56 •
The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
proportion to the output.” Elimination of all forms of waste, including
waste motion in the case of people, makes this achievable. The subsequent
story shows that handmade axe handles, which were,
despite the care
taken by a skilled and experienced laborer, inferior to those produced by
machines.
* * *
Contrast the year 1908 with the year 1911. The factory space increased from
2.65 to 32 acres. The average number of employees from 1,908 to 4,110, and
the cars built from a little over six thousand to nearly thirty-five thousand.
You will note that men were not employed in proportion to the output.
We were, almost overnight it seems, in great production. How did all this
come about?
Simply through the application of an inevitable principle. By the applica-
tion of intelligently directed power and machinery. In a little dark shop on
a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. Out of
seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel,
and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each handle weighed and balanced.
No two of them were alike. The curve must exactly fit the hand and must con-
form to the grain of the wood. From dawn until dark the old man laboured.
His average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar
and a half each. And often some of these were unsaleable—because the bal-
ance was not true.
To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few
cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike—and
every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only
brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost—but
they have immensely improved the product.
The machine in question was almost certainly a Blanchard lathe, or a
similar tool for the mass production of irregularly shaped wooden prod-
ucts. Thomas Blanchard’s original objective was to shape musket stocks
from wooden blanks, per the National Park Service:
The so-called Blanchard lathe [actually, it’s a shaper since the cutter is a
rotating wheel] works much [like] a modern key-cutting machine with a
stock blank [a rough gunstock form] in place of the key blank. An iron master
form, in the shape of the musket stock, slowly rotates allowing a guide wheel
to roll over it and to direct, in turn, the cutting wheel as it makes identical
movements on the rotating wooden stock blank.
* * *
The Secret of Manufacturing and Serving • 57
It is conceivable that the axe handle maker in Ford’s
story could have
had an iron master made from his best piece, his master piece, and
then enjoyed a very comfortable retirement while a Blanchard lathe
made endless copies of his best work. The same principle could apply
today to the hand-crafted wooden products that are often displayed at
art fairs. The key lesson of the story, however, is that automation can
deliver virtually identical copies of the
best known form of the product,
and in far greater quantities and lower cost than is possible through
hand production.
The following from Ford introduces the concept of a supply chain and
its stakeholders, and the interdependency of the supplier, its employees,
and its customers.
* * *
It was the application of these same methods to the making of the Ford car
that at the very start lowered the price and heightened the quality. We just
developed an idea. The nucleus of a business may be an idea. That is, an
inventor or a thoughtful workman works out a new and better way to serve
some established human need; the idea commends itself, and people want to
avail themselves of it. In this way a single individual may prove, through his
idea or discovery, the nucleus of a business. But the creation of the body and
bulk of that business is shared by everyone who has anything to do with it. No
manufacturer can say: “I built this business”—if he has required the help of
thousands of men in building it. It is a joint production. Everyone employed
in it has contributed something to it. By working and producing they make it
possible for the purchasing world to keep coming to that business for the type
of service it provides, and thus they help establish a custom, a trade, a habit
which supplies them with a livelihood. That is the way our company grew and
just how I shall start explaining in the next chapter.
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