Unit 9: Technology in America

Late Nineteenth Century

Edison's Gramophone (phonograph)

Electricity was playing its role in communications during the nineteenth century, yet a new use for this source of power was developed by the most famous of all American inventors, Thomas Alva Edison, whose workshops located in Menlo Park, NJ, brought forth the system of motion pictures, the phonograph, and, as everyone knows, the electric light. This productivity earned Edison the title of The Wizard of Menlo Park. Regarding the electric light, most people concentrate attention on the story of the long search for a suitable filament that would not burn out after a short life of intense heat. Yet the successful development of electrical lighting depended more on solving less dramatic problems than that. The technology of electric lighting is a system. As Edison himself put it:

The lamps must be adapted to the current of the dynamos, and the dynamos must be constructed to give the character of the current required by the lamps, and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine, and the connections between the parts being electrical instead of mechanical. Like any other machine the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended.

One crucial problem that Edison solved was one that many experts said was impossible to solve, namely, how to divide the electricity so it would flow in different locations when the circuit was interrupted at other locations. The experts could only envision what we call a series' circuit, where the failure (or absence) of any element along the path would cause an interruption in the flow of electricity through the entire circuit. Edison was clever enough to devise a ‘parallel' delivery of electricity, which does not require electricity to flow through every element. The solution to the problem of dividing the electricity is less dramatic than that of visualizing workmen huddled around a glowing bulb, congratulating themselves as every hour ticks by.

At the end of the nineteenth century, America was the scene of another significant technological development. This time no new invention was directly involved. Frederick Winslow Taylor began to conduct his time-motion

Frederick Winslow Taylor

studies in order to discover the most efficient ways for laborers to accomplish their tasks. The art of management was being transformed into the science of management. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Scientific Management merged with the concept of the assembly line for manufacture, a notion borrowed by Henry Ford from the practices of cattle

slaughtering houses, where carcasseswere hung on hooks that traveled to different processing stations in the slaughterhouse. So, Taylorism and Fordism combined to make the American system of manufacture in the twentieth century the dreary, mindless, alienating way of working so effectively satirized by Charlie Chaplin in his classic motion picture, Modern Times.

Henry Ford	Charlie Chaplin

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