Good Wednesday Morning!!!

1. Question – If you were the boss, wouldn’t it behoove you to pay your workers enough so they could afford the product they were making?

2. Thought – Henry Ford (1864-1947) did not invent the automobile or the assembly line. But his perfected visions of them made him one of the richest and most powerful men in America. Europeans had taken the lead in the development of the automobile, and the Duryea brothers of Massachusetts were the American pioneers. Ford borrowed from their ideas, envisioning the auto as a cheap box on wheels with a simple engine, and brought out his first Model T in 1909. In a year he sold almost 11,000 of them.

But Ford envisioned a car for the masses. When Ford and his engineers introduced the moving assembly line, an idea proposed in a 1911 book by Frederick W. Taylor, the mass-produced Model T revolutionized the auto industry. The efficiency of the assembly line cut the price tag on the model T from $950 in 1908 to under $300. By 1914, Ford motors turned out 248,000 Model Ts, almost half of all the autos produced, at a rate of one every 24 seconds. Realizing enormous profits, Ford made headlines by paying his workers $5 a day, almost double the going rate. Ford himself was clearing up to $25,000 per day. Paying his workers more money was Ford’s only way to keep them from quitting the monotonous, dehumanizing assembly line. He also realized that it was one way to enable his workers to buy Fords. (Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis)

“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” (Lawrence Coughlin)