Spooner & Wells

The photographs in the Spooner & Wells Highland Park Plant photographs collection were taken for Fred H. Colvin, editor of the American Machinist by the Detroit based firm, Spooner & Wells. Colvin visited plants across the country for more than thirty years studying factory operations, eventually inspecting nearly every automobile plant in the United States. He spent ten days at Ford's Highland Park Plant in 1913. Many of the photographs in the collection appeared in American Machinist from May 8, 1913, to September 18, 1913 in a series of sixteen articles on Ford methods. Testifying in a lawsuit years later, Colvin reported that there was nothing in 1913 which compared with the manufacturing efficiencies of the Ford Company; the Ford layout represented the best automobile producing layout in the United States.