The Wild Wheel

FOUR THE MAD WAY

AT RIVER ROUGE, where the empire came of age, the hierarchy assumed its perfect form. Ford was god, Sorensen was satan and Cameron was pope. They communicated with one another in a language that only seemed to be made up of words. The meaning was in what they understood. Nothing was too strange to happen.

Ford had the kind of feeling for statistics that most people have for snakes, even friendly snakes. “Too many figures,” he said, “make your head swell up like a drum.” Nevertheless they persuaded him to let them make a few figures just to prove how useful they might be, only a few. He had forgotten all about it when one day a year later he stood rigid with bewilderment on the threshold of a large room full of computing machines, tabulating typewriters, mimeograph equipment, people drawing lines on large sheets of quad-ruled paper, and some colored charts on the walls. He beckoned to a person who looked up, and said to him:

“What’s this?”

The startled person said: “This is our Statistical Department, Mr. Ford.”

He stared for a moment with the look of one trying to remember something, then turned and walked away. In the yard he found Sorensen.

“Did I hear you say you needed some space?”

Sorensen said: “I need space like hell.”

Ford said: “In that corner on the second floor where I’m pointing there is a big room. I just now happened to look into it. A lot of people making figures. You can have that space if you will go and take it.”

Sorensen called two men to come in a hurry with crowbars, armed himself with a blunt instrument, and the three of them, descending upon the statistical department, wrecked it down to the floor, computing machines, typewriters, desks, everything. The terrified statisticians scattered and went home, only understanding that their department had been destroyed by an act of Providence. Sorensen sent the debris to the junk heap and moved in.

It would take Cameron to tell you why this was a perfectly rational piece of behavior. Mr. Ford, who in the first place had been persuaded against his judgment, found a large bureau growing on his premises. He knew the nature of bureaus. They grow like demon weeds. If you say, “Cut it down to half size,” it will be obediently cut down; but when you come to look at it a year later it will be twice as big. The only way to control it, therefore, is to kill it. And that is what Sorensen knew. Cameron would add: “Moreover, Mr. Ford thinks the statistician’s facts are dead before they are written down. He says that by the time anyone has assembled a large collection of facts on any subject their value has so changed that they are a record of the past and useless, even dangerous, as guides to the future. The only facts he cares about are the facts he finds as he moves forward.”

It was at River Rouge that what was called the Ford method came to marvelous fruition. All the principles had been worked out. Although Ford said, “Fortunately, we inherited no traditions and are not founding any,” nevertheless he was founding one, and on second thought he added: “If we have a tradition it is this: Everything can always be done faster and better. That pressing always to do work better and faster serves nearly every factory problem.”

No superintendent had to think of anything else. He would be wasting his time if he did. At the end of each day he divided the output of his department by the number of workers employed, and that was his score. If his score was good everything else would come out right.

And it was at River Rouge that for the first time Ford had the leisure to think in a conscious manner, to look back at what he had done without thinking and to rationalize it in theory. Then, finding the clear words for it, he pronounced this dictum:

“The new method must produce the profit. Never cheapen the product. Never cheapen the wage. Never overcharge the public. Put your brains into the method, more brains, and still more.”

Until we come to the piece named X, this will stand as the secret of the greatest individual profit maker of his age, or of any age so far.

Note that in this dictum he says new method. Let the new method produce the profit. Yet the fact is that the Ford method, like the Model T car, had nothing radically new in it, nothing that somebody else had not already thought of.

Before Fordism there was Taylorism. Frederick W. Taylor was the John the Baptist of scientific management. The original principles that were afterward so amazingly demonstrated by Ford were being taught by Taylor in textbooks, in lectures and in practice, long before there was a Ford Motor Company. Taylor was the revolutionary thinker; Ford was the revolutionist in action. The Ford assembly line was the first of its kind ever installed in the world, but the idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef, where each butcher in turn takes one part of the carcass and then pushes it on to the next butcher, who takes another part, and so on, until there is nothing left of it. This you might call a disassembly line. Ford turned it upside down to make the first assembly line on which a thing is built up, not dismembered.

What made the Ford method epochal was not discovery but the imagination, the ingenuity, the excitement and the total logic with which the principles of scientific management were applied. Of general principles, Ford said he knew only two, namely:

(1) That a man should never have to take more than one step if it could possibly be avoided, which meant simply that the man stood still and the work moved, and,

(2) That no man should ever need to stoop over, which meant that his work should be brought to him waist-high.

