To mash up a few other comments, the main thing Henry Ford invented was the business model of the original Ford Motor Company: Pay workers well (better than average for the time), have them do assembly line labor for six and a half days a week, absolutely standardize on a single product, and sell that product cheaply enough your own workers can afford it.
Cars were invented multiple times, including electric cars, before Ford showed up. Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed. Being a tyrannical jackass with a perfectionist streak, while perfected by Jobs, was certainly nothing new. Ford just mashed those together along with a framed picture of Hitler and it all worked.
Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed.
Any time I see a comment like this, I know for a fact that someone does not understand what an assembly line is, nor why the invention of one was important.
An assembly line is a method of production where workers stand still, and the parts that they need come to them at the rate that they will be putting them together. This is vastly superior to previous modes of production because you eliminate all of the time people spend walking around trying to find the next thing that they need. Before the introduction of the assembly line, workers normally spent more time walking than assembling. After the introduction, workers spent more time assembling.
That said, the assembly line was not entirely a novel production. The closest predecessor was in the Chicago meatpacking industry where it took the form of a disassembly line - cows went in one end and standard cuts of meat came out the other. But using it for assembly of complex machinery was still a significant innovation, and Henry Ford deserves full credit for it.
It certainly was not simply applying widely known standardization techniques with interchangeable parts such as was pioneered in the rifle industry and had been predicted by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations with an example involving pins.
Cars were invented multiple times, including electric cars, before Ford showed up. Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed. Being a tyrannical jackass with a perfectionist streak, while perfected by Jobs, was certainly nothing new. Ford just mashed those together along with a framed picture of Hitler and it all worked.