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

By Lindy Biggs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 202pp. $39.95).

"A factory that could run like a great machine" - that is Lindy Biggs' definition of the rational factory. Her slim book is devoted to documenting the slow but definite progress toward establishing well planned, fully mechanized and automated manufacturing plants in the United States. From the evidence she provides, it remains unclear whether this vision of industrial engineers has ever been realized.

At the very dawn of the industrial era, Oliver Evans presented a model of the rational factory; the continuous processing of raw materials occurred in his famed late eighteenth-century automatic flour mill. Evans, and others of his age, may have been driven by what Biggs terms "the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment," but Evans's example would not be followed for more than another century. Biggs notes the great technological developments that soon unfolded in textile manufacture. Spinning and weaving machines dramatically replaced (and reduced the cost of) hand labor. Yet, rationalized production was not achieved in the impressive stone and brick, three and four story textile mills that heralded industrialization in the U.S. The factories were constructed by millwrights to house the new machinery with little concern for improving the flow and handling of materials through the entire productive process.

In her brief treatment of the growth of textile manufacture, Biggs neglects important advances in through-processing. Although it may not have entailed the deliberate decision making that defines her rational factory, at least in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, an innovative system of production was achieved - with the hoisting of cleaned and carded raw materials to the top floors of the buildings for spinning; the reels of spun thread then brought downstairs for weaving, the finished bolts of cloth packaged on the ground floors. Unified belting systems for energy transmission were also developed. Early in the book, the reader in fact learns that Biggs does not associate rationalized manufacture with vertical production. Her study is a paean to one-story plants and horizontal manufacture. For her, early efforts at moving assembly-line production in meatpacking and canning represent the only bona fide advances toward the rational factory in the first stages of American industrialization (in this respect, the author also ignores certain assembly-line aspects of gun manufacture in her discussion of the development of interchangeable parts production techniques).

Progress toward the rational factory accelerated after the Civil War, especially with the emergence of a new professional class of industrial engineers. Educated broadly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other engineering schools, these men would possess and utilize expertise in plant construction and layout, materials flow and transport, and machinery as well as factory lighting, heating and ventilation. In overseeing the building of factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial engineers promoted the adoption of reinforced concrete walls and floors, traveling cranes, conveyor systems, internal railways, and electrification. Biggs notes that their endeavors overlapped with other emerging "engineers" of the American workplace: disciples of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who tended to have more microscopic views, attending to the cataloguing and regulation of specific work tasks, and so-called welfare workers, who developed various benefit programs that encouraged the greater loyalty and diligence of employees. Biggs emphasizes the mutual concerns and objectives of these pioneer management consultants - greater efficiency, fluidity and even interpersonal harmony in production; she does not analyze how these disparate professionals stepped on each others toes, vied for favor, and, in many cases, were disregarded.

For Biggs, progress in creating the rational factory culminated with Henry Ford's motor company and his model Highland Park and River Rouge plants. Biggs echoes recent interpretations of Ford that emphasize the firm's staggered progress toward the mass production of cars. Ford's first advances were in standardized parts production using precision single-purpose machinery; this and not moving assembly lines dramatically reduced the cost of manufacturing the Model T. With increased demand, Ford opened a spanking modern facility in Highland Park, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, in 1910. Biggs shows, however, that it was only the facade that was new - architect Albert Kahn's impressive, large, windowed, reinforced concrete shell. Inside, production remained clogged; parts, cast, forged, lathed, and drilled in adjoining buildings and brought by hand-pushed carts, piled up in the aisles of the stationary assembly area. When company managers experimented with a moving assembly line, the much publicized Highland Park plant proved unsuitable despite various reconstructions. Ford then decided to build a gigantic manufacturing complex further outside of Detroit in River Rouge (this initiative, stymied at first by investors who sued to see profits turned into dividends, not new facilities, would be assisted by government subsidies during World War I).

Stretching over a thousand acres, River Rouge contained major manufacturing plants for the production of steel, rubber, tires, glass, cement, and electrical power as well as an extensive rail system. The complex also boasted long assembly sheds; parts, continuously arriving there by rail cars, were attached to overhead conveyor belts and put in place by workers who toiled alongside moving assembly lines. The designers of River Rouge thus achieved Biggs's rational factory by the early 1920s. But, Biggs cannot fully celebrate. As she admits, standardized parts produced with single-purpose machinery for assembly into a standard Model T made for a fluid production system, but also for bad business. Ford's elephantine plant could not compete with the diversified, flexible production system developed simultaneously at General Motors. River Rouge meets Biggs's criteria for a rational factory. The achievement cannot be labeled a success.

For students of American industrial history, there is little that is new in this book. The study emphasizes the importance of factory design, but Biggs's treatment does not surpass Daniel Nelson's chapters on the subject in his 1975 classic, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920. Biggs also missed an important opportunity. She introduces industrial engineers to the story of American industrialization (these professionals did not formally associate until 1917 with the founding of the Society of Industrial Engineers). Unfortunately, they appear too fleetingly in this work. Their collective biography - treating who they were, their evolving beliefs and how they fared in practice - was (is) in order.

University of Pennsylvania