Assembly Line

An assembly line is a manufacturing arrangement in which an unfinished product moves in sequence from one workstation to the next, with parts added at each station until the final product is complete, a method that speeds production and lowers labor costs compared with building each unit in one place. Ancient civilizations practiced early forms of the division of labor, and the Venetian Arsenal, operating from around 1104, moved ships along a canal to receive standardized parts at successive stations in a manner similar to a production line; the Portsmouth Block Mills, built in England between 1801 and 1803 to make ship pulley blocks with specialized machine tools, is considered probably the earliest industrial example of a continuous, linear assembly process, and Chicago's meatpacking industry adopted conveyor-based disassembly lines around 1867. Henry Ford's moving assembly line, introduced at the Highland Park plant in October 1913, reduced the time to build a Model T to just 93 minutes across 45 sequential steps, multiplying output roughly eightfold while cutting the labor required and helping bring the car's price down from about 825 dollars in 1908 to 575 dollars by 1912.