Cleveland, like Buffalo, is a city of machine shops, steel plants, and many other industries using iron and wood. Cleveland and the smaller lake ports near it forward each year millions of tons of iron ore to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Sharon, and other iron centers.
324. Standardization and the machinery industry.—More than half the automobiles in the world are made in a little triangle of land between Saginaw Bay, Chicago, and Cleveland.
This industry, like so many of our other manufacturing industries, has grown up because methods called standardization and specialization have been used. Standard ized things are all made alike, and thus fit the place for which they were intended. For instance, you can buy cartridges that will fit your gun; you do not need to have them made especially to fit it. There are standardized needles and records that will fit your phonograph. You can buy ready made a new piece that will replace a broken part in your automobile, your typewriter, your reaper, your bicycle, or almost any machine in your factory. A short time ago when a part was broken, another had to be made to replace it. That was very hard to do, and made things costly. Good mechanics were then needed in every part of the country where machinery was used.
Now that standardization has come, one little town in Michigan has a plant that makes automobile rims. Another town makes axles; another, doors; another, bodies; another, bearings; another, lamps; and so on, until almost every town for many miles around Detroit is busy with plants making the parts of automobiles. These parts may be shipped to factories every where, and used on twenty different kinds of cars.
325. Specialization and the machinery industry.—When a factory has begun making a few standardized things, a second great advantage appears, viz.: standardized things can be made easily and cheaply. Therefore the factory specializes on one or at most a few standardized things. These two practices have given us this age of cheap machinery.
326. The great automobile center.—By the use of standardized parts, manufacturing becomes a kind of assembling. Perhaps the most wonderful plant of this kind in the world is the Ford automobile plant, where you can see a car put together in a few minutes by a long row of workmen. First, two axles and a frame come down a chute in front of several men, each of whom turns a bolt or two, and then an endless conveyor takes the frame and carries it forward to the next man. In this manner the car passes in front
of a long line of men, each of whom receives from above or from one side a part which he fastens to the frame. One man puts on com pleted wheels from the wheel department; another, the case that covers the driving shaft; another, springs; another, some other part. Finally a completed engine from the engine .department .swings out on a little crane, is lowered to the car, and quickly bolted fast. Next the gasoline tank with gasoline in it is bolted fast, and the skeleton car that has not yet received its body is ready to run with its own power, and to be tested out. After the test the car is taken apart and packed up to be shipped, perhaps to the very end of the earth, and there it is repaired with pieces that are sent out from the home plant.
The automobile industry of Detroit, Tole do, and the many smaller cities, has grown with such great speed that between 1910 and 1920, Detroit, the automobile center, in creased from 465,766 to 993,678 in popula tion, and from ninth to fourth in rank among the cities of the United States. Does this industry affect Detroit alone? Can one part of our country have good business all by itself? In the spring of 1921, the manager of the Hood River Apple Growers' Associa tion complained that Detroit was buying only one carload of boxed apples a week, because the automobile business was dull and the workers were not spending money for apples. They had been buying five carloads a day when business was good.
327. Future.—Will the demand for auto mobiles and other machinery continue? Will these industries move away from the Lake District where they are so thoroughly established? Every city between Buffalo and Chicago, by way of either Detroit or Cleveland, is exactly on the line of a railroad running fast trains between the east and the west. Iron and wood of the upper lakes and coal of the lower lakes can come by water to every lake city. These cities are on the very edge of the greatest food producing region in Amer ica. They have a wholesome climate, and the summer is neither so hot nor so long as that of regions to the south. These cities being located in a land of lakes, both big and little, are provided with coolness and recreation as well as with cheap freight rates. Increasing population and production in the regions around the lakes means, of course, more traffic over the lakes. Meat, grain, and farm supplies will continue to move as they do now.