October 7, 1913

Highland Park Ford Plant

Ford operates its moving Model T chassis-assembly line at Highland Park

On 7 October, 140 people stood along 150 feet of factory floor and finished 435 chassis before the nine-hour shift ended.

7 October 1913 at Highland Park

At Ford's Highland Park plant in Michigan on 7 October 1913, 140 assemblers were stationed along a 150-foot moving chassis-assembly line, with components placed at appropriate points beside them.

During a nine-hour day the line completed 435 Model T chassis.

The recorded labour content was 2 hours 57 minutes of one worker's time per chassis, against roughly 12 hours 28 minutes under the earlier stationary arrangement.

Still being improvised

This was a chassis line, not the sudden mechanisation of the whole factory; Ford had already introduced moving work for magnetos and other components earlier in 1913.

The setup kept changing. By 1 December the line ran 300 feet with 177 assemblers, producing 606 chassis in nine hours at about 2 hours 38 minutes of labour each, and an endless-chain drive was installed on 14 January 1914.

The reported hours are labour-hours per chassis, not elapsed clock time from bare frame to finished automobile.

Which date, and whose invention

October 7 is supported by Horace Lucien Arnold and Fay Leone Faurote's detailed 1915 technical account and by several later histories, but other institutional histories give 1 October, October generally, or 1 December as the debut.

The disagreement reflects an incremental process: component lines, a rope-and-windlass chassis experiment, a larger manually advanced line and a powered endless-chain line all appeared at different times.

A group of managers, engineers and workers developed the system; it should not be attributed to Henry Ford acting alone.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

October 7 is supported by the detailed 1915 technical account and several later histories, but other institutional histories give October 1, October generally or December 1 as the debut.
The disagreement reflects an incremental process: component lines, a rope-and-windlass chassis experiment, a larger manually advanced line and a powered endless-chain line appeared at different times.
The title-as-listed begins “December 1,” while its slug and listed date say October 7. The December 1 figures belong to a later configuration.
The reported hours are labor-hours per chassis, not necessarily elapsed clock time from an empty frame to a completed automobile.