250 Years of American Manufacturing

By the mid-1900s, manufacturing had learned how to scale. Power was no longer the issue. Flow was understood. Assembly lines had made production faster and more consistent. But there was still a problem sitting underneath it all. And that problem had a name: waste.  And it was waste that came in all forms and fashion.   […]

By the late 1800s, power had allowed factories to scale output and run multiple processes at once.  Plus, there was this new thing everybody was talking about called electricity.  But work was still largely organized around individual stations and loosely connected steps. That started to evolve in the early 1900s, most clearly with the rise

In our first post about the history of manufacturing improvements in the USA, [click here] we talked about how the the constraint back in the earliest days of production was simple. Output was limited by human hands. That started to change in the late 1700s as consistent power entered the picture. Steam engines gave factories

As the United States Semiquincentennial approaches, you might notice some scattered information here and there about where this country started and, just as significantly, how it grew.    [You also might here conversations such as this: “July 4,1776 was when we adopted the Constitution of the United States, right?“  “No, that was in 1787.”   “Oh,