Between 1908 and 1923, annual production at the Ford Motor Company exploded from 6,000 to 1,800,000 automobiles. The company's meteoric rise propelled Henry Ford to national fame and made icons of the sprawling plants at Highland Park and River Rouge. This dissertation funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program argues that historians have overlooked a key development behind the advent of mass production: innovative systems of industrial logistics organized around "the purchasing function." Recent, empirical scholarship in business history indicates that Ford continued to buy half of the 5,000 parts in each Model T from outside suppliers until at least 1916, a year in which production reached 585,000 cars. Mass production at Ford was not only cutting-edge, it was double-edged. The assembly line facilitated an exceptional degree of internal synchronization, but it also entailed an unprecedented level of external coordination.
This project examines Detroit as the site of an industrial network, investigating systems of inter-firm control and the urban landscape on which they depended. It studies automotive purchasing agents as technical experts and the reconstruction of manufacturing districts where the automobile industry's "outside suppliers" made their niche. The project assesses mass production in Detroit as a political as well as a technological achievement by combining the history of industrial procurement with the history of municipal growth.
Although a spate of scholarship related to Japanese models of "just-in-time inventory" and "supply chain management" has appeared since the 1980s, the history of early industrial procurement in the U.S. has yet to be written. This project reframes the history of mass production in terms of manufacturing networks and industrial districts. It contributes to literature concerned with industrial practice, business organization, standards and standardization, "regional advantage," and the history of the automobile.
