When was the first assembly line invented

Before , Ford and many other car makers put together entire cars at one station. A team of workers labored on each car, writes Tony Swan for Car and Driver. The innovation of the moving assembly line cut the number of workers required and reduced the time it took to assemble a car.

It also gave the company more control over the pace. Henry Ford improved upon the assembly line concept by using the moving platforms of a conveyor system. In this system the chassis of the vehicle was towed by a rope that moved it from station to station in order to allow workers to assemble each part.

Using this method, the Model T could be produced every ninety minutes, or totaling nearly two million units in one of their best years. Often credited as the father of the assembly line, he would be more appropriately referred to as the father of automotive mass production. Throughout the s and s, engineers around the world experimented with robotics as a means of industrial development. General Motors installed its own robotic arm to assist in the assembly line in In , Stanford engineer Victor Scheinman created the Stanford Arm, a 6-axis robot that could move and assemble parts in a continuous repeated pattern.

This invention expanded robot use in ways that continue to be applied in modern assembly. At Philips Electronics factory in the Netherlands, production is completed by a number of robot arms assigned to specific tasks. Today robotics are reaching a completely new level of sophistication.

Companies like Rethink Robotics are striving to develop adaptive manufacturing robots that can work next to humans; these robots would help to improve efficiency and increase productivity.

Rethink Robotics especially is working on making their robots low-cost and user-friendly. There are of course other historians who will claim assembly line methods used by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and even earlier cultures. Bottom line, there is little doubt that the assembly line method of production is ancient. For the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, the assembly line enabled an enormous increase in production. How enormous? Well, by sales of the Model-T had passed , units and by , sales reached , units!

By , half of all cars in America were Model T's. This kept parts simple and interchangeable, a key feature in assembly line methodology. While the Ford Motor Company was the first automobile manufacturer to use the assembly line method to produce its cars, Henry Ford certainly did not invent the process.

Keep driving my friends! Growing up in Michigan we learned early on that Ford borrowed the idea of the assembly line. In a sense, this was more of a disassembly line because the animals would be taken apart, but it was the same concept - utilizing moving parts to get the job completed.

These were most widely used in Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio, which were two of the largest meat producers at that time. Many other industries started using technologies to automate and expedite manufacturing processes without formalizing the concept of an assembly line. The production of everything from trains and bicycle transportation to textiles and wristwatches were sped up via things like elevators and simple conveyors.

Important devices at that time such as steam engines and boilers were put on production lines, and various inventors started creating useful items for military purposes. Devices such as cranes also started to revolutionize the construction industry. In , Ransom Olds took the assembly line even farther and formally patented it. Statistically, it is believed that this practice increased the amount of Oldsmobile vehicles made per year by a whopping percent.

While they contained simple parts, they could be made quickly and were affordable and attractive. Only after all of this did Henry Ford actually get his time to shine with the assembly line. Ford worked diligently to expand the concept of the assembly line and invented a method of moving parts by what we know would call a conveyor belt.

Even though Oldsmobile patented the assembly line, Ford usually gets the credit for creating the first mass-production assembly line in the auto industry. He also boasted that employees were allowed to work less hours because with the advances in productivity, they would be able to meet quotas in less time. The price of the Model T also dropped drastically and more Americans could afford one.

Of course, the assembly line would go on to be expanded upon greatly since his time. General Motors fully entered into the assembly line world around when it started to build robotic arms that would help expedite manufacturing even more. Around , the Stanford Arm was created, which allowed a six-axis robot to be programmed to move parts in a continuous, timed pattern.