Industry 4.0 is the hottest trend to hit the manufacturing world since the Toyota Production System started to transform assembly lines two decades ago. Although most of the talk about digital production systems and smart factories involves things such as augmented reality, collaborative robots or data analytics, conveyors play an equally important role.

Of all the things that conveyors have moved the past 222 years, none is more iconic than the small chocolate candies that overwhelmed Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance working on the assembly line in September 1952.

This month marks the official celebration of the world’s first moving assembly line. On Oct. 7, 1913, 140 assemblers stationed along a 150-foot chassis line at a Ford Motor Co. plant just north of Detroit stood in place as the work came to them.

BERLIN—Festo Corp. has invented a pneumatic conveyor belt that uses wave action to transport objects in a targeted manner and sort them at the same time.