Recently, a nine-minute video of life inside a Chevrolet plant in 1936 has been making the rounds on the internets. You know what we say about nine minute videos? Screw ’em! Why? Because we’ve got the whole 27 minute enchilada here for you. The short movie misses all the truly bad ass stuff like casting engine blocks and literally lighting the fires in the blast furnaces.
There is a surprising amount of automation involved in this video, at least to us. While the majority of the work was still performed by human hands, several steps used machinery that we would have never expected to exist in the mid-1930s. Watching the die makers tweak their dies, the fellahs in casting handle huge buckets of molten iron with gloves and a cotton shirt on, and glowing hot crankshafts fly through the air is truly awesome.
This ain’t a Buck Rogers movie kids, it is living history!
Press play below for the 27-best minutes you’ll have today!
Awesome. Tough, dirty work, and for good and bad the sort not done on these shores anymore. Just looking at these guys you can see where OSHA and the like became necessary…so many possibilities for injuries! Interesting, too to compare with the similar video of the Trabant plant that went around recently.
Fascinating to see the machines that make the machines. Remember this all happened 75 years ago! I guarantee you EVERY person in that film is long gone by now. But many of those cars are still on the road. The level of sophistication is amazing, Especially the part where all the machines coming together in the frame making portion but yet standing right in the middle of it is a guy with a hammer randomly whacking away on some of the frames. Did you wonder what ever happened to all that machinery?
“You know what we say about nine minute videos? Screw ’em! Why? Because we’ve got the whole 27 minute enchilada here for you. ”
Are you writing these intros for 12 year olds?