Yet he is speaking there of practice, not principles.

Why should a man never take more than one step? Because steps take time. “Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees,” Ford said, “and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy. The undirected worker spends more of his time walking about for materials and tools than he does in working. Pedestrianism cannot be highly paid.”

And why should a man never stoop? Because it takes time and energy to stoop and lift, and, said Ford, “We think of time as human energy.” That brings him closer to it.

In the last term there is but one principle, and that is to overcome time.

The cost of transforming raw materials into useful forms may be reduced to that one term—time. Labor is time. Machines are time. Raw materials are time. Visibly, the industrial process consists in passing raw materials through hands and machines. Actually, it consists only in passing them through time. The use of the machine is to enable you to pass them faster through time. A lone craftsman may spend a lifetime making one exquisite watch. What is it worth? It is worth his whole lifetime, provided a rich man can be found with the whim to buy it for no better reason than to be able to say that he carries one man’s lifetime in his vest pocket.

2

ONE of the contradictions is that the Ford car came first and the Ford method afterward. For nearly ten years the Ford car was built as every other car was built. That is to say, it was built like a house. The chassis was the foundation. There it stood on one spot and never moved until the car was finished, with mechanics, helpers and stock runners bringing things to it, one part at a time.

That would be the cheapest way to build a few cars. The very cheapest way to build one car would be to build it entirely by hand, with a few simple tools—a lathe, a drill press, anvil, forge and vise—as Ford built his first car; and still it was a costly car because it took him seven years to do it. For one car or for a few cars you could not afford to spend millions of dollars for automatic lathes and milling machines, multiple drill presses that make twenty holes at once in four different directions at the touch of a red button, or ten-ton forging hammers that react with diabolic energy when you step lightly on their bunions.

The Ford Motor Company had success by the mane, “Watch the Fords Go By” was a vaunting advertising line on the billboards and in animated electric signs against the sky by night, other automobile makers were gnashing their teeth for envy and the output of Model T’s was ten thousand a year—when Ford began to hear voices.

He dared not tell what they said to him. It was too fantastic.

They said: “Not thousands. Millions! Automobiles by the million. The people want them, if only you can make them.”

He looked at his shop. It was still like any other automobile shop of that time. Each one in its own way was a little pandemonium. Each new car was witness that purpose enough will somehow overcome confusion to bring its ends to pass. But in that way you could never make automobiles by the million. In the first place, you never could find the skilled mechanics. Secondly, provided you could find them, you would not be able to manage them. How could you manage maybe a million skilled mechanics in one plant?

The first fact therefore was that if you were going to build automobiles by the million you would have to do it with unskilled labor, of which there was always plenty. Then you would have to have not only many, many more machines; you would have to revolutionize your way of thinking about the machine. Actually you could not dispense with skill; but you could build skill into the machine—automatic, unerring skill. A man of very ordinary intelligence could mind such a machine, because he would have only to fill its maw according to a formula and then activate it by pulling a lever or stepping on a treadle, all with a few disciplined motions of his hands and feet, the fewer the better. And he could be trained to do that in a few hours.

What followed logically was an extreme problem of internal transportation—how to move the material to the men at the machines and away from them in a continuous flow. The answer to that was the conveyer belt.

Many engineers and highly skilled mechanics would be needed of course to design and build the machines—strange and specialized machines, new-purpose machines, such machines as the regular machine builders had never heard of, could hardly imagine at all, and sometimes were loath to build on Ford designs, thinking they would not work. What they learned was that if you take thought enough you can build a machine to blow soap bubbles.

A Ford man going to and fro in the world was expected to keep his eyes alert for any new wrinkle in machine craft that could be copied or adapted. Anyone who could think of a new machine or of a better way to make an old one work was king for a day.

You will realize that the Ford way could not have been thought out all at once. It wasn’t. There were too many unexpected complications; the solution of one difficulty brought unexpected problems into view. It had to grow by trial and error. The idea of it was constant, obsessionary and extravagant; the pressure behind it was terrific. If a thing worked on a trial scale it was immediately adopted on a large scale. Almost overnight any whole section of the plant might be turned out to make room for it.

Moving the work to the man, and from one machine to another, by gravity slides and conveyor belts, with the man standing still, was first tried on what are called subassemblies.

