Electrifying America

MIT Press selected Electrifying America as one of 50 books to celebrate when it was 50 years old.  I was asked to prepare a short reflection about it, which appears below. 

The late 1980s was a good time to reflect on and analyze electrification, a process that had begun in the 1880s and been completed in my childhood. When I took up the subject, electricity had become "natural" but it was not difficult to recover its recent novelty. I was also experienced enough, with three previous books (on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General Electric), to realize that this was a wonderful subject and to know how fortunate I was to start work with the encouragement of a contract from MIT Press.

I researched Electrifying America when there was no email or Internet, although I proudly wrote on a new word processor (that had no hard disk). Most documents had to be gathered in libraries and archives, which was less a hardship than a pleasure. Where could I better get a sense of the early electric light than at the Edison National Historic Site? I did research in Muncie Indiana (better known as Middletown) to understand how a typical small city had adopted electricity. Likewise, I studied the electricity-mad Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it had been held in 1901. Such experiences gave me an invaluable grounding in the material culture of my subject.

That grounding stretched back to my childhood. I often visited my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, which, when I first was there, lacked electricity. I also glimpsed the pre-electric world among the Amish and Mennonites whom I encountered while growing up in central Pennsylvania. During summers in Boston, I delighted in streetcars, and pestered my father to take me for rides, demanding to know how the system worked. A mechanical engineer who had co-authored a book about steam-power plants, he explained to me elementary mechanics and electrical machinery. Decades later he was still teaching me when we discussed sections of Electrifying America in draft form. By then, I was also teaching him some social and cultural history. They are at the center of the book, which fuses my education in American Studies with an understanding of technical details and an immersion in specific places. It proved to be the longest and one of the best of the books I have written for MIT Press, though an author always likes to think the next book will be the best one. (My America's Assembly Line will appear with MIT Press in spring, 2013.)

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology received a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in September, 1991, and that December it was named a Times Notable Book for the year. It won the 1991 Abel Woolman Award from the Public Works History Association, and in 1993 it received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. It is still in print.

America's Assembly Line

 After the American Century

The American Assembly line is now more than one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen were strung out in a line, on an October day, with the cars moving past each work station, and it turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods.

The American Assembly line is one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen strung out in a line, with the cars moving past each work station, turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods

The assembly line seems in retrospect to be an obvious technology. Why didn’t the manufacturing technique of subdividing the tasks of production and lining them up in the order of assembly emerge much sooner? There are many interconnected factors that explain why the assembly line emerged when it did and not before, but three were particularly important.

First, parts much be absolutely interchangeable, or else they do not fit together. Machine tools that made parts had to be extremely accurate before this was possible. Eli Whitney envisioned the advantages and convinced Thomas Jefferson to support his efforts to make identical parts for muskets. However, American armories and other manufacturers such as those making sewing machines struggles for most of the nineteenth century to achieve the precision necessary for an assembly line.

Second, in order to arrange machines and processes in an assembly line order the source of power must be extremely flexible. This was not the case in steam-driven factories, where power came steam pipes and from from overhead line shafts, belts and gears. The further steam was from its source, the less powerful it became. As a drive shaft and gear system grew longer, more and more energy was needed just to keep it turning at all. The power train in such a factory was not flexible, and therefore steam power was not well suited to experiments in manufacturing design. In contrast, electric motors, furnaces, and lights could be placed anywhere, and machines in an electrified factory could be placed in any order desired.

Third, an assembly line is expensive to set up, and it makes no economic sense to invest so much capital in one unless a large market exists, a market willing to purchase a single product.  The United States developed such a mass market, in contrast to Europe, where trade barriers balkanized the market. In France, Britain and Germany, there was a “class market” that demanded differentiated products that appealed to different segments of a smaller pool of consumers.  After 1914 European manufacturers visited Detroit to study the assembly line, but few industries could build comparable factories because Europe was not yet a mass market.

