InfoBritain - Travel Through History In The UK :
History Of Mass Production
The Age of Mass Production
The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, London, showing "Embankment" by Rachel Whiteread
Cars were one of the first major consumer items to be built in vast quantities by production lines. Nowadays we are apt to think that when something is mass produced it is, by definition, lacking in quality and refinement. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that the originators of mass produced cars were perfectionists rather than commercially minded people who were only interested in making things as quickly and cheaply as possible. Frederick Lanchester, a pioneering English car designer, always worried his commercially minded company directors by his insistence on quality. The Lanchester directors were of the opinion that it was better to use cheap labour to hand fit parts. Lanchester disagreed. He wanted to guarantee the quality of his product, and the only way to do this was to take unpredictable individual hands out of the manufacturing process. Lanchester insisted on the use of standardised parts made with precision machine tools. The word "manufacture" means to make by hand, but Lanchester wanted to change this.
Lanchester's contemporary, the American industrialist Henry Leland had similar views. In Detroit in 1899 the car maker Ransom Olds asked Leland's advice on producing a transmission free of the noise and vibration that afflicted Olds cars at that time. Leland was appalled to find that Olds transmissions had gears hand filed to make them fit. Leland removed such vagaries, using the gear cutting expertise of his own company to produce precision ground gears interchangeable between cars without any hand fitting. In this way Olds transmissions were made to run quietly and smoothly.
Mass production has a history that stretches back much further than Detroit in the 1890s. You are reading a page on the internet which can be reproduced on millions of computers (yes I can dream). This led on from the printed book, which once again could be printed in huge numbers; and the printed book dates back to the Gutenburg Bible of about 1440. But even before 1440, when books were written out by hand, we can still think of standardised production. The hand writing of the scribes was itself stylised and standardised. In 789AD the emperor Charlemagne, whose influence extended over much of Europe, issued an edict decreeing a fixed style of hand writing. This style endured for centuries, eventually developing into the Gothic script used by the original German printers. Hand writing itself was designed to take away the vagaries of individual hands. I typed this page in a font called Times New Roman - luckily for you as my hand writing is not the best. This font dates back to the very earliest days of printing when the German printers Sweynheim and Pannartz introduced printing into Italy. Working in Subiaco they had to abandon the familiar Gothic form of their text and find a style more in accordance with that used by the Italian scribes of the time. It is this style that we now call "Roman". What you are reading is a standardised font. It is also an echo of the handwriting of an Italian scribe working five hundred years ago.
Going back even further into history Randy White of New York University has studied the abundance of beads and other body ornaments that suddenly appeared in France, Belgium and Germany 28,000 years ago. White comes to the conclusion that "once the prized raw material was procured, it was shaped, polished and drilled using standardised production techniques to ensure uniformity of design." (P326 The Neandertal Enigma by James Shreeve)
Mass production has always been with us, generally speaking as a way of ensuring quality. But this has not always been the case. Going back to printing, the earliest printers initially showed the same perfectionist tendencies displayed by Lanchester and Leland in building cars. In Antwerp in the 1560s Christopher Plantin began to turn printing into an industry. He was a man "who never allowed commercial considerations to lower the typographical standard of the books." (A History of European Printing by Colin Clair) Things went the other way in the nineteenth century with the coming of the steam press. The necessity to produce cheaper books and newspapers meant that standards fell, and mass production gained its poor reputation. It was during the nineteenth century that people like William Morris began to worry that mechanised production was taking away opportunities for individual creativity, and tending to dehumanise people's working lives. Morris planned to counter these apparent problems with a revival of handicrafts. Numerous craft based associations and communities were founded, and the idea of something being hand made became rather fashionable. To satisfy this demand some large scale manufacturers introduced hand made or hand finished "art" ranges. Morris's intentions were egalitarian, but the customers for these hand made products were of course the better off. A memorial to the Arts and Crafts movement is now preserved at Standen in Sussex, a grand house decorated by William Morris.