t might be, was the
most economical. The secret of success was the rapid production of
a serviceable article in large quantities. When Ford first talked of
turning out 10,000 automobiles a year, his associates asked him where
he was going to sell them. Ford's answer was that that was no problem at
all; the machines would sell themselves. He called attention to the
fact that there were millions of people in this country whose incomes
exceeded $1800 a year; all in that class would become prospective
purchasers of a low-priced automobile. There were 6,000,000 farmers;
what more receptive market could one ask? His only problem was the
technical one--how to produce his machine in sufficient quantities.

The bicycle business in this country had passed through a similar
experience. When first placed on the market bicycles were expensive;
it took $100 or $150 to buy one. In a few years, however, an excellent
machine was selling for $25 or $30. What explained this drop in price?
The answer is that the manufacturers learned to standardize their
product. Bicycle factories became not so much places where the articles
were manufactured as assembling rooms for putting them together.
The several parts were made in different places, each establishment
specializing in a particular part; they were then shipped to centers
where they were transformed into completed machines. The result was that
the United States, despite the high wages paid here, led the world in
bicycle making and flooded all countries with this utilitarian article.
Our great locomotive factories had developed on similar lines. Europeans
had always marveled that Americans could build these costly articles so
cheaply that they could undersell European makers. When they obtained a
glimpse of an American locomotive factory, the reason became plain. In
Europe each locomotive was a separate problem; no two, even in the same
shop, were exactly alike. But here locomotives are built in parts,
all duplicates of one another; the parts are then sent by machinery to
assembling rooms and rapidly put together. American harvesting machines
are built in the same way; whenever a farmer loses a part, he can go
to the country store and buy its duplicate, for the parts of the same
machine do not vary to the thousandth of an inch. The same principle
applies to hundreds of other articles.

Thus Henry Ford did not invent standardization; he merely applied this
great American idea to a product