When most people think of Henry Ford, the Ford Motor Co., or iconic cars such as the Model T, they automatically think of Detroit. But, believe it or not, Chicago (the hometown of ASSEMBLY magazine) actually played a key role in Ford’s fortunes and contributed to the company’s mass-production success story.

The Windy City helped shape Henry Ford’s vision during a unique 15-year period. In particular, several trips to Chicago proved to be “eureka!” moments for him and helped spawn the famous assembly line applications that ushered in the mass-production era.

In 1893, Henry Ford boarded a train and headed west. Like millions of Americans, his destination was the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ford was fascinated by the thousands of exhibits from around the world that were housed along the shore of Lake Michigan in Jackson Park, near the location of today’s Museum of Science and Industry. In particular, one small display caught his attention.

It was a horseless carriage that was created by an obscure mechanical engineer from Stuttgart, Germany, named Gottlieb Daimler. Just a few years before, he had built the world’s first four-wheeled automobile.

The one-cylinder Daimler quadricycle was hidden in a corner of the huge Transportation Building at the Chicago world’s fair. It was the only gasoline-powered “horseless carriage” on display and the tiny vehicle was dwarfed by steam locomotives, streetcars and other state-of-the-art machines. In fact, the vehicle was so obscure that it wasn’t even listed in the fair’s official catalog. Daimler also displayed some small stationary engines that could be used for applications on land, water and air.

However, the brief encounter made a big impact on the 30-year-old Ford, who became inspired to tinker with his own vehicle designs. Many years later, Ford Motor Co. printed an advertisement in which Henry Ford recalled studying a two-cylinder Daimler engine mounted on a fire hose cart at the 1893 world’s fair.

“He had been working a long time to develop just such a power plant,” the ad explained. “Here was proof that his plans were sound. He hurried home to his little shop in Detroit, and by 1896 produced a horseless carriage that would really run.”

On another trip to Chicago a few years later, Henry Ford found inspiration for the moving assembly line that would eventually help make the Model T such a huge success. He visited several meatpacking plants on the southwest side of the city, such as Armour & Co., Swift & Co. and Wilson & Co. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Ford claimed that the “disassembly” lines of Chicago meatpackers served as a model for flow production at the Highland Park plant that first implemented moving assembly lines in 1913 (magneto production) and 1914 (chassis production).

Henry Ford also visited the Sears, Roebuck & Co. plant that processed orders for the company’s famous mail-order catalog. The 40-acre operation was called “the world’s greatest mercantile institution.” Shortly after the huge facility on the West Side of Chicago opened in 1906, Ford was one of the first visitors and he delighted in its operation. The Sears warehouse contained numerous elevators, conveyors, endless chains, moving sidewalks, gravity chutes, pneumatic tubes and “every known mechanical appliance for reducing labor” to reduce time and improve productivity.

Another source of inspiration for the moving assembly line concept came from Ford’s visit to Chicago’s Continental Can Co. Its plant used automated machinery and an elaborate conveyor system to mass-produce tin cans for the food industry.