June 7
The Henry Ford was a fabulous experience! There was the museum, filled with all sorts of wheeled (and other) inventions, cars, trains, tractors and even Buckminster Fuller's Dimaxion House. There was only one made (it was supposed to be mass-produced and setup on site in three days) and this was it! (Photos of Dimaxion House). There was the bus on which Rosa Parks took her seat, the limo in which JFK was shot and all manner of old fire trucks, first Harleys, antique bikes and the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile! There was a vast display of antique woodstoves and another of teadle sewing machines. AND a temporary display of early flying machines-including the Wrights' and the Tin Goose. Memorabilia in the museum included letters from bandits extolling the virtues of the Ford as a getaway car (Photos of Henry Ford museum).
All together, it was 12 acres!
Then we went on a tour of Rouge, the original Ford plant and current manufacturer of Ford pick-up trucks, complete with three movies, the middle one with some smells and shaking floor to custom music by the Detroit Philharmonic.
To put things in perspective, Henry Ford was a tinkerer. He worked on a motor car called the Quadracycle in his evenings and weekends until he had one that would go. Then he started a company to manufacture them. It went bust in a year. He started another one. In a month or two, it was history. His third one, the Ford Motor Company survived. (They were non-specific about what was different here.) The first Model T rolled out and everybody wanted one.
In the beginning, it took workers 12 hours to complete one car. Mr. Ford studied other industries for their uses of mass production and then experimented with a moving line. One of the movies actually showed some early experiments with men pulling a chassis with a rope! By the time these early experiments were complete, the Ford Motor Company could turn out a Model T in about 90 minutes! But they were selling like hotcakes, because they were durable and affordable and were fast becoming a symbol of weath.
Mr. Ford conceived of a manufacturing plant at which allowed a car to be made from the raw materials to the finished automobile and thus the Rouge Plant was created (Rouge is the name of the river on which barges brought the raw materials-mostly iron.)
At its peak, 100,000 people worked there. When the plant first opened, Mr. Ford doubled the pay of his employees from $2.50 to $5/day and thousands came looking for jobs. The UAW (United Auto Workers) called him to task in the 1920s and he felt he had already done so much for his workers that he was against them unionizing. However, it became an acceptable reality, but with the depression, the company was hard hit. The war got them back in operation but for the war effort they made jeeps and tanks-not cars and with lots of "Rosies" doing the work of the men who were off fighting. After the war, they were back in business making cars.
Now, due to downsizing, the miracle of modern robot technology, outsourcing and competition (they didn't say this), there are only 10,000 employees and only 2,000 work in manufacturing. Up to 60 trucks roll off the line every hour. After the movies, we got to see trucks being assembled, in a very leisurely fashion, by the looks of it. The plant looked very clean, but the people very informally dressed in everything from "through back" jerseys to plaid T-shirts (thanks, Rob for the distinctions).
Around the observation deck, there were short video presentations every so often, most of them featuring pretty black females in hardhats telling about what we were seeing. I had lots of fun asking questions of the live personel, like "What does the QC staff do with trucks which don't pass?" The answer: "Fix um! Actually, you want to buy a truck which doesn't pass, because they get a second going over and there is hardly ever anything worse than a loose bolt. The engines always start these days." (One of the videos had shown us the rigors of rough road and brake testing, water jets which tested for leaks, etc.)
Here was another: "I notice that there are different colored doors and bodies all coming down the line for assemply. What if they don't match when they get there?" He replied, "The parts are put together at the top-by and then separated so that never happens. It is all regulated by computer" AND, "what percentage of parts are American vs Japanese or German?" He couldn't answer this.
There was a big emphasis (read "snow job") on environmental concerns. Little was mentioned about air pollution by their products or the fact that the river had been so polluted a few years back that it had caught fire. Here are examples of their environmental projects: The plant's flat "green" roof (planted with little succulants), to help with drainage and cooling, a very small greenbelt with little baby trees between these emmense buildings to clean the air, and a few photovolteic cells. Oh yes, and signs on the restroom walls indicated that recycled water might cause a bit of cloudiness in the potty.
To cap the day, we saw the new Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban. It was an interesting departure from the first two, with a new Italian director and a rearranging of the story's basics, which was what it was reduced to, plus a few details which were not in the book for "mood". It is so hard to divorce our appraisals from our knowledge and love of the book. Of all the books, this is the favorite of many (includiing Mom) and probably deserved to be followed more closely. However, so much happens in this one that a movie which was faithful would probably be 5-7 hours long!-not that most of us would complain.
2004 Tour Home
