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Technology and Culture 42.1 (2001) 51-80



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"As Near as Practicable": Precision, Ambiguity, and the Social Features of Industrial Quality Control

Amy Slaton

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In 1906, Anson Marston, dean of engineering at Iowa State College, asserting that a new six-year degree program in his division ranked on a par with the college's curricula in law and medicine, claimed for his intellectual progeny membership in "a great learned profession." In the same year Charles Dudley, the prominent industrial chemist, exhorted engineering instructors to avoid overemphasizing "accumulated information" in their teaching to the "neglect of underlying principle and reason." Technical work, these men suggested, was rarified mental labor. A consulting engineer put it simply in 1915: "And who has to think more deeply than the engineer?" 1

Strange, then, to find that from 1900 onward, graduates of prestigious American engineering schools commonly left the tidy confines of the laboratory for grittier environs: the dust and smoke of the modern concrete construction site. 2 Outwardly the work bore little resemblance to the white-coated [End Page 51] and cerebral enterprise we think of as science, or even to the intrepid explorations of field researchers in geology or biology. In tin sheds overheated by the summer sun technicians checked stacks of cement pats for tiny cracks; in dank excavations they tested the solidity of pilings. They carted sieves and scales up scaffolding and down into caissons and filled out reams of preprinted report forms. For all the tedium of their jobs, however, the testers did seem to fulfill the elevated aspirations of their mentors. They worked for building and engineering firms at exceptionally high rates of pay and promotion and maintained positions of authority over laborers in the building trades. Employers handed them responsibility for millions of dollars in materials and investment. Their portable strain gauges safe in velvet-lined boxes, their mantles of expertise secure in the blowing dust and flowing mud, these young men brought scientific procedures to the construction site, and in so doing imported an entire hierarchy of skill and opportunity into this industrial workplace. The origins and consequences of that intellectual authority are the subjects of this article.

I will be following here the worldly travels of scientific knowledge through the corridors of commerce, examining routine applications of science that parallel in some ways the investment American businesses made in research and development in this period, but with implications for many more workers. Railroads, as large consumers of steel, had pioneered science-based testing and inspection at midcentury, and in the 1880s a group of influential scientists and engineers had begun developing standardized procedures for use on the shop floor or construction site. Working in university laboratories or private consulting firms, these specialists in industrial materials found a highly receptive market for their services. By 1900 producers of rubber, pharmaceuticals, sugar, machine parts, and industrial equipment relied on chemists and materials engineers to bring laboratory science to their expanding plant operations. 3 Engineering firms turned to science-based testing when erecting large commercial buildings and civil projects, while federal and city agencies introduced their own regulatory testing and inspection that further necessitated industrial adoption of the new scientific procedures. Across the American commercial arena a vast army of inspectors and testers deployed these new methods to scrutinize raw materials and finished products and structures. In many enterprises, workmen traditionally performed a basic level of preliminary inspection as [End Page 52] they went about their labor and foremen monitored the progress of work crews, but manufacturing and engineering firms now began to employ specially trained inspection personnel to oversee those employees. 4

In concrete construction projects the connection between technical controls and operational efficiency was particularly obvious. Here was a building medium predicated on flow in the truest sense of the word; concrete begins as a liquid poured into forms and achieves its strength as it hardens. If all goes well the process is ceaseless, with one portion of a structure being poured as the previous portion hardens. As innovative projects...

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