Greece’s Roman Road - Chapter 286

After carefully examining the drawings Andros put on the table, Giannis pondered for a long time, then suddenly turned his head and asked Andros, “Mr. Andros, can your car production line be used to produce airplanes?”

As the Minister of Armaments of the Greek Army, he has been immersed in the development and change of military technology over the years, making Giannis extremely sensitive to the latest military technology.

Giannis was acutely aware of the vital use of aircraft in future warfare.

Although the current aircraft is limited to backward performance and backward technology, it can only be used for reconnaissance and artillery calibration tasks on the battlefield, but the aircraft has the characteristics of being more efficient than traditional reconnaissance and calibration methods, which impressed the officers who used it.

For aerial reconnaissance and calibration, the aircraft has a unique advantage.

As a new technical weapon, the aircraft has been in the spotlight in recent wars.

In the Italian-Turkish war and the two subsequent wars in the Balkans, aircraft, a new type of weapon, were involved.

At present, Greece does not have the ability to produce aircraft domestically.

The unexpected question made Andros unable to respond for a while. He was talking about cars, but why did he suddenly involve the plane.

Andros doesn’t know much about a new aircraft like the airplane.

Andros turned his eyes to Constantine, who just gestured with his eyes to let him try his best to meet the military’s requirements.

“Well, in theory, the car production line can indeed be used to produce aircraft, Mr. Giannis, but if the car factory is converted to produce aircraft, a lot of changes will be needed,” Andros explained to Giannis while thinking.

“The engine of the car can be used as the engine of the aircraft as long as it is slightly modified. If the high performance of the aircraft is required, a new type of engine must be specially developed for the aircraft.”

This answer made Giannis very satisfied: It seems that the Andros Machine Factory mentioned by Crown Prince Constantine is of great significance to Greece, both in terms of social benefits and military use in Greece, and it is indeed correct. .

“Mr. Andros, the truck on the drawing, you will produce a prototype as soon as possible, and hand it over to the army for actual testing.”

“If the performance is suitable for the purpose of the military and the price is suitable, the order quantity required by our armament department may reach 3,000 vehicles.”

“By the way, what is the price of the truck you designed?” Giannis turned to the price of the truck.

“About fifteen thousand drachmas each”

Hearing this high price, Giannis frowned, thinking that the Andros Machinery Factory was currently in financial trouble, and did not argue with Andros about the price.

This huge order can also be regarded as the price the army must pay to help the struggling Andros Machinery Factory survive.

Giannis’ words made Andros happy. It seemed that the army, a big customer, had really become a big customer of the machine factory.

“If your products are good enough to replace the hundreds of thousands of mules and horses currently used by the military for logistical tasks, there may be even more orders for wagons,” Constantine interjected, encouraging Andros.

Although he was prepared in his heart, the huge number of orders from the military still surprised Andros: “So many? If the military really needs thousands of trucks, I am afraid that the production capacity of our machinery factory will be put to the test.”

Minister Capotestelias, who had been on the sidelines for a long time, suddenly said to Andros: “If the performance of the cars produced by your company can meet the needs, the government will recently limit the number of horse-drawn carriages in the city of Athens in the form of an executive order. , advocating the use of cars as taxis, replacing horse-drawn carriages as the new urban means of transport”

“According to my estimates, if the plan is successful, there will be a demand for a thousand or so taxis in the city of Athens, Mr. Andros”

Andros, who was in trouble at first, is now getting a little dizzy from the shock of orders coming in one after another.

“Very, um–, thank you very much, Your Excellency Minister of Transportation,” Andros said gratefully.

“As the second largest city in Greece, Thessaloniki also needs to use cars instead of carriages. As a taxi, even if the number is not as good as Athens, it will not be too small,” Constantine continued.

“According to the production capacity of your factory, I am afraid that within the next year, the supply of these two orders will be very tight, Mr. Andros.”

At present, the production capacity of the machinery factory is very weak. Due to the small market in Greece, in order to allow the factory to survive, the machinery factory produces a variety of products, including tractors, cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles.

