Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.

Ford was not the first to build cars in an assembly line. Ransom Olds did that first in 1902, and Ford copied him. And, according to Ford himself, the idea to create a moving assembly line came to him while watching the moving dis-assembly line at a Chicago meatpacking plant. But Ford put these two ideas together to create “flow manufacturing,” a term he coined during the 1920s and that is still considered innovative a century later.

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