50 Fun Facts About Manufacturing

A visit to which Chicago industry's plants inspired the moving assembly line at Ford?

Meatpacking plants ran what was called a disassembly line. Ford's William Klann saw one at Swift & Company and reversed the idea, so that a car came together step by step instead of coming apart.

Which Italian city's Arsenal could turn out nearly one war galley a day, centuries before car factories?

Venice fitted out galleys at its Arsenal with standardized parts on a production-line basis in the early 1500s. Galileo later advised its engineers as a consultant.

Imports from which country prompted an 1887 British origin-label law, only for the label to become a badge of quality?

Germany was where most of the falsely marked goods behind the Merchandise Marks Act came from. Instead of warning buyers off, the label grew into a brand synonymous with quality, durability and reliability.

Which small item did Adam Smith break into about eighteen steps to show the power of dividing labor?

Pins were Smith's example in The Wealth of Nations. He reckoned ten men sharing the tasks could make upwards of 48,000 a day, where each working alone could not have made twenty.

Taiichi Ohno based Toyota's just-in-time kanban system on the shelf restocking of which American businesses?

Supermarkets stock only what they expect to sell, and shoppers take only what they need. Toyota began studying them in the late 1940s and carried their shelf-stocking techniques onto the factory floor.

Which snack, launched by Procter & Gamble, is cooked by a machine that novelist Gene Wolfe helped develop?

Pringles are shaped from a potato-based dough into identical saddles, then fried and stacked in a tube. Wolfe was a mechanical engineer as well as an author of science-fiction and fantasy novels.

Which lightweight metal, once priced above gold, became commonplace after the Hall–Héroult process of 1886?

Aluminum was still uncommon in 1884, when a 2.85-kilogram piece of it capped the Washington Monument. Two years later Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult independently found how to produce it on an industrial scale.

Which American icon stands for the women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II?

Rosie the Riveter took her name from a 1942 song. Norman Rockwell then painted her for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover, on her lunch break with a rivet gun across her lap.

Which technology, pioneered by Chuck Hull's stereolithography patent, does industry call additive manufacturing?

3D printing builds a part by adding material layer by layer, where machining removes it. In the 1980s it was thought fit only for prototypes, and a machine cost upwards of $300,000.

The Jacquard loom of 1804 wove patterns automatically by reading which medium?

Punched cards were laced into a chain, each one standing for a single row of the design. A silk portrait woven from 24,000 of them helped inspire Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Which Ford car of 1908 sold more than 15 million and made car travel affordable for middle-class Americans?

The Model T was not sold in black at all at first: until 1913 buyers chose gray, green, blue or red. Ford's famous black-only policy began in 1914.

Which American inventor signed a 1798 contract for army muskets and championed interchangeable parts?

Eli Whitney lost much of his cotton gin profit in patent lawsuits, so he turned to government gun contracts. His own muskets were still costly and handmade by skilled workmen.

Which process, patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844, toughens natural rubber by heating it with sulfur?

Vulcanization is named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. British inventor Thomas Hancock took out a British patent for the same treatment in 1843, before Goodyear had his American one.

Which movement of English textile workers wrecked factory machinery in organized raids from 1811 onward?

Luddites signed their threatening letters to mill owners with the name of Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver. The government sent in the army, and the word came to mean anyone opposed to new technology.

Which chemical element is grown into single-crystal ingots and sliced into thin wafers for most computer chips?

Silicon for chips is refined to a purity of 99.9999999 percent or higher. Each round wafer is cut from a crystal pulled out of a melt, a method devised by Polish chemist Jan Czochralski.

Which country, nicknamed the world's factory, overtook the United States as the top manufacturing nation by 2010?

China built that reputation on exports after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Within a decade it was producing more manufactured goods by value added than any other nation.

Which aircraft maker's factory in Everett, Washington, is the largest building in the world by volume?

Boeing put up the Everett plant in 1967 to assemble the 747 jumbo jet. The main building encloses more than 472 million cubic feet, enough room to hold all of Disneyland.

