Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabana
So, going back a bit (I didn't read every post and hope I'm not repeating), that damned Henry Ford put the horse and carriages out of business! Did he retrain any of them to be auto mechanics? I hardly think so...
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First, the horse and buggy became a smaller business long before Henry Ford started making cars. The early auto manufacturers didn't use assembly lines, and neither did the buggy makers, so they were probably a good source of factory workers. They were pretty much already trained for not so very different work. Of course I'm just guessing but I think it's a fairly safe bet that that was one source of early auto workers.
Mechanics repair cars. Factory workers build them.
By the way a really good novel about this very topic is Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons". It's not about retraining factory workers so much as it's about the changes in society brought as the auto industry came into being. It was also the second ever Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and for good reason.
Barry