The engine is an example of subassembly. The complete engine as a thing in itself, with several hundred parts, some heavy and some as delicate as watch parts, is all put together before it arrives at the chassis to take its place in the automobile. That would be the same if one mechanic were building an automobile entirely by hand. Naturally he would assemble the engine on the bench before putting it on the chassis.

In the old way one man assembled the entire Ford engine, walking round and round it until it was finished. In the new way, what that one man did was broken down into eighty-four separate operations, one man to each operation, all eighty-four of them standing still, with the work moving past them waist-high, each man having just time enough to do his one thing. Where formerly only one man touched the engine, now eighty-four act upon it in sequence, but you do not have now eighty-four men where before you had one. What happens is that whereas before it took eighty-four men to assemble eighty-four engines, now eighty-four men assemble 252 engines, or three times as many.

Another example of subassembly was the flywheel magneto, a feature of the Model T that now is extinct. When one man did the whole job the time was twenty minutes. When the job was broken down into thirty-nine operations, with the men standing still and the work moving past them, the time was reduced to seven minutes.

The first result of speeding up the subassemblies in this manner was to confound confusion. Each subassembly line was a rising stream and there was no river to take the flood. There stood the chassis still, in the middle of the floor, with everybody running around it, everybody bringing something to it, until somehow a finished automobile should appear; so that of course the faster the subassemblies arrived—the engine, the flywheel magneto, the transmission, the rear axle differential, and so on—the madder the disorder was.

Then a natural thought presented itself. The chassis had to move!

That may seem now to have been a very simple translation of what they already knew into its logical next dimension, and yet what it did was to call out of the dimness a mighty revolution of practice. The last secret of mass production was discovered.

First they got a windlass and 250 feet of rope and dragged the chassis slowly along the floor. Everything had been timed and arranged beforehand. Parts and subassemblies were piled along the way, so that the right part and the right subassembly would be there within arm’s reach, just as the chassis arrived, and the workers either walked with the chassis or rode it, doing their work as they moved, keeping their tools in their hands.

That was a capital day. Never before had a car been assembled in less than twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes. This one at the end of the rope was assembled in five hours and fifty minutes.

Well, if that could be done with one chassis at a time, why not tie eight or ten to the end of the rope? That was tried. The speed of the windlass was increased. The parts and subassemblies along the way were delivered waist-high, the easier to be picked up, and each man’s operation was further simplified. By these improvements the time required to assemble a car was squeezed again. So now there began to be a river for the subassembly streams to flow into and everybody was happy.

Until one day the rope broke; the automobiles at the end of it, building as they moved, piled up in a dead heap.

They threw away the windlass and rope and sat down to think. What they thought of was a power-driven endless conveyer belt, flush with the floor, like an escalator running on the level. It was wide enough to hold not only the chassis but workers on both sides of it, so that the workers and the automobile moved together, each worker doing his specialized bit of work, then stepping back a few paces to do it again to the next car, in a string of forty-five.

As Ford described it, the line moved six feet a minute. There were forty-five building stations, at each of which something was added to the moving car. The first man fastened four mudguard brackets to the chassis frame; the engine arrived at the tenth station, and so on. Some men did only one or two small operations, others more. The man who placed a part did not always fasten it. The part might not be fully in place until several stations later. The man who put in a bolt might not put on the nut; the man who put on the nut might not tighten it. At station thirty-four the engine got its gasoline; it had previously had lubrication. At station forty-four the radiator was filled with water, and at station forty-five the engine started. Then the car moved away under its own power.

On that first conveyer belt the time required to assemble an automobile was reduced to ninety-three minutes—from twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes.

This made such a raging river through the middle of the shop that the subassembly lines began to run dry. So they had to be raised higher and higher and more were added, and the work everywhere was subdivided again and again to a point at which each operation was incredibly simplified.

“With the result,” said Ford, “that the necessity for thought on the part of the worker is reduced to a minimum. He does, if it is possible, only one thing with one movement.”

There seemed to be no limit to how far you could go in that direction. Ford overhauled his fantasy of a car a minute. It did not stop there. Five years later a Model T was appearing every ten seconds of the working day. That was mass production. In his passion for it Ford called it the New Messiah. Everything to satisfy material human wants could be produced in that way, and if everything were, then man for the first time could have both plenty without end and the leisure to consume it.

His feud with time was relentless. As some people at a glance see four-leaf clovers in the grass, so in his marginal vision as he walked through the shop he could see waste of labor, energy and materials, all three representing time. It might be something he himself had not noticed yesterday.

