Tourists:
Diego Rivera included a tourist filled observation area in this mural to denote popular fascination with complex manufacturing technologies like Ford's moving assembly line. Beginning in the early 19th century, Americans and Europeans expressed a strong fascination with factories as symbols of material progress, and as model institutions that could represent the values and goals of a society. The Lowell mills in Massachusetts, for instance, were visited by foreign tourists during the early nineteenth century. The interest of these "technological tourists" was undoubtedly reinforced by the large scale of Ford's manufacturing facilities and the public's craze for automobiles.
To learn more click here: Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Assembly Line:
In the nineteenth century, engineers and mechanics working in the nation's arsenals had improved the uniformity of parts and rationalized production to create what was known as the American System of Manufacturing. Production engineers at Ford built on this foundation when they introduced the moving assembly line in the flywheel magneto department during the Spring of 1913. Ford's workers hated the repetition, monotony, the lose of control over the rate of work that resulted from the moving assembly line. They also resented Ford's attempts to control all aspects of the production system, including their personal behavior off the job. Ford's methods were part of a much broader transformation of American society and culture that integrated mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption. His focus on maximizing the throughput of parts and materials reflected a movement toward rational management practices, epitomized by Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management.