In fact, in terms of sales, bicycles are the best product currently sold by machinery factories, with annual sales reaching tens of thousands.

For each product, the production volume is not large, such as tractors, which sell more than 100 vehicles each year. Naturally, there is no need for a machinery factory to build a huge production line, and the production is completely unsystematic.

The machinery factory has such a weak production capacity, and the annual production volume is very limited. Even if there is a huge demand from the Greek army in the future, Andros’ machinery factory will not be able to meet it for a while.

This kind of machinery factory is more like a small workshop. It can produce everything, but it does not produce much. It is not worth the effort of Constantine. The Zelos government wants policy support.

Constantine spent so much energy on the machinery factory, and naturally he was not satisfied with such a small workshop.

“Andros, have you ever thought about listing your machinery factory on the Athens Stock Exchange to raise funds for the factory to expand production. After all, with these two orders in place, the machinery factory’s biggest problem at the moment is , it’s not sales anymore, it’s your backward production capacity,” Constantine told Andri.

“As Greece ends the war and the economy recovers rapidly, the domestic private market in Greece will also become larger and larger.”

In recent years, the situation in the Balkans has been turbulent, and Greece is facing war all the time. Against this background, the survival of the machinery factory has been very difficult, and it has been burdened with large loans and has not been able to make profits.

“Haven’t you always admired the assembly line invented by Ford in the United States, why don’t you try to replicate the assembly line in Greece?” Constantine persuaded Andros in a seductive tone.

The invention of the assembly line is a technological change for the manufacturing industry, which greatly improves the work efficiency.

Early manufacturing was completely done by a large number of people, and this way of working required each worker to understand the complete manufacturing process of the entire finished product.

To quickly manufacture a finished product, it is necessary to be very familiar with the entire process and process, which invisibly increases the requirements for the quality of workers.

The emergence of the assembly line has achieved semi-automation for the manual manufacturing industry and accelerated the processing speed.

For each worker, it is only necessary to be familiar with one of the steps in the entire process.

This greatly reduces the requirements for workers, speeds up the process of workers being familiar with the business, and also improves the production speed of workers.

It was Ford’s first introduction of the assembly line into large-scale industrial production, and it was such an initiative that made Ford stand out from many car manufacturers.

It is said that Ford got the inspiration from the slaughterhouse, which can be called a “demolition line”, that is, a slaughtered cow or pig is moved in front of many meat cutters, and each meat cutter only cuts a specific piece of meat. some part.

Ford reversed this process. The car chassis moved from one end to the other at a certain speed on the conveyor belt. As it moved forward, it gradually installed the engine, operated the empty system, the cabin, the steering wheel, the instrument, the lights, the window glass, Wheels, a complete car is assembled.

The first assembly line shortened the assembly time of each Model T car from 12 hours and 28 minutes to 10 seconds, increasing the production efficiency by 4,488 times!

This has given Ford a huge advantage in labor costs. When facing other competitors, Ford is cheating like it is hanging!

It was this huge advantage that gave Ford the confidence to do something “outrageous” – he proposed an 8-hour workday, raised the hourly wage from 2.5 cents to $5, and was the first to implement five a week. working day.

In the hearts of fellow practitioners like Andros, Ford in the United States is simply a god-like existence.

If the machinery factory can be transformed into an assembly line, there will undoubtedly be a leap in production capacity, which will be of great benefit to Greece, both in terms of national defense and economy.

This is undoubtedly what Constantine would like to see.

Constantine’s words, imitating his idol, Ford’s suggestion to build an assembly line in his own machine factory, are so seductive that Andros’s heart is beating “thump thump”.

“Gudu” swallowed a mouthful of saliva. Although he really had the urge to agree, the reason in Andros’ head still prevented this crazy move.

“His Royal Highness, the situation in Greece and the United States is different.” Andros’s head ran quickly, thinking about the reasons for preventing him from establishing an assembly line in Greece.

“The American people are rich and have the income level to consume automobiles. Moreover, the United States has a vast territory and sparsely populated areas, so there is an objective need for automobiles.”

