My Forty Years with Ford by Charles E. Sorensen

Description

The man who put the world on wheels — from the inside. My Forty Years with Ford is Charles E. Sorensen's firsthand account of working beside Henry Ford for four decades — and of building the manufacturing system that changed the modern world. If Ford was the visionary, Sorensen was the man who made the vision run on time. Sorensen joined Ford in 1905 as a pattern maker and rose to become the company's manufacturing chief: the practical genius behind the moving assembly line that made the Model T affordable to ordinary workers. He oversaw the vast River Rouge complex — where raw iron ore entered at one end and finished automobiles rolled out at the other, the most ambitious experiment in vertical integration ever attempted — and masterminded Ford's immense World War II production effort, including the Willow Run bomber plant.

Part memoir, part industrial history, this is the essential insider account of how mass production was really invented — told by the engineer who built it, with all its ambition, ingenuity, and contradiction intact. You will learn how the assembly line actually came together: not as a single flash of genius, but as years of patient experiment with layout, timing, parts, and people. You will see River Rouge at full stretch, an industrial city built to turn raw materials into cars without pause. And you will see the war years, when the same system was turned to bombers at a scale and speed no one had thought possible. Along the way, Sorensen offers an intimate portrait of Henry Ford himself — a visionary genius and a difficult, contradictory man — written with engineer-like precision.

First published in 1956, this classic of industrial history remains essential reading for anyone interested in manufacturing, innovation, and the making of modern America. For managers and engineers, it is a masterclass in how systems are built; for history lovers, it is a front-row seat to the century's greatest industrial transformation. Get the ebook edition here at a discount from Tellebook.