In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

ASSEMBLY LINES
Invented by Frederick Taylor and first used in the industrial production
process by Henry Ford after 1914, assembly lines are no longer an
exciting technological innovation. Everybody seems to be familiar with
their structure and functioning-either by direct professional experience,
or through the still-frequent use of the concept as a metonym for whatever
is perceived as new (and even futuristic) in the world of labor. An
assembly line consists of an endless chain which slowly moves through
a factory building and on which large numbers of a single product are
put together through the repeated and standardized operations of workers
stationed along the chain. Assembly lines have revolutionized the
involvement of the worker's body in the production process. They have
inverted the traditional relation between the craftsman and his product:
the worker has become stationary, while the product moves along the
chain so that its progress toward completion is visible. Each worker's
body performs, over and over, the same operation, and the pace of this
repetition is determined by the movement of the chain. The worker's
body thus enters a double structural coupling with the chain as a technical
device. Not only does the speed of the body movements depend on
the speed of the chain, but the complementarity among the individual
operations performed by the bodies of different workers transforms
these bodies, together with the chain, into one huge and complex production
machine. The assembly line is an emblem of a double division
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