Marc Brunel and Henry Maudslay designed 22 types of machine tools for the Portsmouth Block Mills (1801 to 1803). The mills made pulley blocks for Royal Navy ships. It is probably the earliest industrial example of a linear, continuous assembly process. The Bridgewater Foundry in England began operation in 1836. It was an early example of an almost modern factory layout designed for easy material handling. The buildings were arranged in a line with a railway running through them, and cranes and rail tracks moved heavy items. The first flow assembly line was started at Richard Garrett & Sons in Leiston, England, for portable steam engines. It was working by early 1853. The boiler started at one end of the Long Shop and stopped at stages along the building where new parts were added.
The Venetian Arsenal, dating to about 1104, worked something like a production line. Ships moved down a canal and were fitted out by the shops they passed. In the early 16th century it employed some 16,000 people. Chicago meatpacking plants, from 1867, are believed to be among the first industrial assembly lines in the United States. Workers stood at fixed stations, and a pulley system brought the meat to each person to do one task. Ransom Olds put an assembly line to work in his Olds Motor Vehicle Company factory in 1901. It built the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, the first mass-produced automobile. Ford made the moving assembly line work for cars in 1913.
Adam Smith described a pin factory where ten workers, each with a narrow job, could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. That is about 4,800 each. Working separately, he said, each would hardly make twenty pins, perhaps not even one, in a day. The word Luddite comes from early 19th-century English textile workers who attacked factories and destroyed machines to protest. They were said to be led by Ned Ludd, who may not have been a real person. Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine in the early 1700s to power machines that pumped water out of mine shafts. In the 1760s James Watt added a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient.
Smelting iron ore with coke, made by heating coal, was cheaper than using charcoal and produced higher-quality metal. It let Britain's iron and steel production expand to meet demand from the Napoleonic Wars and the growing railroad industry. Unimate, the first industrial robot, worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in New Jersey in 1961. George Devol filed the original patent in 1954. He and Joseph Engelberger started the first robot maker, Unimation. Industrial robots do jobs such as welding, painting, assembly, picking and placing parts, packaging, palletizing and inspection. They do all of it with high endurance, speed and precision. Inspection is a major part of quality control. Inspectors are given lists of unacceptable defects, such as cracks or surface blemishes. That way they know what to reject.
Words to know
- foundry: metal workshop
- assembly: putting together
- Luddite: machine breaker
- inspection: close checking