Aside from these three factories, an assembly line required sub-division of the labor into tasks of equal length, which deskilled much of the work force. It demanded that workers repeat a few actions, and annual Ford employee turnover rose to over 300 percent in 1913. In response, the company introduced the $5 Day, doubling the average wage. Not only did the higher wages keep people on the job, but workers with higher wages could afford to buy the products of mass production.

By the early 1920s half of all the automobiles in the world were Fords, Henry Ford was a billionaire, and his factory workers were among the highest paid in the world. Thus emerged a system of production that almost miraculously was able to increase production, raise profits, and pay higher wages, all at the same time. Henry Ford’s ghostwritten My Life and Work became an international bestseller. It briefly seemed that the assembly line would lift humanity to a new level of leisure and prosperity. The Boston department store owner, Edward Filine declared.

Mass production is not simply large-scale production. It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying, and that the greatest total profits can be obtained only if the masses can and do enjoy a higher and ever higher standard of living. For selfish business reasons, therefore, genuine mass production industries must make prices lower and lower and wages higher and higher, while constantly shortening the workday and bringing to the masses not only more money but more time. . . .         Edward Filene, Successful Living in This Machine Age, 1931

The story of the assembly line in subsequent decades was not quite what Filene imagined, for it was also an efficient method for producing tanks and bombers. Moreover, as the assembly line was adopted worldwide it often was used to drive down wages rather that raising them. In the Cold War, the assembly line became a symbol of American prosperity, yet at the same time many feared technological unemployment. Meanwhile, Japanese corporations reinvented the assembly line as lean production, which was then re-exported to the United States.

The assembly line is still evolving as a system of production, today largely monitored and controlled by computers and increasingly “manned” by robots. It has become inseparable from central political and social issues such as automation, unemployment, competitiveness, resource depletion and global warming. At its centennial, the assembly line was being reconceived as a green technology based on recycling and alternative energies.

These and other topics are further explored in America’s Assembly Line.

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, reconsidered

 Remarks made at MIT celebrating the fiftieth anniversary  of the publication of 

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden

 

I first heard about The Machine in the Garden when a freshman at Amherst College in 1964. I saw it reviewed in the local newspaper, and I went out and bought a copy in hard cover, as a Christmas present for my father. He was interested in the history of technology, but I was not, or so I thought. I did not consider reading it myself, until I had a course with Leo Marx the following year. 

Amherst prides itself on a low student-faculty ratio and small classes. But Professor Marx’s survey of American literature was so popular that he taught in the largest lecture room on campus. About 150 students took the course every year, which meant that about half of all the Amherst student body chose to take it. He lectured on the Puritans, natural depravity, attempts to define "what is an American" from Crévecoeur onwards, the pastoral dream of America, the madness of Ahab in Moby Dick, Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, and Whitman's barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of the world. For those of us taking the course, this literature often seemed to be a meta-commentary on our times. The generals in the Pentagon were our Ahabs, the leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements our Thoreaus, and Bob Dylan was our version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Our best hope, it seemed, was to survive the coming apocalypse as the Ishmaels of our generation. This was not the thrust of Professor Marx's course, I hasten to add, which was a most inspiring and coherent set of lectures on nineteenth century literature.  I then bought a second copy of The Machine in the Garden, by then in paperback. Reading it, I could hear Leo’s wonderfully engaging voice, which at times has an almost hypnotic quality when he reads from and explicates literature. The survey course made such an impression that his seminars were oversubscribed, and I was one of the lucky 20 who managed to get into one of them.

When each Amherst class graduated, the custom was to select a faculty member as an honorary member of the class. Shortly before graduation the faculty member selected gave a final lecture to the entire class in the College chapel. My class of 1968 selected Leo Marx, and he lectured on technology in American society, with considerable reference to Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, which had appeared the previous year. I cannot claim to recall his argument in detail, but it linked the themes of  The Machine in the Garden with sociology and philosophy, notably Martin Heidigger’s understanding that the essence of technology lies in the mind not the machine. The tensions analyzed in The Machine and the Garden were not new, but had emerged in antiquity, as with Mumford’s example was the building of the pyramids. Classical references were also in Leo’s book, notably his discussion of the emergence of the pastoral genre in ancient Greece and Rome and its re-emergence in early modern Britain.

