News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea by PeterisP on Saturday June 19, 2021 @09:56AM (#27560481)
Division of labor while producing a complex thing was a concept well established and documented during the industrial revolution before Ford. E.g. Adam Smith had a lot to say exactly about "Instead of a team working on various operations, [...] introduced workers who each did a very simple operation, without having to change or readjust.", it's misleading to call it "Ford's system" because Ford applied it extensively, but he did not invent it and wasn't the first to use it. Conveyor lines also wasn't an invention of Ford - he applied them a lot on scale, but they were widely used in different industries long before he was born. He also wasn't the first to apply continuous assembly lines specifically to the production of cars, as far as I understand the founder of Oldsmobile had been doing high-volume series-production of cars with strong division of labor a couple years earlier, though eventually not as successful as Ford.

He can and should be credited with applying these innovations at scale and ironing out various kinks in the process and popularizing these concepts, but it would be a lie to call it "Ford's innovation", all these things you mention were initially invented by others, although Ford did manage the practical implementation of all these innovations in combination unusually well.

There are no comments on this comment yet.