The Ford Motor Company initiated the First Moving Assembly Line in the automobile industry in 1913 in Highland Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Not only was Ford the first to implement this, it also marked the first truly advanced and mechanized assembly line in any modern industry, with the result that cars cost less and could be easily purchased by the American middle class. Although there had been the assembly of interchangeable parts of guns going back to the mid-19th Century, (rifles manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts and Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia)), Ford’s manufacturing methods represented a quantum leap in the annals of Mass Production. That term originated in a 1926 Encyclopedia Britannica article referring to the pioneering automaker. With the advent of the new manufacturing technique, assembly time for autos was dramatically reduced in 1913 from 12 ½ hours to ultimately 1 hour and 33 minutes and a phenomenal increase of some 200,000 cars that year to well over a over a million by 1920.