Let me draw a few conclusions based on these Amherst years. Before its publication, Leo’s book developed to some degree through his teaching. Many close readings of particular authors were presented and no doubt refined in front of his students before the volume itself appeared. Through the process of teaching, it seems, Leo found compelling ways to make his argument. The ideas themselves had first been nurtured at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied with F O Matthiessen and Perry Miller, and where he was Henry Nash Smith’s TA. But he reworked his dissertation for over a decade. He was not forced to rush into print in order to gain tenure, as is the unhappy practice today. This is a great book partly because it was closely linked to teaching and because its author was able to give it time. 

My copy of The Machine in the Garden went with me to the University of Minnesota, where Leo had once taught, and where Alan Trachtenberg [who spoke just before I did] was one of his students. His former colleagues recalled him fondly, particularly Barney Bowron, who taught me much about late nineteenth century American literature. The Machine in the Garden was highly regarded at the Center for American Studies, and I found it useful not only in courses but also in framing my PhD thesis. Only in graduate school did I fully understand that this book was quite interdisciplinary. At Amherst the combination of history, literature, fine art, and the social sciences had seemed quite natural, but at Minnesota the faculty at these departments did not always share a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Notably, the New Criticism was still strong in the English Department, and I found that I had to defend the “myth and symbol” approach and to find arguments for the practice of American Studies itself.  To my surprise, I discovered many arguments along these lines in The Machine in the Garden, in paragraphs that had not seemed so important when I was an undergraduate. I more fully understood its importance in shaping the development of the field of American Studies. It offered a model for how to combine sweeping analysis with close readings of texts, including literature, political speeches, government reports, and much more. It was genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on classics, history, psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and  fine art, even as it kept the main focus on literature.

By the middle 1970s when I was out of graduate school, academic fashions were changing rapidly. The field of American Studies was going through a transformation that emphasized social history more than literature and that focused on racial injustice, class tensions, and gender inequality.  These matters were not excluded from the American Studies I had known at Amherst, and it has always seemed to me that they were very much part of the tradition of American Studies that Leo represented. Nevertheless, each academic generation seems to establish itself by attacking those who went before. The so-called “myth and symbol school,” which in fact never formally existed or identified itself by that name, came under attack. This is not the place to rehearse the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Suffice it to say that while it is true that the book might have included such writers as Willa Cather or Ralph Ellison, their addition would not have undermined or compromised the argument, but rather showed its strengths. There is an enormous difference between leaving someting out because it does not fit a line of argument and leaving something out because not all of American literature can be discussed in a single book. In any case, The Machine in the Garden has outlasted its critics, most of whom  are little remembered today except by specialists. It remains in pint, and people continue to cite it today. It is so well-known that other books refer to it in their very titles. In 1994 appeared, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton), in 2004 The Machine in Neptune’s Garden (Watson Science), and in 2001 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.  The journalist Joel Garreau has written an essay, "The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise" (1991). There is also a gothic/darkwave musical duo who call themselves “The Machine in the Garden”. No doubt there are more examples.

Throughout my academic life both Leo and his book have preceded me. When I went to Spain on a Fulbright, I found that Leo had been there lecturing the year before, and The Machine in the Garden  was a celebrated work. When I went for a year to The Netherlands, I found that he was friends with several people there, and that he had apparently lectured at all their universities. He had also spent a Fulbright himself in Britain, and he was well-known in Germany. Furthermore, Leo spent enough of his childhood in France to speak that language. It is difficult to find a European professor of American literature who has not read The Machine in the Garden. I could give many more examples, but one final one. A month ago I sat down at a random table in an airport restaurant waiting for my flight. At the next table a Finnish woman was talking about a lecture she was going to give in Stockholm about ecology and literature. It turned out that one of the first books cited in her paper was The Machine in the Garden.