Which pioneering robot arm joined a General Motors plant in 1961 and later putted a golf ball on The Tonight Show?

Unimate was the first industrial robot, a 4,000-pound arm invented by George Devol. It moved hot die castings and welded them onto car bodies, work that could poison or maim a human.

Flat window glass is made in the Pilkington process by floating molten glass on a bath of which molten metal?

Tin has a low melting point, and floating the glass on it gives a sheet of uniform thickness with a very flat surface. Pilkington pioneered the technique in the 1950s at St Helens in England.

In which Charlie Chaplin film does the Tramp crack under the pace of an assembly line and get stuck in a machine?

Modern Times was Chaplin's last performance as the Little Tramp. He set the 1936 comedy in the Great Depression, with the factory's repetitive work driving his character to a nervous breakdown.

Which English inventor's converter made the first cheap mass-produced steel by blowing air through molten pig iron?

Henry Bessemer made his first fortune from steam-powered machines that turned out bronze powder for gold paint. He turned to steel while trying to cut the cost of military ordnance.

Which element, at 10.5 percent or more, makes steel stainless by forming a protective film that heals itself?

Chromium forms a passive film that repairs itself whenever it meets oxygen. The alloy's name took years to settle: in 1921 one trade journal was calling it unstainable steel.

Hot-dip galvanizing protects steel from rust by submerging it in a molten bath of which metal?

Zinc goes on protecting even where the coating is damaged, because it corrodes in place of the exposed steel. The process is named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani.

Which English city, a center of cutlery making since the 1600s, is where Harry Brearley developed stainless steel?

Sheffield metallurgist Harry Brearley was hunting for a gun-barrel steel that resisted erosion, not rust. He called his 1913 alloy rustless steel until a local cutlery maker gave it a catchier name.

Which machine tool did Henry Maudslay refine around 1800 so that it could cut standard screw threads into metal?

The lathe is far older than the factory: a painting from 4th-century BC Egypt shows one. Maudslay's screw-cutting version allowed thread sizes to be standardized for the first time.

Which metalworking process shapes solid metal with compressive blows, as a blacksmith does with hammer and anvil?

Forging is one of the oldest known metalworking processes. Parts made this way have about a 20 percent higher strength-to-weight ratio than cast or machined ones of the same material.

Which fuel gas, burned with pure oxygen at about 3,500 °C, is the primary choice for gas welding torches?

Acetylene burns far hotter with oxygen than propane or hydrogen can manage. French engineers Edmond Fouché and Charles Picard were the first to develop welding with it, in 1903.

What does the N stand for in CNC, the system that lets a computer steer mills, routers and other cutting machines?

Numerical control came first: machines of the 1940s and 1950s followed points fed in on tape. Adding a computer made the programs easier to write and change, usually as lines of G-code.

Which process, patented in an early form in 1872, is the most common way of making plastic parts?

Injection molding began with a machine that worked like a large hypodermic needle, its plunger forcing plastic through a heated cylinder into a mold. John Wesley Hyatt and his brother Isaiah patented it.

Which process, patented in 1797 for making metal pipe, also gives macaroni and many breakfast cereals their shape?

Extrusion pushes material through a die cut to the cross-section of the finished piece. It works on metals, polymers, ceramics, concrete and foodstuffs alike.

Which American engineer, called the father of scientific management, pioneered timing factory tasks with a stopwatch?

Frederick Taylor was a champion sportsman too: he won the doubles at the first US national tennis championships in 1881. His Principles of Scientific Management was later voted the most influential management book of its century.

Which American statistician is the namesake of the national quality prize Japan established in 1951?

W. Edwards Deming taught statistical quality control in Japan after World War II. He had earlier helped develop the sampling techniques used by the US Census Bureau.

Which electronics company pioneered the Six Sigma quality method, introduced by its engineer Bill Smith in 1986?

Motorola credited the method with more than $17 billion in savings by 2005. Much of its fame comes from Jack Welch, who made it central to General Electric's strategy in 1995.

Which Japanese word, made famous by a Masaaki Imai book, names the practice of improving through many small changes?

