Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (review)

Kathleen Franz has written an interesting, well-researched, and thought-provoking book that touches on a range of topics familiar to readers of this journal. Studying automotive tinkering—which she defines narrowly as the "user modification of the automobile body" (p. 3)—helps Franz explore user agency, the potential flexibility of sociotechnical identities, and the American culture of inventiveness during the first few decades of the twentieth century. During this period many middle-class motorists modified their cars, as the artifact itself remained open to—even required—user modification. Franz argues, however, that by the mid-1930s design changes in the automobile reflected deliberate marginalization of consumer tinkering and "limited the space in which individual tinkerers could intervene in the design of the automobile" (p. 128).

Franz wants to draw scholarly attention to the act of tinkering because she sees it as manifesting grass-roots challenges to dominant constructions of technology and society. She shows that between 1900 and 1930, both male and female consumers reinvented the automobile as they "outfitted, altered, cut-up and tinkered with their individual cars to render them more comfortable, efficient, and versatile vehicles for long-distance travel" (p. 161). They added trunks, beds, tops, tents, and more, thereby blurring the line between production and consumption. Such postproduction agency has gained considerable attention in the history of technology in recent years, and Franz contributes the perspective of a scholar versed in American studies and material culture to this dialogue.

Extending Virginia Scharff's argument in Taking the Wheel (1991), Franz focuses part of her study on women's mechanical inventiveness, resourcefulness, and ingenuity; women in particular "used the automobile to help revise their relationship to public space" (p. 43). Yet she finds that automobile travel, which elicited so much inventiveness among middle-class motorists of both sexes, eventually hampered women's claim to status when domestic roles, transported from the home to the campsite, closed "the window of opportunity" to renegotiate their sociotechnical identities (p. 72). Franz understandably foregrounds the role of gendered auto-camp relations in limiting women's roles, even though the process of gendering the automobile occurred over much broader cultural and technological terrain.

The strength of Franz's book emerges in her third and fourth chapters, where she gives life and voice to the ebbing wave of inventiveness that Thomas Hughes and others have noted in aggregate for this period. Drawing on extensive original research into one hundred auto-accessory patents and two hundred letters that amateur inventors sent to the Ford Motor Company, Franz shows how a self-help industry of patent lawyers and technology publications nurtured the myth of emulation and invention well into the period of corporate R&D and encouraged the increasingly quixotic efforts of motorist-inventors.

In addition to these hundreds of single-patent inventors, Franz follows Earl Tupper's failed attempts (well before his success with Tupperware) to patent and market a rumble-seat top. Tupper's story clarifies how increasing patent and production costs, combined with the shift in automobile design to streamlined, all-metal bodies, left little room for the kinds of add-on modifications common to campgrounds and roadsides just a few years earlier. Franz argues that this was not simply the unintended consequence of maturing automotive technology. Engineers and industrial designers, who were often contemptuous of layperson fabrications, intentionally sought to recast consumers as passive recipients of corporate innovations. "Although drivers continued to tinker throughout the Great Depression, more complete cars, all-steel streamlined bodies, and the concerted effort of corporations to draw a line between users and innovators worked to discourage the active modifications of automobiles by average Americans" (p. 160).

Ironically, Franz counts the consumer out too easily. She asserts in her epilogue that after 1939 "tinkering with cars was no longer the pastime of a wide cross-section of middle-class American consumers as it was when the automobile was new" (p. 162). If tinkering is limited to body modifications for camping and...