Were the average person to look at one of this year’s new £20 Bank of England banknotes, it may seem a tad confusing for him or her to find a reference to a factory manufacturing pins. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, describes the economic concept of division of labour, by which each person specialised in a particular task and several people combined these respective products to increase efficiency, in terms of what he saw at the time: pin-making.

Nowadays, we find the example risible not because it doesn’t hold the same basic economic fact that it did when Smith wrote it in 1776, but because it seems so trivial, so small-scale. Today, we would see the smallest examples of division of labour all around us, but nowhere more so than on the production line. So much do we take the awesome productive power of the production line for granted, that we forget that there was once a time where no such innovation existed.

In the early summer of 1903, there were few more nervous men in Detroit, nay the whole of the United States, than Henry Ford, the majority proprietor and name-bearer of a small automobile-building factory. Ford had sunk his entire fortune into the enterprise: an enterprise that was down to its last few dollars. No-one had yet ordered one of his ‘Model A’s, and the company was going under.

However, salvation for the company came on 23 July 1903, in the form of a German doctor in Chicago, Dr Ernst Pfenning, who took a chance on Ford, and ordered one (out of self-interest, mind!). It would be the first of 1,750 produced over the following year. From then on, it was to bigger and better things that Ford aspired to and attained, culminating in the dominance of the Ford Model T. Ford introduced a style of industrialism based on the large-scale division of labour, centred on the production line that had been pioneered by Eli Whitney, that bears his name: Fordism.

If the sum of man’s accomplishments can be measured by the sum of his products, there can be few men that have ever achieved more than Ford. The cornerstone of the new Fordist economic order, the production line, unleashed the capacity of people to produce in a way never seen before. Had Ford’s factories been around in 1776, there can be no doubt that it would be the car factory, and not the pin factory, that would be recorded as Adam Smith’s archetypal division of labour, and the mainstay of the new economic order.