Directions: Read the rewritten passage of Henry Ford’s “My Life and Work” and answer the following questions.

I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in packaging beef. We had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto in the usual method. With one workman doing a complete job, he could turn out
from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day or about twenty minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations that cut down the assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight inches which was in 1914 and cut the time to seven minutes. Further experimenting with the speed that the work should move quickly and cut the time down to five minutes. In short, the result is the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did only comparatively a few years ago. That line established the efficiency of the method, and we now use it everywhere. The assembling of the motor, formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four operations. Those men do the work that three times their number formerly did. In a short time, we tried out the plan on the framework on the car or the chassis.

About the best we had done in stationary chassis assembling was an average of twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes per chassis. We tried the experiment of drawing the chassis with a rope and windlass down a line two hundred fifty feet long. Six assemblers traveled with the chassis and picked up the parts from piles placed along the line. This rough experiment reduced the time to five hours fifty minutes per chassis. In the early part of 1914, we elevated the assembly line. We had adopted the policy of "man-high" work. We had one line twenty-six and three-quarter inches and another twenty-four and one-half inches from the floor to suit squads of different heights. The waist-high arrangement and a further subdivision of work so that each man had fewer movements cut down the labor time per chassis to one hour thirty-three minutes. Only the chassis was then assembled in the line. The body was placed on "John R. Street" which is the famous street that runs through our Highland Park factories. Now the line assembles the whole car.

It must not be imagined, however, that all this worked out as quickly as it sounds. The speed of the moving work had to be carefully tried out. In the fly-wheel magneto, we first had a speed of sixty inches per minute. That was too fast. Then we tried eighteen inches per minute. That was too slow. Finally, we settled on forty-four inches per minute. The idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work. He must have every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second. We have worked out speeds for each assembly, for the success of the chassis assembly caused us gradually to overhaul our entire method of manufacturing and to put all assembling in mechanically driven lines. The chassis assembling line, for instance, goes at a pace of six feet per minute; the front axle assembly line goes at one hundred eighty-nine inches per minute. In the chassis assembling are forty-five separate operations or stations. The first men fasten four mud-guard brackets to the chassis frame. Then the motor arrives on the tenth operation and so on in detail. Some men do only one or two small operations whereas others do more. The man who places a part does not fasten it because the part may not be fully in place until after several operations later. The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. On operation number thirty-four, the budding motor gets its gasoline. It has previously received lubrication. On operation number forty-four, the radiator is filled with water, and on operation number forty-five the car drives out onto John R. Street.
 

Note

Only spelling mistakes, if any, in the above passage have been corrected. No other corrections, including grammatical, have been made so that the originality of the passage is maintained.