduces a high division of labor and makes use of economies of scale—that is, it is possible to make goods more cheaply (and often more rapidly) when they are produced on a large scale.

Mass production is often seen as a twentieth-century invention: the terms mass production and assembly line both date from the first quarter of that century and are particularly identified with Henry Ford. But historians of industrialization trace assembly-line methods back to at least the 1660s, when they were being used in a pencil factory in Castille, Spain, or even earlier, to the rapid building of warships from standardized parts in sixteenth-century Venice.

Ford's achievement was to synthesize many of the elements of mass production that had emerged by the early twentieth century. One notable step was the application of electrification to create moving assembly lines. Now, the unfinished product was brought to the worker rather than vice versa. This also imposed a time pressure on production, and assembly lines had to be designed to take account of the fact that some steps in production took longer to accomplish than others. The Model T car was introduced in 1908, but the moving assembly line was implemented five years later. Though Ford was neither the first to mass produce automobiles nor the first to use assembly lines, his system was able to produce cars at a remarkable pace, so fast indeed that for some time only black paint dried rapidly enough to be used in these vehicles (giving the iconic Model T its famous color). Costing half the price of comparable cars from other manufacturers, the Model T was taken up by a mass market, stoked by advertising and clever publicity, and served by a network of local dealers across the United States.

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