In 1913 at his Highland Park plant in Michigan, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, in which the Model T was carried past stationary workers each performing a single repetitive task. This cut the time to assemble a car from over twelve hours to roughly ninety minutes and slashed unit costs, allowing Ford to lower prices and pay the well-known five-dollar day. The result was the first true mass production of a complex consumer product. The method was widely copied across manufacturing industries.
Mass production created the company towns and sprawling single-storey factory districts of the twentieth-century industrial landscape, while the cheap car it produced reshaped cities around driving and commuting.