The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production

American historians of technology have shown a sustained fascination with mass production and the American system of manufactures. Over time this historical interest has moved well beyond the initial questions concerning machine tools and production methods to include concerns for workers and the communities in which they lived. Lindy Biggs’s study focuses upon yet another element of mass production, the development of the factory buildings that housed assembly lines. She argues that engineers and others motivated by visions of a “factory that could run like a great machine” (p. 6) shaped factory structures during the early twentieth century.

Biggs adopts the metaphor of this “master machine” as the unifying element in her book, which takes as its time period the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her opening chapter ranges over familiar nineteenth-century antecedents to mass production, including Oliver Evans’s grain mill, early textile production, meat packing, bicycle manufacturing, fruit and vegetable canning, and Alexander Holley and Bessemer steelmaking. In broad brush strokes she sets the stage for the later development of the assembly line. The next three chapters focus on factory development from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, with special attention to the role of what would come to be called industrial engineers. The final three chapters examine Henry Ford’s buildings as examples of the rational factory.

The chapters covering industrial engineers may be the most important in the book. No good historical summary of this subdiscipline of engineering exists, so Biggs’s quick account of the emerging educational patterns for industrial engineers is a welcome addition. A number of schools, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, paid attention to manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, and slowly management issues appeared in engineering curricula. But industrial engineering, Biggs tells us, formally took shape in the early twentieth century against the backdrop of the combined demands of handling the flow of materials and finished products and a workforce in ever larger facilities. A number of schools, including Penn State, Cornell, Carnegie Tech, and MIT, offered industrial engineering programs by 1920, as pressure grew to provide engineers with a better understanding of economics and business. But Biggs shows that industrial engineers were concerned with more than profit-and-loss considerations. They also were motivated by a vision of the factory as a “master machine.” These engineers believed they could not only advance manufacturing efficiency but also resolve pressing social problems, including labor unrest, by attention to improved flow of materials in factories and through improved design of the buildings. Workers were seen as another component of their machine. In key respects, industrial engineers resembled other experts who claimed special abilities as solvers of the Progressive era’s technical, economic, and social problems.

In subsequent chapters, Biggs examines industrial engineers working on two difficulties: the “labor problem” and factory design. The first is familiar, and Biggs builds her discussion from other historians’ studies of welfare capitalism. She moves quickly over such matters as light, air, and motion in work environments to look at broader corporate welfare schemes of planned communities, controlled leisure activities, and so forth. But her focus remains fixed upon the engineers, as opposed to the industrial sociologists and other reformers who emerged at the same time. Then she follows the impacts of three technical developments vital to the engineers’ goal of rational factories: materials handling, reinforced concrete, and electricity.

All of these elements come together in Biggs’s examination of the physical form of Henry Ford’s factories. In chapters devoted to his primary structures (Highland Park, 1910–14; the New Shop at Highland Park, 1914–19; and River Rouge) she tracks Ford’s deep commitment to the industrial engineers’ ideal of the factory as a giant machine. She examines how new construction techniques, materials (reinforced concrete and glass), and materials handling techniques influenced building designs. In the end...