American harvesting machines are built in the same way; whenever a farmer loses a part, he can go to the country store and buy its duplicate, for the parts of the same machine do not vary to the thousandth of an inch.

The same principle applies to hundreds of other articles.
Thus Henry Ford did not invent standardization; he merely applied this great American idea to a product to which, because of the delicate labor required, it seemed at first unadapted.

He soon found that it was cheaper to ship the parts of ten cars to a central point than to ship ten completed cars.

There would therefore be large savings in making his parts in particular factories and shipping them to assembling establishments.

In this way the completed cars would always be near their markets.