Civilopedia entry[]
The industrial revolution redefined the very concepts of manufacturing and changed the way goods were produced. One such concept was that of mass production, which utilized the benefits of machine made replaceable parts to their greatest advantage. In 1914 Henry Ford, the father of the assembly line, realized that by making a moving line on which automobiles moved and giving each person on the line a series of specialized tasks they would be able to make cars cheaply and more efficiently. This concept of mass production revolutionized the automotive industry. The time it took to turn out a Model T in the factory went from 728 minutes to 98 minutes; this time was eventually to drop to one Model T every 24 seconds. The idea quickly spread, and by the time America entered World War I in 1917 the assembly line had been adapted by all US military manufacturing plants and shipyards. Mass production techniques developed in the early 1900s transformed the American landscape from a rural population into an urban one, and changed all industrialized nations, for better or for worse, forever.