Download or read book A Short History of the Ford Plant written by Brian McMahon and published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief history of the famed automobile assembly plant in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood, 1925-2011.

Download or read book River Rouge written by Joseph Cabadas and published by Motorbooks. This book was released on 2004 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914, Henry Ford ordered the construction of a small plant at the confluence of the River Rouge and Detroit River in what was then the rural community of Dearborn, just outside of Detroit. Eventually, that small pilot plant grew into the gigantic 1,100-acre River Rouge Complex, the most famous auto factory of the twentieth century, renowned as the home of Ford's "vertical integration." In 1999, Ford's great-grandson and Ford Chairman Bill Ford III announced that the company would reinvent the complex as the auto factory of the new century, scheduled for completion in 2004. Like "the Rouge" itself, this illustrated 90-year chronological history of the complex will provide a sprawling view of the evolution of automaking and industrial technologies, as well as the exciting new concepts the company is incorporating into the current redesign. Central to vertical integration was self-sufficiency: raw materials went in one end and finished cars came out the other. In fact, iron ore and coal became completed engine blocks in less than 24 hours! Filled with evocative inside-the-factory shots, this illustrated 90-year history provides sprawling views of manufacturing processes, factory evolution, and the exciting new concepts Ford has incorporated into the redesign. Author Joe Cabadas also explores "vertical integration" as conceived at the Rouge-raw materials essentially entered one door and new automobiles exited the other. In fact, iron ore and coal were transformed into engine blocks in less than 24 hours. In addition to manufacturing processes that also included glassmaking and woodworking, the engaging chronological history explores the Rouge's roles as a crucible of industry unionization (at its peak in 1929, the 1,100-acre factory employed 128,000 workers) and wartime production, and its profound influence on Japanese automakers. Thanks to the Rouge's immensity and diverse operations, archival and current images provide a visual cornucopia for just about any reader.- The River Rouge automotive factory is part of Henry Ford's grand legacy that remains today. It is one of the world's largest automotive manufacturing facilities.- Timed to coincide with the completed Rouge renovation and the complex's ninetieth anniversaryAbout the AuthorJoe Cabadas is an automotive journalist whose work regularly appears in several industry trade publications. He is the co-author of MBI Publishing Company's bestselling The American Auto Factory (ISBN 0-7603-1059-9) and lives in Dearborn, Michigan.

Download or read book Henry Ford s Lean Vision written by William A. Levinson and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese manufacturers have made concepts like kaizen (continuous improvement), poka-yoke (error-proofing), and just-in-time famous. When the Japanese began to adopt these techniques from the Ford Motor Company during the early twentieth century, they knew exactly what they were getting: proven methods for mass-producing any product or delivering any service cheaply but well. Henry Ford's methods, however, went well beyond the synergistic and mutually supporting techniques that constitute what we now call lean manufacturing. They included the "soft sciences," the organizational psychology that makes every employee a partner in the drive for success. In Henry Ford's Lean Vision, William A. Levinson draws from Henry Ford's writings, the procedures in his factories, and historical anecdotes about the birth of lean in Japan to show that the philosophy that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing was the same philosophy that grew the Ford Motor Company into a global powerhouse -- and made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Levinson reveals how Ford was ahead of other modern visionaries and discusses why the very ideas that made his company such a success were abandoned in his own country, and why they finally found acceptance in Japan. Henry Ford's Lean Vision is a hands-on reference that provides the reader with proven principles and methods that can be applied in any business or service enterprise. It covers all aspects of building and running a successful enterprise, including Ford's principles for human relationships and the management of physical resources.

Download or read book The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford written by Beth Tompkins Bates and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

Download or read book A Savage Factory written by Robert J. Dewar and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Savage Factory is a true memoir straight from the factory floor of an automotive giant losing the global auto war to smaller, weaker, less experienced foreign competitors that beat us at our own game on our own turf. It gives an inside look, up close, at incompetent management at war with the labor force that created a quality nightmare and caused the car buying public to lose trust and faith in American cars. It is a true story of the inner workings of Ford's largest automatic transmission plant: the people, the machines, and the never ending war between management and labor that produced low quality cars that opened the door for foreign competitors to come to our country and take our auto market. It gives real life examples of the battlefield like conditions in the auto plants that caused alcoholism, drug addition, sexual harassment, and family breakdown, while producing transmissions that received the largest recall in automotive history and would have caused Ford Motor Company to go bankrupt had the Federal Government not intervened.

