With the great Lowell Thomas as your guide, here’s a tour of the immense River Rouge Ford plant in 1938.
The film opens with some gee-whiz statistics: 1096 acres. 7,250,000 square feet of plant space. 345 acres of glass windows. 90 miles of railroad track. More than 80,000 workers. Even these fantastic figures fall short of describing the colossal scale of Henry Fords River Rouge plant in Dearborn, MI.
Designed by Albert Kahn and constructed over a period of 11 years from 1917 to 1928, the Rouge plant was the tangible expression of Ford’s personal dream: totally integrated manufacturing. In theory at least, raw ore, minerals, rubber, and timber would arrive at one end of the giant complex, and completed Ford automobiles would drive out the other. It never quite worked out that way, but when this film was made in 1938, the process came impressively close.
The familiar voice belongs to Lowell Thomas, the famed world traveler, journalist, and broadcaster. There are great moments throughout the film, but a few worth mentioning are the block casting process–utterly mesmerizing–at five minutes in, a fabulous look at flathead V8 engine assembly at around 20 minutes, and brand new Ford automobiles loaded onto carriers for transport at 29 minutes, as the film draws to a close. By the way, the Ford Rouge plant is still in operation today, but in much different form than shown here. Enjoy the movie.
Great video…..I wonder how many men were un-normally employed!
I saw that too. This being 1938, I believe the phrase was their way of saying that the employment numbers were fairly unstable.
Amazing!! Thank you!
A great movie. Thanks for showing it to us.
Very few car assembly plants have an engine assembly plant on site, fewer still would have a foundry on site. But to have a rolling mill, steel works, coke plant and glass plant is an undertaking of immense proportions.
In the early 70’s, as part of high school shop class, we had a field trip to a GM assembly plant. While it was 30 some years later than the above film, the labor required, not to mention the monotony of doing the same thing hundreds of times per shift, was enough to convince me to get some education and avoid that line of work. While still maintaining my blue collar roots, I have managed to avoid production line work so far. And in my late 50’s now, I don’t plan to start.
Kudos to those who build the vehicles we so desire, but I would rather live in van down by the river.
live in A van. Stupid fingers.
To all the people who say assembly line workers don’t earn their wages, I say try it.
Too right! $35 an hour ,+++ sounds about right. It’s not just the mind-numbing work it’s often the people you work directly under…
the up-start manager types.
Awful work, I do hope it’s getting better tho
Simply amazing. The complexity of not only the production, but also of the machines used in the production process. It’s very easy to see why there was so many little differences in cars produced in the pre-computer, pre-robotics age. To think of standing in one spot for a shift in the heat and noise, doing the same thing over and over all day long, it’s easy to see why injuries and death were so common on production lines like these. Each process was repeated countless times each day, and with so many of the things being done by hand held tooling, a weld here missed, a bolt left loose, was probably the norm instead of the exception.
Ole Henry had a dream, take the best in raw materials and produce the best in automobiles, and I think for the most part he succeeded. It’s too bad now that production and income have over ridden the desire to have the best at the lowest pricing to attract repeat customers.