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Automobile Industry
The rst internal combustion-powered vehicles were produced in Europe—notably by Gottlieb
Daimler and Carl Benz in Germany during the 1880s. But the emergence of the modern indus-
try dates back to 1913 and Henry Ford’s rst implementation of the production technology—the
continuously moving assembly line—that would revolutionize so much of industrial capitalism over
the next few decades. Ford quickly became the master of mass production, churning out thousands of
black Model T Ford from his Highland Park plant in Michigan. Mass production dramatically low-
ered the costs of building cars and paved the way for the emergence ...