The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE BIRTH OF THE ASSEMBLY LINE
Ford now describes how division of labor made economic mass production 
possible. His factory began with the traditional departmental or “farm” 
layout, in which individual departments made specific parts that a single 
worker or department would later assemble. The workers’ need to get and 
move the parts, however, created an enormous amount of waste motion 
that added no value to the product, and for which the worker could not be 
paid. This led to the assembly line that moved the work to the people, and 
task subdivision that eliminated the waste motion of exchanging one tool 
for another.
Note especially the statement that pedestrianism is not a highly paying 
line of work, and also Ford’s two basic motion efficiency principles. No job 
should require a worker to take more than one step in any direction to get 
or move work, and no job should require anybody to bend over. The latter 
doubtlessly prevented back-related repetitive motion injuries in a highly 
repetitive working environment.
* * *
A Ford car contains about five thousand parts—that is counting screws, nuts, 
and all. Some of the parts are fairly bulky and others are almost the size of 
watch parts. In our first assembling we simply started to put a car together at 

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62  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed 
in exactly the same way that one builds a house. When we started to make