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the Arts and Crafts movement had largely died out as an influential voice. Designers realised that producing goods by hand to a reliable standard was simply not economically viable. Adam Smith had made this point in the late eighteenth century in his Wealth Of Nations. In the industry of pin manufacture Smith pointed out that one man working alone might be able to make twenty pins a day. Ten men working together, dividing the work into separate tasks, could make a staggering 48,000 pins a day. (Wealth of Nations Bk 1 Chapter 1)The 48,000 pins of the production line would also be of higher quality than the twenty pins made by the individual, since each man on the production line became an expert in his piece of the process. With division of labour and mass production offering such benefits the idea of basing serious production on one person making a product was never realistic. It also became clear that industrialised production was not incompatible with either creativity or beauty. For the American architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright mass production was democratic in making it possible for the poor as well as the rich to "enjoy beautiful surface treatments and clean strong forms." He believed that industrialised production was "capable of carrying to fruition high ideals in art" and "ultimately emancipate human expression." "(Quoted The Oxford History of Western Art P383) In 1943 Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York to display his vision. Meanwhile new groups such as the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907came together to develop high quality designs for mass production. The First World War turned some people against mass production for a while, with its connotations of mechanised slaughter. Even the great designer Walter Gropius felt like this temporally. But by the 1920s the commitment to rational mass produced design had returned.
The history of modern design can be explored at the Design Museum in London. The Design Museum is full of quirky products and really brought home to me the creativity of design. The close association between modern industrial design and modern art can be experienced first hand at the Tate Modern, built in an old power station on London's Bankside.
Today we live in a society where the benefits of mass production are so all encompassing that it is hard to see them. But there is still a sense in which the words hand made suggest quality. The Green movement is perhaps the new Arts and Crafts constituency, though the contradictions that bedeviled the vision of William Morris still apply. If the goal is greater efficiency and less waste then mass production is the way to go. Hand made, as it was during William Morris's time, remains largely a sales gimmick for the rich. I recall reading about the actor Hugh Grant who paid £685,000 for an Aston Martin Vanquish built specifically to his requirements. According to the article there was a plaque inside the driver's door which read: "Vanquish V12, hand built in England for Hugh Grant." Frederick Lanchester and Henry Leland would not have approved. From their point of view the millions of people who bought Alec Issigonis's revolutionary Mini would have been more likely recipients of quality than Hugh Grant. We see quality in the hand made approach that once left Ransom Olds' cars clattering along the road. No doubt most of Hugh Grant's Aston Martin was built with machine tools. The basic process would have been the same as that used by Frederick Lanchester. Perhaps on Hugh Grant's car a few more parts than usual were assembled by hand, and there was a bit of hand polishing of woodwork going on. But that would have been it. The most famous of the hand build specialists in car manufacture always maintained quality by standardising parts. Harry Miller who produced racing engines between the wars is famous for "hand building" his engines, but each hand assembled part was built with machine tools. Often Miller had to supply engines for most of the field at the Indianapolis 500, and the only way to guarantee the quality of all these engines was to standardise parts. Parts on a Miller engine were interchangeable without modification by hand, just as in a mass produced engine. It wouldn't make sense to do things any other way.
Chairs at the Design Museum
There is a pleasant egalitarian message here. Or rather we can see the message we want to see. Both communist and capitalist governments have embraced the notions of mass production as their own. In the world of twentieth century art, there were artists in the West working in a style known as Fordism. This style was named after the car maker Henry Ford, who did more that anyone else to automate the car production industry. Fordism became, as Peter Wollen has written "a vision not only of greater productivity, necessary for the development of capitalism, but also a new model of social organisation with universal implications." (Quoted in Tate Modern The Handbook ed Iwona Blazwick and Simon Wilson P84) In Soviet Russia artists were busily doing the bidding of the Committee of Arts by painting "industrial triumphs and agrarian fecundity" (Oxford History of Western Art Ed Martin Kemp P470) It's as if the ideals of individualism and collectivism and both embraced.