Is it true that Henry Ford invented the conveyor?

It is generally accepted that the famous American automotive industry invented or at least first applied conveyor assembly in the industry. We checked whether this is really so.

This is how the official Russian -speaking annotation To Henry Ford's autobiographical book “My Life, My Achievements”: “In 1911, Henry Ford changed the world. He went down in history as the inventor of the conveyor and one of the most honest millionaires. He was mistaken, lost his fortune and re -rich, sued the patents, won and played litigation, he pulled America from the Great Depression and became a symbol of the most powerful economy in the entire history of mankind. His ideas and methods of organizing production described in this famous book are introduced into the activities of thousands of enterprises and deserve the attention of everyone who creates their own business. ”

The fact that it was Henry Ford invented the conveyor is told by specialized sites ("Autoexpert"), Journalistic books (" "Cars and transport","Jewish wisdom") And periodicals (" "Dialogue","Kuzbass worker","Banner"). The people even often called the inventor of the car.

The significance of the personality of Henry Ford in the history of the automotive industry is difficult to overestimate. Being a young man, he performed The duties of a mechanical engineer, later the chief engineer in the Electric Company of Edison (Edison Illuminating Company), and in 1893, in his free time, he constructed his first car. Having become a co-owner of the Detroit Automobile Company, he soon left the companions from the companions and founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. It is here in 1908 that the legendary model T, which made a revolution at once in many aspects, among which is the low cost, durability, versatility and ease of service.

However, let's understand what is Henry Ford's merit in the conveyor of the conveyor assembly of cars? The moving assembly tape did not immediately appear at its factories - only on December 1, 1913, five years after the start of the serial issue of Ford T.

Until 1913, Ford and many other automakers collected whole cars in one place, above each car I worked The team of workers. The innovation reduced the number of workers and the time required to assemble the car.

On the other hand, monotonous work on the conveyor at first was considered an insult to qualified masters and another example of total control over employees who have already managed become famous Henry Ford. Cinematographers responded to the innovation - take at least Charlie Chaplin's comedy film:

However, this is what happened before 1913.

A few millennia BC. e. In ancient China and India for continuous supply of water from reservoirs to irrigation systems Used Chain pumps - prototypes of scraper conveyors. In Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, multi -core and screw water lifting were used - the precursors of modern bucket elevators and screw conveyors. The first attempts to use scraper and screw conveyors to move bulk materials (for example, in flour production) dates back to the 16th - 17th centuries.

At the end of the 18th century, conveyors Started Used to transport light bulk materials at short distances. In the 1830s, for the first purpose, conveyors with durable fabric ribbons were first used for the first time. In the second half of the 19th century, the industrial use of conveyors began to deliver heavy mass and piece cargo. Extension The regions of the use of conveyors were also due to the appearance of new types of conveyors: tape with fabric rubberized ribbons (1868, Great Britain), stationary and mobile plate (1870, Russia), spiral screws for coarse -custody materials (1887, USA), buckets with hinged -mounted Cargoes for the delivery of goods along complex routes (1896, USA), strip with steel ribbons (1905, Sweden), inertial (1906, Great Britain, Germany), etc. In 1882, the conveyor was used to communicate technological units in the hill-mass production (USA).

In 1901, Rans City Olds (creator of another legendary car brand - Oldsmobile) Developed and patented the first car assembly line. Ranses introduced a lot of what we call the assembly line today: he determined repeated operations, assembly stations and parts delivered to the worker. Due to this, in the first year, the production of cars at its plant increased by almost 6 times (from 425 pieces in 1901 to 2500). However, it should be noted that all parts and nodes were transported on carts from one worker to another. That is, it was a prototype of an already automobile conveyor, only without a tape.

In 1908, Haiml Goddard from Logan Company received the first patent on the roller conveyor. It was this type of conveyor that began to be widely used in the automotive industry. The principle of connecting jobs with a moving tape allowed the car to “grow” with details that the workers installed one after another.

Shortly before his innovation, Henry Ford I visited Chicago meat processing plant Swift & Company. Local workshops can hardly be called assembly ones - they were more of showdowns, since the workers were engaged in cutting carcasses. But it was here that Ford first saw a suspended platform on wheels, which allowed workers to transfer the result of his work to colleagues.

Definitely the Ford innovation can be called a mechanized belt that he instructed Introduce into conveyor assembly in February 1914. The belt rotation speed was six feet (almost 2 m) per minute.

Thus, the main merit of Henry Ford is to optimize the conveyor directly for cars. It was inspired by continuous production methods used in flour, brewing, cerebral plants and industrial bakeries, as well as cutting animal carcasses at a meat processing plant in Chicago. Being a de facto father of the first modern automotive conveyor, he was not the creator of the principle in common for different types of industry. Another thing is that the innovations of Ford later adopted other, not only automobile manufacturers, but the statement “Ford invented the conveyor” can hardly be called correct.

Photo on the cover: Wikipedia, Flickr.

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