Americans are naturally richer, not only later, but in fact, the United States has been relatively rich since the beginning of the nation.

The United States has gathered a large number of German, British, and French immigrants. If the United States is not rich, why are the people of Britain, France and Germany willing to cross the sea and come to a strange new world to make a living?

You know, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Europe was at its peak, most of the world was colonized by Europe.

Even so, every year there are a large number of British, French and German people who are willing to immigrate to the United States, of course, because the United States is relatively wealthy.

The United States did not become rich until after World War II, nor did it become rich after surpassing Britain in 1893 and becoming the world’s largest industrial power. When the United States was still a colony, it was already very rich.

In New England (the predecessor of the United States) in the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers’ food, clothing, shelter and transportation were already the best of their time.

The reasons are as follows: 1. The per capita arable land is very large, and the land is fertile. You can buy a large amount of land at a very cheap price. As long as you are not lazy, you can have a good life.

2. For religious reasons, most of the people who go to North America to live are Puritans, who are more diligent and have no cumbersome religious ceremonies or powerful churches to exploit the people.

3. The fertile land of New England, at that time, the entire North American land after the Ice Age, after so many years of nourishment, was quite fertile and rich in natural resources.

To sum up, the most important thing is the social structure and the composition of the population, and the large amount of social wealth generated later.

It is these advantages that make the United States the richest among the major powers, and its gdp has always been the highest, whether per capita or total.

Therefore, Americans can consume such expensive means of transportation as cars, but Greeks may not.

“Also, the U.S. is the world’s No. 1 oil producer, there is plenty of oil to fuel cars, and the price of oil is cheap enough”

Before the advent of the internal combustion engine, the main purpose of petroleum refining was to produce kerosene for lighting, and most of the gasoline was dumped directly, and the price was naturally low enough.

Is it cheap to recycle garbage?

And after the advent of American cars, the happiest oil tycoon like Rockefeller may be. Gasoline, which could only be thrown away as garbage, has transformed into a new commodity with a wider market than kerosene, and its potential is unlimited.

On the contrary, kerosene, which was originally the main economic product of petroleum refining, began to shrink after the large-scale application of electric lamps.

“For a variety of reasons, the U.S. auto market is very broad”

“But Greece is different. Greece has poor resources. In a short period of time, it has participated in three wars and consumed a lot of wealth. The income of the people is not high, at least not as high as the Americans, and the territory is not large.”

“These objective reasons are restricting the Greek auto market”

“For Ford, the U.S. auto market is broad enough, and the biggest problem is their backward production capacity constraints, which provide a large enough stage for the assembly line.”

“And Greece is not the case. The narrow car market is our main problem, and the low car production capacity is not our main problem.”

Constantine just looked at Andros calmly, without arguing with him.

Although every reason listed by Andros is preventing the construction of his own assembly line, Andros knows that he is moved.

“That’s okay, the machinery factory’s products include tractors, motorcycles, cars, and in the future there will be trucks, and possibly other products, who knows?” Constantine shrugged and said indifferently.

“Although the single production quantity of these products is not high~www.mtlnovel.com~, the total number is still considerable”

“We just need to improve on the Ford assembly line, and that’s it, we can build a hybrid assembly line that can make both trucks and cars, or tractors, and if our engineers are smart enough, this hybrid assembly line can even be Should be able to produce motorcycles”

“For example, the production of trucks or tractors can be concentrated in the production of cars for a certain period of time, and then changed again to produce trucks or tractors, in short, in turn in accordance with the order.”

“Although such a mixed assembly line may not be as efficient as Ford’s production of a single T-car, it is also an assembly line.”

“As long as the essence of the assembly line is brought into play, it will still have the characteristics of high production efficiency of Ford’s assembly line. At least compared to the low production speed of the small workshop in the machinery factory, it is also a huge leap.” Constantine In order to get Andros to agree to build an assembly line, Ding used his brains to say.

Constantine’s words seemed to have broken some kind of **** that bound Andros’ head. He widened his eyes and finally muttered: “Mixed assembly line, it should be possible to focus on producing a single product for a certain period of time. Bar”