Sleepy History: Henry Ford’s Assembly Line | A SleepWise Story

Tonight on SleepWise, we drift slowly into the autumn of 1913, into the brick-and-glass walls of a single factory in Highland Park, Michigan. There, on a quiet floor inside Henry Ford’s new plant, a chain was laid down for the first time, and a chassis that had once taken twelve and a half hours of human labor began to move past stationary workers, finishing in ninety-three minutes a job that had once taken most of a day. This is a calm, factual bedtime story for adults about Henry Ford, the assembly line, and the factory that quietly reshaped the rhythm of human work for a century.

Across twenty gentle segments, we follow Ford himself from a small Dearborn farm to the Crystal Palace plant designed by Albert Kahn, through the famous Five-Dollar Day that doubled factory wages overnight, and across the years the Model T turned automobiles from rare luxuries into ordinary household objects. We also walk, more carefully, through the darker chapters: the Dearborn Independent newspaper Ford purchased after the First World War, the antisemitic articles it published, and the long labor battles that ended at the Rouge plant in Dearborn. It is a story of invention and contradiction, of generosity and prejudice, of a man who lifted wages and lowered a curtain at the same time.

It is told gently, as SleepWise stories are, with no urgency and no need to remember the details. Just facts arranged like furniture in a quiet room, light turning slowly across them, and a steady voice carrying you toward sleep.

If these slow journeys through history help you rest, you can follow SleepWise and share the show with someone who might enjoy drifting off while learning something new about the makers of our modern world.

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