One day he passed the men who were testing the engine. He turned back suddenly and asked one of them: “Why do we do that?” The man was struck dumb. He did not understand that Ford was putting the question not to him but to himself. Always the Ford engine, like every other engine, was put on a block and tested under its own power before being installed in the automobile. It was standard practice. Ford left the man staring, went straight to his engineers and said: “The only reason we make a trial run of the engine is we are not sure we made it right. Let’s make sure of that and stop this testing.”

After that the Ford engine came alive in the automobile as it drove off the end of the assembly line.

3

PARTURITION in the mechanical kingdom is a sweet and charming event, essentially marvelous, and yet so blurred by dull-witted familiarity that few of us ever see it in the pure light of wonder. It happens that in the automobile engine you cannot see it at all. The action is concealed. But to have seen it, for example, in the case of a steam locomotive, with all the action visible, is something to remember.

That magnificent animal now is doomed by evolution and will presently survive only in museums, like lions in the zoo. It begins with white lines on dark paper—the flat blueprints. Skilled mechanics labor for months to raise it to the third dimension. Then at last there it is, complete, standing on a track of wheels so that it may run without moving, and still inanimate. Movement is unknown to it.

A high-pressure steam line is attached; a valve is turned. The first sign of life is a tremor of astonishment; then a gasp and a half-strangled cough. The big drive wheels start to revolve, hesitate, stagger slightly, and you think of a newborn calf taking its first sprawling steps; they make one revolution, stumble again, then begin to turn smoothly, faster and faster, until they find their rhythm.

So an engine comes alive. Any engine. Millions a day come alive in the world, and although the birth rate is recorded statistically by the economists, to tell us how fast our race of mechanical slaves is propagating itself, it is not otherwise regarded.

But there was a time when the first engine—the very first one—clumsily moved. Next to the dawn of animal life, that was the miracle most pregnant and most brooding in all the apocalyptic story of the earth.

Whence came the engine? Who makes it? We seem to be sure that God does not make it. God makes the elephant. The elephant therefore belongs to the mystery of life. It is what we call a natural fact. By the hand of man, issuing from the creative power of his imagination, come an engine that can fly elephants through the firmament; and yet we say there is nothing mysterious about the engine. It is an artificial fact.

We think it not at all mysterious that engines procreate engines. Without engines we could not have engines. We have discovered a law of evolution in the animal world, and that is mysterious; but engines evolve from lower to higher forms much faster than anything in the animal world. Engines today are of different kinds and species and much less like the engines of one hundred years ago than people are like monkeys, after aeons of time. Physicists can tell you why engines run. They found it out afterward. It is because gases behave in a certain way. If you ask them why gases behave in a certain way they cannot tell you, nor can anyone explain why the engine is the only form of absolute truth in the possession of mankind.

Anyhow, with engines coming alive faster than one a minute on his assembly lines, and time screaming for mercy on the banks of the River Rouge, Ford began to look in new directions for greater occasions to pursue his feud.

4

BY THIS time the Ford Motor Company did much more than to fabricate automobiles. It had become a vast integrated manufacturing empire, going all the way back to the sources of raw materials, such as to get ore from its own iron mines, fuel from its own coal mines, wood from its own forests, rubber from its own plantations, chemicals from its own vats, fabrics from its own looms—and was potentially self-contained. Although it continued to buy enormously from suppliers and contractors when there was advantage in it, still it was ready to manufacture for itself anything that was needed to make an automobile, and sometimes made things just to see if it could, like rubber tires and glass for windshields, without intending really to go into either the rubber tire or the glass business, unless the tire and glass makers got too proud with their prices.

As he looked in these new directions all he could see was a chaos of waste. Nobody doing anything the Ford way.

The worst wasters of all were the railroads. They wasted not only their own time but Ford time, which was unforgivable. Their inefficiency scandalized him. Railroad people, he said, had been so long at war with their employees and with the public that the purpose of railways was sometimes forgotten. When they were unable to handle their traffic properly the only thing they could think of was to borrow more money to increase their facilities. The right way would be first to make sure they were using their facilities to the utmost, and if they did that they might find that it was not necessary to increase them at all.

He had tried to show them how. Formerly he shipped automobiles as everybody else did, whole, and seven to a freight car. The first time he made as many as one thousand cars in a day and tried to ship them he created the worst traffic jam Detroit had ever seen. What would it be like when he wanted to ship twice that many?

