ABSTRACT
During the year 1903 a forty-year-old Detroiter named Henry Ford, having left the employ of the little Detroit Automobile Company with the idea of going into the manufacturing business for himself, designed and built a big and powerful racing car. He wanted to build, not a showy car for the well-to-do, but a practical, effort-saving car for ordinary people like himself. Ford was indebted, too, to Frederick Winslow Taylor for his studies in “scientific management,” the careful planning of manufacturing processes so as to save steps and motions. What Ford had actually done–in his manufacturing techniques, his deliberate price cutting, and his deliberate wage raising–was to demonstrate with unprecedented directness one of the great principles of modern industrialism: the dynamic logic of mass production. The great Ford experiment was only one element in the lively industrial development of the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
