ted to make a go of the automobile business! These firms were small businesses, usually operating out of home-based machine shops and hand-crafting an expensive product. Like most small businessmen of the nineteenth century, these operations found that working capital was far more important than fixed capital. Their yearly operating expenses frequently exceeded fixed costs. When such small concerns met a downturn in demand they could simply stop producing. Larger manufacturing firms, however, had to continue to pay on such items as rents, interest on fixed capital, taxes, and so on. Thus large capital backing was important to the creation of such firms and it was the accumulation of such capital that was the primary impetus behind the rise of big business. Big businesses had a different cost structure and were only able to manage their large fixed costs because they were adequately capitalized and because "new productive techniques made it possible to turn out huge quantities of goods at a lower cost per item." Ford's company combined the two approaches in a manner made possible by his own vision and by the way in which that vision was able to tap into an otherwise unsuspected market of enormous potential.
The difference between Ford and the rest was not, however, that he had more money (he had less than a few of them) or that he had the brilliant idea of using the assembly line. Instead it was Ford's
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