Henry Ford’s dream of “a motor car for the great multitude,” ran into some basic technological limitations: because each car from top to chassis had to be assembled by a skilled craftsman, costs remained too high. Model T was an unqualified success from its very beginnings, but it was still too expensive for the multitudes. Ford looked outside for ideas, taking inspiration from Chicago’s metpacking houses and grain conveyor belts – those same ones could be used to transport parts. But this still took too long; Ford continued to experiment, finally coming up with a workable solution in the form of an assembly line.

On this day, December 1, in 1913, Henry Ford began running a new type of manufacturing process, breaking down the assembly of the flywheel magneto into 29 discrete steps, each performed repetitively by a worker.

With Ford’s technique, the workers no longer needed to be skilled craftsmen; it was enough for them to know their specific task. It also cut down on assembly time: production time for a single vehicle went from twelve and a half hours to less than 6. At the same time, Ford raised the rates of his workers to $5 a day – a considerable sum in those days – which got him branded as a traitor by the other industrialists, but saved Ford much trouble with organized labor. Besides which, Ford believed, well-paid, motivated employees did their jobs better.