Courtesy of the Ford Motor Company, here’s a 1962 visit to the mighty Rouge plant, one of the industrial wonders of the world.

It’s often been said that Henry Ford’s favorite creation was probably not the Model T automobile. No, it was his colossal River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Started in 1917, the Rouge plant was the embodiment of Ford’s dream to achieve complete vertical integration in vehicle manufacturing. That is: to have iron ore, rubber, and other raw materials enter at one end of the factory and completed cars drive out the other. He never quite got there with that vision, but with its own steel mill, engine foundry, and glass plant, his River Rouge plant came impressively close.

By 1962, when the Ford Motor Company produced this film, vertical integration was falling out of favor. Henry Ford II, the grandson of the founder, followed more recent ideas about manufacturing, and Ford’s plants and operations were strategically spread out across North America. But as the film shows, in 1962 the giant steel mill was still running, and so was the glass plant. (Today, Cleveland-Cliffs owns and operates the steel mill, while the glass plant was shut down in 1998.) The Rouge plant still runs today, but now it’s a more manageable 600 acres and is mainly an assembly plant for Ford pickups. In contrast, here’s what was happening in 1962 as shiny new Fairlanes rolled off the line. (By the way, there is no sound between 14 and 18 minutes. Sorry about that.) Video below.