Charles E. Sorensen

Charles Emil Sorensen (7 September 1881 – 11 August 1968) was a Danish-American principal of the Ford Motor Company during its first four decades. Like most other managers at Ford during those decades, he did not have an official job title, but he served functionally as a patternmaker, foundry engineer, mechanical engineer, industrial engineer, production manager, and executive in charge of all production. By the end of his career, he had become an officer of the company, being a vice president and a director. Speaking figuratively, he saw himself during most of his career as "a viceroy ruling the production province of the Ford empire", and at the end as a "regent" who managed the company during the "interregnum" between the reigns of Henry Ford I and Henry Ford II.

Sorensen emigrated from Denmark to the United States with his parents when he was four years old. He first worked as a surveyor's assistant, then apprenticed at the Jewett Stove Works in Buffalo, New York as a patternmaker and foundryman. In 1900, the family moved to Detroit, and while working at a foundry in Detroit, Michigan he met Henry Ford. In 1905 he accepted a job as a patternmaker at Ford Motor Company. By 1907 he was head of the pattern department. He translated Henry Ford's ideas, which came to him in the form of simple sketches or descriptions, into prototypes and into the patterns from which the parts would be cast.

Sorensen (with others, notably Walter Flanders, Clarence Avery, and Ed Martin) is credited with developing the first automotive assembly line, having formulated the idea of moving a product (for cars, this would be in the form of the chassis) through multiple workstations. His innovations were widely applied to the mass production of complex products that average people could afford.

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