America's Assembly Line (MIT Press)

Nye, David E.

ISBN 10: 0262018713 / ISBN 13: 9780262018715

Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013

About this Item

First Edition, 1st printing. A LITERARY and PICTORIAL history of the American Assembly Line. A bright, clean, tight copy sans flecks, tears, stains, markings, discoloration, etc. PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED in archival black and white photography with accompanying descriptive captions. 338 pages. GN12.

Seller Inventory # 020080

Bibliographic Details

• Title: America's Assembly Line (MIT Press)
• Publisher: The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262018713
• ISBN 13: 9780262018715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

David E. Nye is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute and the History of Science and Technology program at the University of Minnesota and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His other books published by the MIT Press include Electrifying America and American Technological Sublime. He was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2005 and was knighted by the Queen of Denmark in 2013.