The moving assembly line was introduced for the Ford Model T in 1913. Ford’s Highland Park plant in Michigan began operating the moving line on October 7 of that year.
The system moved the vehicle or chassis past workers, with each person repeating a specialized task. Earlier Ford factories had already used interchangeable parts, divided labor, and experiments with moving chassis. The 1913 Highland Park installation was the major operational breakthrough that joined those ideas into a continuously moving automobile assembly process.
Production became dramatically faster. Chassis assembly time fell from many hours to about 2 hours 40 minutes in the initial stage, eventually reaching roughly 93 minutes as the process was refined. The resulting economies helped Ford reduce prices and made automobile ownership attainable for a much larger middle class.
The assembly line did not originate every idea in the system: Ransom Olds had used earlier forms of assembly-line production, and Ford’s method developed through teamwork. Its lasting importance was the scale and efficiency Ford achieved with the Model T, influencing factories far beyond automobile manufacturing.