IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 15

A. David Wunsch

America's Assembly Line
By David E. Nye. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2013, 338 pages.

f I asked you to
name five prominent
American business
entrepreneurs of
the 20th century I'm
almost certain you would supply me
with Henry Ford - so perhaps this
will give you a little shock: in Russia, in the 1920s, the Soviet Communists enthusiastically embraced
Ford, this symbol of capitalism. One
learns from David Nye's newest book
that Ford's 1922 memoir My Life
and Work was by 1925 reprinted
four times in the Soviet Union and
was read "with... zeal" by Russians.
By 1929 Ford agreed to sell plans,
to the Soviet Union, for the construction of two complete plants capable
of mass producing his new Model A.
That the Russians, the Germans,
French, English, Japanese, and
Danes all showed intense interest in
making Ford's cars and in Fordism
(his practices) testifies to not only
the importance of this subject but
to the appropriateness of this book
published by M.I.T. Press in 2013.
Fordism came into its first major
employment one hundred years
earlier in 1913. This book is about
more than Fordism; it's concerned
with the history of the assembly line,
of which Fordism is, historically, its
major manifestation. Indeed, Nye is
at pains to point out that Ford did

not invent the assembly line method
of production. But he did bring it
to a level of popularity and employment in the production of the Model T
Ford such that his name is inextricably connected with it.
Nye helpfully reduces Fordism to
a set of conditions:
1) There is division of labor - each
worker has a set of well-defined
relatively simple tasks to be performed on a car being moved
along on a moving assembly line.
2) The parts that the laborer applies
in the assembly process are
interchangeable. There is no ad
hoc filing, grinding, etc., to make
them fit in place.
3) Manufacturing employs specialized machines that have a single
function.
4) Machines are not grouped by
type (you don't put all the milling
machines in one spot) but are
placed where they are needed.
5) Parts and assemblies are moved
automatically from one stage of
production to the next - they're
not shifted by workers whose
job is assembly. There is no wearisome heavy lifting or towing.
6) There is enhancement of production by electrification and
good lighting.
Nye shares with most historians
of technology an evolutionary theory of invention, which holds that
new devices and practices emerge
gradually. The assembly line is an

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554704
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

june 2016

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

example - it was developing before
Ford. For example, Adam Smith had
noted in the 18th century that effective manufacturing of pins required
division of labor. And interchangeable parts don't date from the Model
T era. These were used in the 18th
century in the making of clocks.
The bringing of heavy objects to
the worker, who labors around one
spot, could have been seen by Ford
in 19th century Chicago slaughter
houses - although here the production worker engages in disassembly - butchering renders the
moving carcass progressively lighter.
Finally, Nye notes the importance of
the electric motor, which became
reliable 25 years before the Model T
production line. With motors, factory
machinery was no longer a slave to a
common drive shaft, driven by steam
or water. Ford began integrating all
these elements from the start of the
Model T in 1908, until the production line came to fruition in 1913.
But there is another aspect to
Fordism, and it's not found in the
factory. Classical Marxist theory
holds that the owner of the means
of production (the bourgeois in
Marx's language) will pay his workers
as little as possible so as to maximize his profits. Ford saw the need
for consumption of his product: an
inexpensive car that, in his imagination, a blue collar worker - his
own, in fact - could afford. Starting
early in 1914 a worker at Ford in

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016