Kaizen simply means improvement, or change for the better, in everyday Japanese. The idea of piling up many small gains became part of The Toyota Way.

Which Japanese term, applied to factories by Shigeo Shingo, describes designs that prevent human errors during assembly?

Poka-yoke replaced an earlier name, baka-yoke, which meant fool-proofing and was dropped for the milder word. It comes from the board game shogi, where it means avoiding an unthinkably bad move.

The andon signal that Toyota workers trigger by pulling a cord is named after the Japanese word for which object?

Paper lantern is the original meaning, and stacked lights are among the most common factory andons. At Toyota a first pull of the cord calls the team leader without stopping the line.

Which family of international standards, first published in 1987, sets out requirements for quality management systems?

ISO 9000 grew out of military procurement rules, among them a 1959 US Department of Defense standard for suppliers. More than a million organizations have since been certified to ISO 9001.

Which phenomenon, where people work harder when watched, is named after a Western Electric factory in Cicero, Illinois?

The Hawthorne effect came out of 1920s lighting studies at a telephone equipment plant that employed 45,000 people at its peak. Each change in the lighting was said to raise output.

Which Intel co-founder noted in 1965 that the number of components on a chip had been doubling every year?

Gordon Moore made the observation in a magazine article while running research at Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1975 he revised his forecast to a doubling every two years, and that version held for decades.

Which Taiwanese company, founded by Morris Chang in 1987, was the first to make chips purely to other firms' designs?

TSMC was the world's first dedicated semiconductor foundry. Taiwan's government had lured Chang, a Texas Instruments veteran, with a blank check to build the island's chip industry.

Which bomber did Ford build at Willow Run on an assembly line over a mile long, finishing one about every hour?

The B-24 Liberator is the most produced bomber in history, at about 18,500 built. At its peak Willow Run was turning them out faster than the military could put them to use.

Which class of cargo vessel did American yards weld together in World War II, building 2,710 to a single design?

Liberty ships took about 230 days each at first, but the median build time had dropped to 39 days by 1943. Time magazine nicknamed the plain design the Ugly Duckling.

Which American car brand's Curved Dash runabout of 1901 is credited as the first mass-produced automobile?

Oldsmobile founder Ransom E. Olds is credited with the basic concept of the assembly line. Henry Ford improved on it a dozen years later by keeping the line in continuous motion.

Which former barber and wig-maker built Cromford Mill and became known as the father of the factory system?

Richard Arkwright was the driving force behind the water frame, a spinning machine adapted to run on water power. His Derbyshire mill is preserved as part of a World Heritage Site.

Which American gunmaker's Hartford factory made the mass production of revolvers viable by using interchangeable parts?

Samuel Colt sold firearms to both the North and the South in the run-up to the American Civil War. Years earlier his backers had balked at paying for the machinery his method needed.

Which naval fittings did Marc Brunel's all-metal machines mass-produce at Portsmouth during the Napoleonic Wars?

Pulley blocks poured out of the Portsmouth mill at a rate of 130,000 in 1808 alone. With Brunel's machines, ten men could make as many as 110 skilled craftsmen working by hand.

Which British engineer devised the world's first national screw thread standard in 1841, with a 55-degree thread angle?

Joseph Whitworth also designed a rifle so accurate it was called the sharpshooter. It is counted among the earliest sniper rifles and was used by some Confederate forces in the American Civil War.

Which heat-resistant plastic, the first made from synthetic components, housed early radios and telephones?

Bakelite was developed in 1907 in Yonkers, New York, by the chemist Leo Baekeland. It does not conduct electricity either, which made it a natural choice for insulators.

Which DuPont synthetic, first sold as toothbrush bristles in 1938, soon became a sensation as women's stockings?

Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year on the market. During World War II almost all production was diverted to parachutes, and black-market pairs fetched as much as $20.

Which Japanese robot maker has run a lights-out factory since 2001, where robots build other robots unsupervised?

Fanuc robots were reported building about 50 more robots in every 24-hour shift, running unattended for as long as 30 days. With no people inside, the air conditioning and heat are switched off too.