Ford's Assembly Line Turns 100 Today - Here's What It Looked Like In 1913

On October 7, 1913, the moving assembly line was born at the factory of the Ford Motor Company in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park.

Henry Ford's invention allowed workers to build a Model T from scratch in 84 steps, cutting the production time from 12 hours to around 90 minutes.

A year after the birth of the assembly line, Ford doubled wages for workers, allowing them to buy the cars they built (he supported high wages for moral as well as economic reasons).

To celebrate the date, Ford released these photos of the Highland Park assembly line in 1913. You can see that in the beginning, cars in production were towed along the line by rope:

And here's some early footage: