From: brian carroll <[email protected]> [deleted]
>Ford automotive, manufacturing plants of the earliest >assemblyline for car manufacturing, was based around >logistics of lining up, not only workers on the line to piece >together cars in a coordinated, orchestrated sequence, it >also involved movement of raw materials, their processing, >shaping of the steel, trains and railheads, smelters, and >electrical generation of power, such that the entire system >functioned as a gigantic machine, humans and technology >in fluid interaction and then figuring this out in total detail; >thus mass produced low-cost high-tech vehicles for sale My father, Samuel Warren Bell Jr., worked for Ford between 1965-67. One day, my mother took me and my sister on a tour of Ford's enormous River Rouge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex plant, which was an example of those 'all in one' plants, assembling not only the cars but building the components. At one point, the tour group came to a catwalk spanning a railroad track inside a huge building. I, running ahead, climbed the catwalk and walked to the middle of the span, the tour following behind. But just as I got to the middle of the catwalk, a huge metal door opened up, and a railroad flatcar came out, carrying a huge (40 feet by 8 feet by 2 feet, I'd estimate today) orange-hot ingot of steel, rolling on the railroad track. It went directly under the middle of the catwalk, precisely below I was at the time. Didn't Richard Pryor say, "Fire is inspirational!" Well, it was for me! I didn't expect the updraft. I guess I am walking in the steps of the same 'loyalty' shown by my father: He once said that he was the only Ford employee to drive to work...in a Volkwagen car. (not very politic in the mid-late 60's). Incidentally, my father invented the "Dual Clutch Transmission". Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-clutch_transmission tells you that a Frenchman named Adolphe Kegresse invented it just before WWII, but says that he didn't make a working copy. Neither did my father (who was unaware of Kegresse's invention), but he (as he was obligated to do) presented the design to Ford management about 1966. Perhaps not surprisingly, in hindsight, Ford didn't want it. (That was the era of $0.20/gallon gas, and virtually every automatic transmission had 3 forward gears.). It wouldn't have done any good for him to patent it himself: Had he obtained a patent in, say, 1968, that patent would have run out 17 years later, in 1985. As stated in the Wikipedia article, "The first series production road car to be fitted with a DCT was the 2003 Volkswagen Golf Mk4 R32." Jim Bell
