The Moving Assembly Line Turns 100 (2013)
This month marks the official celebration of the world’s first moving assembly line. On Oct. 7, 1913, 140 assemblers stationed along a 150-foot chassis line at a Ford Motor Co. plant just north of Detroit stood in place as the work came to them. With the aid of three-wheeled dollies, chassis were pushed by hand along parallel rails embedded in the floor of the Highland Park plant. Six months earlier, Ford engineers had experimented with a movable line for assembling flywheel magnetos, a key com