Charles E. Sorensen - Early Life and Early Career

Early Life and Early Career

Sorensen emigrated from Denmark to the United States with his parents when he was four years old. He first worked as a surveyor's assistant, then apprenticed at the Jewett Stove Works in Buffalo, New York as a patternmaker and foundryman. In 1900, the family moved to Detroit, and while working at a foundry in Detroit, Michigan he met Henry Ford. In 1905 he accepted a job as a patternmaker at Ford Motor Company. By 1907 he was head of the pattern department. He translated Henry Ford's ideas, which came to him in the form of simple sketches or descriptions, into prototypes and into the patterns from which the parts would be cast.

Sorensen (with others, notably Walter Flanders, Clarence Avery, and Ed Martin) is credited with developing the first automotive assembly line, having formulated the idea of moving a product (for cars, this would be in the form of the chassis) through multiple workstations. His innovations were widely applied to the mass production of complex products that average people could afford.

On a Sunday in 1910, in the Piquette Plant, Sorensen and another Ford executive, Charles Lewis, tested his idea. Apparently, by the end of the day he had determined that moving a car in a straight line from one end of the factory to the other, with parts added along the way by specialized workers performing repetitive tasks (with the stockrooms also placed strategically along the line) was the most efficient and therefore cheapest way to build an automobile. To prove his theory, he then towed an automobile chassis on a rope over his shoulders through the Ford plant while others added the parts.