In 1776, Adam Smith promulgated the idea of the division of labor in his book The Wealth of Nations. He described how pins could be manufactured faster if the process were broken down into separate tasks and each task assigned to a different worker whose only work would be that task. Higher productivity would result from task analysis and work assignments within this framework. He was right, for the most part, and the world has benefited from his insight. Worker satisfaction was not an issue for Smith.
In contrast to Smith, industrialists Henry Maudsley and Marc Brunel manufactured pulley blocks with lines of steam engine-driven machine tools that they designed and built in Britain in 1807. At the time, ships used pulley blocks by the hundreds. Higher productivity came from the use of tools to build parts faster than skilled craftsmen could. Workers assisted the machines in the pulley block line.
About 100 years later, Henry Ford took Smith’s idea a step further by creating an assembly line and feed-in methods for the materials or parts to be used by each worker along the line. He also applied Maudsley/Brunel’s idea of using machine tools to create parts.
Ford increased the volume of cars produced by having a continuous run of production, sustained by immediate and timed delivery parts, trained workers, machine tools, and mechanical systems to augment human labor. His method became the benchmark of successful manufacturing and was the precursor to the Toyota Production System, which decades later became the benchmark of success and quality manufacturing.