So he began to ship them knocked down, to be assembled at the branch plants; and that way he could get one hundred and thirty in one freight car. He went much further. More and more the branch plants all over the country assembled the cars and did also some manufacturing, so that only the subassemblies and the bits and pieces went out from Detroit, and these packed and crated with such geometric precision that a loaded freight car was as full as an eggshell.

But for a living industrial process that required the oxygen of a continuous and invariable flow of materials, incoming freight was a nightmare. It was uncertain, whimsical, generally tardy and in the best case too slow, only for the reason that railroads were run like that. “For a railroad to deliver in ten days what it might deliver in five is grand larceny,” he said; and if it delivered in five days its facilities would be doubled.

He had found that in stockpiles and warehouses he had $200,000,000 of capital tied up, dead capital in raw materials and finished automobiles, all as insurance against the aberrations of railroad transportation. He hated stockpiles and warehouses. He perceived that the time cost in manufacturing began the moment the raw material was separated from the earth and continued until the finished product was delivered to the consumer. Having on hand twice as much material as was needed—which was only another way of saying twice as much stored human labor as was needed—was precisely the same as hiring two men to do the job of one, and hiring two men to do the job of one was a crime.

So he resolved to abolish stockpiles and tear down his warehouses. Five years later, when that feud was won, he found that in that time the extension of the business, which had been very great, had all been paid for with money that before would have been idle in piles of iron, steel, coal, or in finished automobiles. Now he did not own or use a single warehouse.

How did he do it?

First was created a Ford Traffic Department that became the day-and-night torment of the railroad people. From the moment a car of Ford freight started from anywhere, until it arrived, it was a red ant in their pants. On its departure a Ford man wired in its number. At the first junction or breaking point there was another Ford man to check its arrival, to see that it got on its way again, and to report it by wire; and so at the next point and the next one, until it arrived in home territory, and there again was a Ford man to pick it up and see it to the unloading platform. There was a kind of military precision about it. If anywhere on the map, day or night, a car loaded with Ford freight was an hour late the Ford Traffic Department knew it and there was hell to pay. Ford freight was nothing a railroad could afford to lose.

For ore there was a fleet of Ford boats running from the head of the Great Lakes to Detroit—the engine rooms finished in gray and white with all nickel-plated trim, the crew’s quarters finished in hardwood, a shower bath for each man—and the story of the ore was as follows:

Forty-eight hours down the Lakes from Marquette the ore boat docks at Fordson on the River Rouge at 8 A.M., Monday. Ten minutes later its cargo is moving toward the High Line and becomes part of a charge for the blast furnace. By noon Tuesday, the ore has been reduced to iron, mixed with other iron in the foundry cupolas, and cast. Thereupon follow fifty-eight operations, which are performed in fifty-five minutes. By three o’clock in the afternoon the motor has been finished and started off in a freight car to a branch for assembly into a finished car. Say that it reaches the branch plant so that it may be put into the assembly line at eight o’clock Wednesday morning. By noon the car will be on the road in the possession of its owner. If the motor, instead of being sent to a branch plant, goes into the assembly line for the Detroit district, then the completed car will be delivered before five o’clock Tuesday afternoon instead of at noon Wednesday.

From ore on the dock to the finished car in sixteen working hours.

When the stockpiles had vanished and the last warehouse had been torn down, the production cycle, that is, the elapsed time from the moment the ore was separated from the earth at the mine to the appearance of the finished automobile, had been reduced from fourteen days to three days and nine hours.

A further step was the ocean-going and coastwise vessel, designed, like a one-purpose machine, for Ford cargo only, with special racks, so that nothing had to be crated. The saving on crating alone might be as much as twenty thousand dollars a trip.

Yet the main thing was time. A Ford ship was held to schedule like a railroad passenger train, and was limited to twenty-four hours in port, because if a ship was held a couple of weeks in port, unloading and loading, the loss would probably be greater than the total wages for a year. The total of wages paid on a ship was not very important. The important thing was to see that you got full use out of the big investment, namely, the ship.

Time was money and time loved to be wasted. Idle money was time and money loved to be idle. To tolerate this evil association was Ford’s idea of mortal economic sin.

“From time waste,” he said, “there can be no salvage. It is the easiest of all waste and the hardest to correct because it does not litter the floor.”