Culture and Technological Transformation

Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue canadienne d'etud.esa1111•ricaines Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 19S-203 Culture and Technological Transformations Angela Gugliotta 195 Lindy Biggs. The Riltional Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 169 and notes, bibliographic essay and index. Mark H. Rose. Cities of Light and Heat: Doniesticating Gas ami Electricity m Urban Anierica. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 201 and bibliographic essay and index. Maureen Ogle. All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing 1840-1890. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp xii + 160 and notes, bibliographic essay and index. These recent books in the history of technology chronicle the development of some defining material commonplaces of twentieth-century American life: indoor plumbing, gas and electricity, and the mechanized factory. John Staudenmaier, in a 1990 American Historical Reuiew essay on the history of technology highlighted historiographical struggles against the traditional "master narrative" of "the whig reading of Western technological evolution 196 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes americaine.s as inevitable and autonomous" (Staudenmaier 1990, 725). Since then, historians have redoubled their efforts to understand technology as a product made by human cultures, rather than as an autonomous force determining the unfolding of human history. These three books treat hard cases for technological antideterminism-cases in which we are most inclined to see improved quality of life and industrial efficiency as inherent in technologies shaped unproblematically by obvious material needs. The books examine rich bodies of sources and fill important gaps in the history of everyday life and, for this reason alone, are worthwhile and useful contributions. In addition, all three, both through their historical methods and their explicit theoretical discussions, call attention to central historiographical dilemmas concerning the imperatives, limitations, and power of constructivist technology studies. In doing so they make clear the persistent difficulties in exorcizing the determinist ghost from the machine. Lindy Biggs's The Rational Factory traces the embodiment of the ideal of the factory as a machine in American mass production facilities. Biggs argues that changes driven by this ideal, including the eventual construction of factory buildings around a mechanically conceived production process, were central to the development of mass production. She concentrates on changes in materials transport and handling and factory architecture, which have been deemphasized by historians in favour of the study of the mechanization of individual production operations. Biggs finds the origins of the rational factory ideal in Enlightenment mechanical philosophy, and sees a precocious American embodiment in Oliver Evans flour mill (1791). Despite Evans's example, other early nineteenth century efforts mechanized only individual operations, while improvements in materials handling and factory architecture would reshape the factory as a whole later in the century. Biggs looks at differing motivations for the mechanization of individual operations in the early-nineteenthcentury textile, paper, and arms industries, and chronicles the latenineteenth -century emergence of mechanized materials handling in the processing industries of meatpacking, canning, and steelmaking. Biggs discusses the concurrent rise of the profession of industrial engineering in response to the fragmentation of knowledge of the production process caused by division of labour and shop-floor de-skilling. She highlights the architectural flexibility introduced by reinforced concrete and electrification -which allowed factory form to more directly serve factory function. Angela Gugliotta I 197 In her last three chapters, Biggs traces the rationalization process in the American automobile industry-following the development of Ford plants from 1910 through the 1930s. As demand for Model T's increased after 1900, Henry Ford expanded operations, beyond his nineteenth-century-style plant in Detroit, to suburban Highland Park, Michigan. In his first (Old) Highland Park plant, in 1913, he first experimented with a moving assembly line, cranes, and monorails, but the second (New) Highland Park facility (constructed 1914-19), would be built around the requirements of the assembly line. Biggs takes this move to designing the building around the production process to be just as important as the introduction of the assembly line itself, hence the prominence of "architecture" in the book's title. Bmlt, in Dearborn...