timelets | Entries tagged with ford

And success in manufacture is based solely upon an ability to serve that consumer to his liking. ... He is best served by the highest quality at the lowest price, and any man who can give to the consumer the highest quality at the lowest price is bound to be a leader in business, whatever the kind of an article he makes. There is no getting away from this.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

Clearly, youtube meets this requirement.

There were two benches and twenty−eight men in all; they assembled one hundred seventy−five pistons and rods in a nine−hour day—which means just five seconds over three minutes each. There was no inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the motor assembling line as defective.

...
The foreman, examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much as three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop−watch. He found that four hours out of a nine−hour day were spent in walking. The assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. In the whole task, each man performed six operations.

The foreman devised a new plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end.

Instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then performed only one third of the operation—he performed only as much as he could do without shifting his feet. They cut down the squad from twenty−eight to fourteen men.

The former record for twenty−eight men was one hundred seventy−five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out twenty−six hundred assemblies in eight hours. It is not necessary to calculate the savings there!

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

That would be quintessential Enframing per Heidegger, i.e. technology shapes and makes use of live and dead parts to increase productivity. As a result, everybody is better off but there's something dehumanizing in sitting for hours without even shifting your feet and performing the same mechanical operation with two simple parts in a tempo imposed by an external decision-making process.

Amazon warehouses are designed in a similar fashion.

Our foundry used to be much like other foundries. When we cast the first “Model T” cylinders in 1910, everything in the place was done by hand; shovels and wheelbarrows abounded. The work was then either skilled or unskilled; we had moulders and we had labourers.

Now we have about five per cent. of thoroughly skilled moulders and core setters, but the remaining 95 per cent. are unskilled, or to put it more accurately, must be skilled in exactly one operation which the most stupid man can learn within two days. The moulding is all done by machinery.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

As a result of this knowledge environment, most of How To books are written "for dummies."

... by 1905 I had fairly in mind the specifications of the kind of car I wanted to build. But I lacked the material to give strength without weight. I came across that material almost by accident.

In 1905 I was at a motor race at Palm Beach. ... foreign cars...

After the wreck I picked up a little valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was made of. Nobody knew.

...it was a French steel and that there was vanadium in it. We tried every steel maker in America—not one could make vanadium steel.

I sent to England for a man who understood how to make the steel commercially. The next thing was to get a plant to turn it out. That was another problem. Vanadium requires 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The ordinary furnace could not go beyond 2,700 degrees. I found a small steel company in Canton, Ohio. I offered to guarantee them against loss if they would run a heat for us. They agreed. The first heat was a failure. Very little vanadium remained in the steel. I had them try again, and the second time the steel came through. Until then we had been forced to be satisfied with steel running between 60,000 and 70,000 pounds tensile strength. With vanadium, the strength went up to 170,000 pounds.

Having vanadium in hand I pulled apart our models and tested in detail to determine what kind of steel was best for every part—whether we wanted a hard steel, a tough steel, or an elastic steel. We, for the first time I think, in the history of any large construction, determined scientifically the exact quality of the steel. As a result we then selected twenty different types of steel for the various steel parts. About ten of these were vanadium.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

My associates were not convinced that it was possible to restrict our cars to a single model. The automobile trade was following the old bicycle trade, in which every manufacturer thought it necessary to bring out a new model each year and to make it so unlike all previous models that those who had bought the former models would want to get rid of the old and buy the new. That was supposed to be good business. It is the same idea that women submit to in their clothing and hats. That is not service—it seeks only to provide something new, not something better.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

In the case of an automobile the sale of the machine is only something in the nature of an introduction. If the machine does not give service, then it is better for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have the worst of all advertisements—a dissatisfied customer.

The repair men were for a time the largest menace to the automobile industry. Even as late as 1910 and 1911 the owner of an automobile was regarded as essentially a rich man whose money ought to be taken away from him. We met that situation squarely and at the very beginning. We would not have our distribution blocked by stupid, greedy men.

--- Henry Ford, My life and work.

Nearly all of these various features had been planned in advance. That is the way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before starting to build. For otherwise one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. It will not be rightly proportioned. Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations.

--- Henry Ford, My life and work.

Limitations determine trade-offs and optimization strategies.

The principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge. If there is a single principle on which our business rests it is that. It makes no difference how finely made a chisel is or what splendid steel it has in it or how well it is forged—if it has no cutting edge it is not a chisel. It is just a piece of metal. All of which being translated means that it is what a thing does—not what it is supposed to do—that matters. What is the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light blow on a sharp chisel will do the work? The chisel is there to cut, not to be hammered. The hammering is only incidental to the job. So if we want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest possible fashion? The cutting edge of merchandising is the point where the product touches the consumer. An unsatisfactory product is one that has a dull cutting edge. A lot of waste effort is needed to put it through. The cutting edge of a factory is the man and the machine on the job. If the man is not right the machine cannot be; if the machine is not right the man cannot be. For any one to be required to use more force than is absolutely necessary for the job in hand is waste.

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

It looks like Henry Ford originated this expression.

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international—a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. -- Henry Ford. My Life and Work.

It's amazing to see how a person absolutely brilliant in one field can be a total idiot in another. In the Henry Ford's case, they showed during the court proceedings (Ford vs Chicago Tribune) that he didn't know anything beyond car manufacturing.

"He was virtually illiterate, obviously, and his philosophy was unashamedly out of the cracker barrel. Both these characteristics were common to any number of residents in the American hinterland," Tebbel wrote.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-06-08/news/9706300080_1_henry-ford-chicago-tribune-anarchist