Ever watch those old vintage vehicles? You see them around, looking so majestic on the roads, their owners driving sedately, literally looking as if they ‘own’ the road.
Then again, looking at the vehicles they drive, the sheer beauty and quality of them, and they probably did when they were new!
Up to about a hundred years ago only the really rich could afford to own a motor vehicle, they didn’t necessarily drive them, they had us ‘drivers’ for that, but owning one was for the rich only!
See, up to about a hundred and ten years ago the way they built cars (Yes the car was around at that time, they’d been making them for about fifty or more years) was you’d start with a chassis in a garage and a team of specialists would work on it until they turned that bare chassis into a fully functional automobile! You’d have maybe ten or twenty men working on it, but it’d take maybe a month for the best models and, well there were no ‘basic’ models but to get the thing up and functional could only take maybe a week or so.
Then came a guy.
That ‘guy’ was a man by the name of Henry Ford who started the Ford motor company, and his idea was simple, instead of having a team of people working to build the car, put the car itself in a line, have each man, not necessarily a specialist, but someone who knows one job and have him do that job for every car on that line and see how fast they can do it.
(This isn’t one, but you get the idea)
The car they built was the Model T Ford and instead of building one every few weeks they built one every five minutes!
Not only that but a thing of beauty was born and the average man in the street could enjoy it!
Technology has moved on since then, and the vehicles have gotten so much better, so so we think, but it all started with one man who ‘changed gears’ literally, he didn’t invent the motor car or even invent mass production, he developed the idea of ‘ the assembly line’ that gave everyone a share in a better future.
Lawrence's letters 