Photo journal: Rise and fall of mass production

The scale of mass production is hard to comprehend.

Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit, completed in 1928, stretched for a mile along a tributary of the Detroit river and employed 100,000 men.

Raw materials like iron ore and rubber were unloaded at one end, and finished cars emerged from the other end, 72 hours later.

But Ford's system proved less efficient than GM, which produced a range of models for different pocketbooks.