The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

IDENTIFY AND ELIMINATE WASTE
The following material underscores one of Ford’s success secrets, which 
was the ability to identify waste on sight and also apparently to teach his 
workforce to do the same. The statement, “The waste worried the men,” 
which also appears more than once in Norwood (1931), underscores 
the fact that intolerance of all forms of waste was part of the culture as 
opposed to a management-driven activity.
The story about the discs of sheet metal also illustrates the concept of 
paying attention not only to the doughnut (the product), but also the hole 
(everything that is thrown away). The workers knew that the discs were 
recyclable, but they saw little sense in throwing them back into the blast 
furnace if they were usable as they were.
This section also illustrates the economy that comes from shipping parts 
instead of completed items (like automobiles) that occupy most of the 
freight train or other vehicle with predominantly air. The parts are then 

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How Cheaply Can Things Be Made?  •  135
assembled into the complete product at the point of use. This is standard 
practice for many prefabricated furniture items today.
* * *
Take a few more instances of saving. The sweepings net six hundred thou-
sand dollars a year. Experiments are constantly going on in the utilization of 
scrap. In one of the stamping operations six-inch circles of sheet metal are cut 
out. These formerly went into scrap. The waste worried the men. They worked 
to find uses for the discs. They found that the plates were just the right size 
and shape to stamp into radiator caps but the metal was not thick enough. 
They tried a double thickness of plates, with the result that they made a cap 
which tests proved to be stronger than one made out of a single sheet of metal. 
We get 150,000 of those discs a day. We have now found a use for about 
20,000 a day and expect to find further uses for the remainder. We saved 
about ten dollars each by making transmissions instead of buying them. We 
experimented with bolts and produced a special bolt made on what is called 
an “upsetting machine” with a rolled thread that was stronger than any bolt 
we could buy, although in its making was used only about one third of the 
material that the outside manufacturers used. The saving on one style of bolt 
alone amounted to half a million dollars a year. We used to assemble our cars 
at Detroit, and although by special packing we managed to get five or six into 
a freight car, we needed many hundreds of freight cars a day. Trains were 
moving in and out all the time. Once a thousand freight cars were packed in 
a single day. A certain amount of congestion was inevitable. It is very expen-
sive to knock down machines and crate them so that they cannot be injured 
in transit—to say nothing of the transportation charges. Now, we assemble 
only three or four hundred cars a day at Detroit—just enough for local needs. 
We now ship the parts to our assembling stations all over the United States 
and in fact pretty much all over the world, and the machines are put together 
there. Wherever it is possible for a branch to make a part more cheaply than 
we can make it in Detroit and ship it to them, then the branch makes the 
part.
The plant at Manchester, England, is making nearly an entire car. The 
tractor plant at Cork, Ireland, is making almost a complete tractor. This is 
an enormous saving of expense and is only an indication of what may be 
done throughout industry generally, when each part of a composite article 
is made at the exact point where it may be made most economically. We are 
constantly experimenting with every material that enters into the car. We cut 
most of our own lumber from our own forests. We are experimenting in the 
manufacture of artificial leather because we use about forty thousand yards 
of artificial leather a day. A penny here and a penny there runs into large 
amounts in the course of a year.

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136  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
The greatest development of all, however, is the River Rouge plant, which, 
when it is running to its full capacity, will cut deeply and in many direc-
tions into the price of everything we make. The whole tractor plant is now 
there. This plant is located on the river on the outskirts of Detroit and the 
property covers six hundred and sixty-five acres—enough for future develop-
ment. It has a large slip and a turning basin capable of accommodating any 
lake steamship; a short-cut canal and some dredging will give a direct lake 
connection by way of the Detroit River. We use a great deal of coal. This coal 
comes directly from our mines over the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton Railway, 
which we control, to the Highland Park plant and the River Rouge plant. Part 
of it goes for steam purposes. Another part goes to the by-product coke ovens 
which we have established at the River Rouge plant. Coke moves on from 
the ovens by mechanical transmission to the blast furnaces. The low volatile 
gases from the blast furnaces are piped to the power plant boilers where they 
are joined by the sawdust and the shavings from the body plant—the mak-
ing of all our bodies has been shifted to this plant—and in addition the coke 
“breeze” (the dust in the making of coke) is now also being utilized for stok-
ing. The steam power plant is thus fired almost exclusively from what would 
otherwise be waste products. Immense steam turbines directly coupled with 
dynamos transform this power into electricity, and all of the machinery in 
the tractor and the body plants is run by individual motors from this electric-
ity. In the course of time it is expected that there will be sufficient electricity 
to run practically the whole Highland Park plant, and we shall then have cut 
out our coal bill.