Download or read book Lean Thinking written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lean Thinking was launched in the fall of 1996, just in time for the recession of 1997. It told the story of how American, European, and Japanese firms applied a simple set of principles called 'lean thinking' to survive the recession of 1991 and grow steadily in sales and profits through 1996. Even though the recession of 1997 never happened, companies were starving for information on how to make themselves leaner and more efficient. Now we are dealing with the recession of 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2002. So what happened to the exemplar firms profiled in Lean Thinking? In the new fully revised edition of this bestselling book those pioneering lean thinkers are brought up to date. Authors James Womack and Daniel Jones offer new guidelines for lean thinking firms and bring their groundbreaking practices to a brand new generation of companies that are looking to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Download or read book The Ford Century in Minnesota written by Brian McMahon and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1903, before the Ford Motor Company was even incorporated, Stephen Tenvoorde signed a contract to sell "Fordmobiles" at his bicycle shop in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Four generations later, the Tenvoorde family still operates what is now the oldest Ford dealership in the world. Brian McMahon chronicles how the fortunes of the company and the state became intertwined during that century. Ford assembled Model T cars in the world's tallest automobile plant in Minneapolis and a three-story structure in St. Paul--both still standing. These factories quickly became functionally obsolete after the development of the moveable assembly line. The hunt for a new site to build a modern, single-story plant stirred intense rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Henry Ford took a rare personal interest in the search and selected a 125-acre parcel in St. Paul overlooking the recently built High Dam on the Mississippi River, which allowed for navigation and hydroelectric power. The Twin Cities Assembly Plant would go on to manufacture millions of cars, trucks, tractors, and military vehicles until its closure in 2011. Henry Ford's large-scale experiments with every aspect of the industrial economy sent ripples and shockwaves through the lives of Minnesotans--management and assembly line workers, dealers and customers, families and communities. First-person accounts of more than forty retired auto workers share what it was like to work at Ford--from the early years of the Minneapolis plant to the final hours of the Twin Cities Assembly Plant in St. Paul. McMahon documents the company's transformation--through the Depression, the rise of the United Auto Workers Union, World War II, women joining the workforce, competition from imported cars, globalization, outsourcing, and the closing of the plant. This publication was made possible in part by the people of Minnesota through a grant funded by an appropriation to the Minnesota Historical Society from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Any views, findings, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society, or the Minnesota Historic Resources Advisory Committee.

Download or read book America s Assembly Line written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line—developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts—first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

Download or read book Today and Tomorrow written by Henry Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize! Henry Ford is the man who doubled wages, cut the price of a car in half, and produced over 2 million units a year. Time has not diminished the progressiveness of his business philosophy, or his profound influence on worldwide industry. The modern printing of Today and Tomorrow features an introduction by James J.

Download or read book Fordlandia written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Download or read book The People s Tycoon written by Steven Watts and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.

Download or read book Ford Chronicle written by and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book I Invented the Modern Age written by Richard Snow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model-T, the machine that defined twentieth-century America.

Download or read book Ford in the Service of America written by Timothy J. O’Callaghan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ford Motor Company's products during World Wars I and II: jeeps, Eagle Boats, B-24 Liberators, squad tents, the ultra precision gun director, tanks, and aircraft engines. Details of how Ford produced each product are included. During both wars, Ford used precision manufacturing methods and innovative designs and procedures, increasing quality while lowering production costs"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Wheels for the World written by Douglas Brinkley and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 858 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The saga of how Henry Ford and Ford Motor Co. changed our world. Reveals the details of Ford¿s achievements, from the success of the Tin Lizzie to the Model A and V-8, through the Thunderbird, Mustang, and Taurus. Innovators include: Thomas Edison, Alfred Sloan, the Wright Bros., Diego Rivera, and Charles Lindbergh. Discusses 3 factories: Highland Park, River Rouge, and Willow Run, where B-24 airplanes were mass-produced during WW2. Tells of Ford¿s expansion throughout the world, as well as the acquisitions of Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Mazda. Explores Ford¿s darker aspects, incl. its founder¿s anti-Semitism and wartime pacifism. Introduces us to: James Couzens, Lee Iocacco and William Clay Ford Jr. Photos.

Download or read book Hitler s American Friends written by Bradley W. Hart and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Download or read book Ford Small Block V8 Racing Engines 1962 1970 written by Des Hammill and published by David and Charles. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many will be familiar with 1960 Ford racing programmes using the very compact pushrod Small Block V8, few know the facts behind the technology employed at Ford during this time. This book gives insight to the confident, logical approach of engineers working at Ford's Engine & Foundry Division. Engineers who made outstanding technical decisions, leading to many major motorsport events being won using larger capacity derivatives of the 1961 221ci Small Block V8 production engine, a power unit introduced by Ford mid-1961 for use in 1962 model year intermediate Fairlanes and Mercurys.