Nicolás Ibarra
Subscribe
Nicolás Ibarra

The Machine That Builds the Machine

Musk’s companies treat the factory as the real product. The idea is older than Tesla: it was already in the pin workshop of the Encyclopédie.

By Nicolás Ibarra

1 min readCraftSample text

A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie showing a pin workshop: workers turn great wheels to draw wire, and the tools of each step are laid out below.
Encyclopédie, planches, “Épinglier”, pl. II, 1762. Public domain.

Elon Musk likes to say that the factory is the machine that builds the machine. It sounds like a slogan. It is closer to a theory of the firm.

In 1776 Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with a pin factory. One worker alone, he wrote, could scarcely make a pin a day; ten workers who split the job into about eighteen operations made tens of thousands. Smith most likely took the example from the Encyclopédie, whose plates had already laid the workshop out step by step, wheel by wheel.

The product is the process

What Musk adds is not the division of labour but the obsession with its rate. A rocket or a car is the output; the line that produces it is the thing to design, measure and rebuild.1

Workers in caps stand along a long assembly line in a Ford factory in 1913, each repeating one operation on parts that move past them.
A Ford assembly line in 1913, the year the moving line arrived at Highland Park. U.S. National Archives. Public domain.

What survives without the founder

The harder question is what remains when the person who keeps asking why a step exists leaves the room. A method that depends on one temperament is not yet a method.

Notes

  1. This is a sample text written to show the layout of an essay.

Clap if it got you thinking

Keep reading