Machinery, The New Messiah

Taylor distilled the essence of Bismarck’s Prussian school training under whose regimen he had witnessed firsthand the defeat of France in 1871. His American syntheses of these disciplines made him the direct inspiration for Henry Ford and "Fordism."² Between 1895 and 1915, Ford radically transformed factory procedure, relying on Taylorized management and a mass production assembly line marked by precision, continuity, coordination, speed, and standardization. Ford wrote two extraordinary essays in the 1920s, The Meaning of Time, and Machinery, The New Messiah, in which he equated planning, timing, precision, and the rest of the scientific management catalogue with the great moral meaning of life:³

The Meaning of Time is a short chapter within Ford's book, Today and Tomorrow, it's a very interesting analysis of the role of the speed of transportation in Ford's whole system of production. Machinery, The New Messiah is an essay that was published in The Forum magazine, and the following quote is actually a rough paraphrasing of the essay.