They tied a rope to a chassis frame and dragged it down the floor with a windlass, and six or so men walked alongside fitting parts as it went. That was the first trial at Highland Park, 1913. No chain, no conveyor, nothing you'd point at and call machinery — a rope, a winch, and a line on the boards to keep it straight.
Before that, a chassis stood still and the men went to it. One gang round a stationary frame, walking off to the stock piles for a bracket, walking back. Roughly twelve and a half hours a car. Once the thing moved and the parts were laid out at the stations in sequence, it came down to about an hour and a half. Nobody's hands got faster. Nobody had to fetch anything.
The chassis wasn't even the first. They'd done the flywheel magneto earlier the same year on a waist-high bench, which is the sort of job nobody photographs [the height mattered more than you'd think — they shifted it a few inches so men weren't stooping all shift]. Clarence Avery and Charles Sorensen did a lot of the laying-out, and William Klann had been round a Chicago packing house watching carcasses go past on a moving rail. What I've never found is who actually turned the windlass.
Wendell, the turnover is the part the company itself kept citing: men walked off the line faster than Ford could hire them, and the following January came the five-dollar day. The record shows it was announced as a profit-sharing scheme, not a wage — which spared the accountants some argument.
Wendell, once the line settled in they were turning out something like a thousand chassis a day, and nearly all of them left Highland Park by rail — Ford had its own sidings and yard crews right there. Later on they shipped them knocked down in boxcars to branch plants, since you can fit a great many more Model Ts in a car when they're in pieces.