When I bought that first edition for my father fifty years ago, I could never have imagined how much it would come to mean for me, for American Studies, and for the history of technology. As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is also being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in other fields. It remains useful in my research and teaching. A colleague at the University of Texas told me that the new graduate students are quite interested in it. One of my classmates from Amherst, Gordon Radley who has a high position at Lucas Films, tells me that The Machine in the Garden has been influential in the formation of some of their motion pictures. If a comprehensive study were done of this book's influence, many more such stories would come to light.

After half a century of prominence, The Machine in the Garden has become an important part of  American culture. It is one of those rare books that is, at the same time, a primary source and a secondary source.  We read it both as one of the highest achievements of American Studies in its first two decades, and as a compelling meditation on the place of technology in American society. 

Technologies Matter

Editorial Statement

This blog is produced by myself, David E. Nye, and it is devoted to technologies understood as part of culture. It is not exclusively about one nation, but it does focus to some degree on the United States, where I am a citizen, and on Denmark, where I live. The word "technology" is not often clearly defined and explained. Therefore, I begin this blog with a brief definition of the word.

Technology

The word "technology" emerged into English from Latin during the seventeenth century to describe systematic study in the applied arts. It was not a widely used term in the eighteenth century, when it was defined as a description of the mechanical arts. In the United States it became a bit more familiar after the publication of Elements of Technology in 1832. It was written by a Harvard University professor, Jacob Bigelow, and for the next decade one finds references to the term primarily in citations of his book. As Leo Marx has observed, "through most of the nineteenth century, the word technology referred to a kind of book," typically a manual that described a particular branch of mechanical knowledge. A few engineering colleges embraced the term, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it remained unusual. Only at the end of that century did a few sophisticated writers such as Thorstein Veblen begin to use the word to refer to the practical arts collectively, and this conception was not widely adopted until c. 1920.

Before that time, Americans employed other terms to speak about what would later be called technology. They spoke of the "mechanic arts" or the "useful arts" or perhaps "science" in contexts where one might use "technology" today. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that the word began to mean entire systems of machines, and even so at times it is used as an annoyingly vague abstraction that is both cause and effect. More recently, during the 1990s, the unstable meaning of the word was further complicated when journalists and stock market trades began to use "technology" as a synonym for computers, information systems, and digital devices of all kinds. This blog will not use the term in that way.

Within the field of the history of technology, the term is generally understood to refer to techniques, tools, and machines embedded in cultural contexts. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine human beings as pre-technological. All peoples seem to have some tools, such as traps, clothing, weapons, pottery, baskets, ovens, or irrigation systems. All cultures seem to have developed tools to provide shelter, protection, food, warmth, music, art, and entertainment. These devices pre-existed the relatively recent technology of writing, which emerged thousands of years later. Technologies are inseparable from verbal, visual and kinetic systems of meaning, which vary from one culture to another. In short, technologies are inseparable from what it means to be human, but they vary from one group to another. Even within one country, considerable variations are common.

When so defined, technology does not refer to a deterministic system of machines that marches inexorably toward some inevitable result. Rather, technologies are socially constructed, malleable, and constantly evolving. While some authors still espouse deterministic ideas about technology, these are seldom scholars in the history of technology. They do not agree with Karl Marx that new forms of production force society to develop a certain class structure. It is a misguided notion to think that society passes through inevitable stages, such as "Taylorism" and "Fordism,"  Nor do they agree with Marshall McLuhan or others who argue that systems of communication have a decisive effect on the shape of society. 

Through technologies, people can enable diversity, but governments and monopolies can also use technologies to impose uniformity. There is noting inevitable about their adoption and use, whether windows, fences, street railways, light bulbs, radio, computer games, or the Internet. Each can be manufactured, adopted, and used in different ways. The process of incorporation is not only a question of invention, development, and manufacturing but also political, gendered, symbolic, and psychological. 

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For a detailed history of "technology" see Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

I reviewed this book in Technology and Culture 61:4 October, 2020, 1212-1213.

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