151: Lindy Biggs' Rational Factory

In The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production, Lindy Biggs examines the relationship between rationalized, mechanized mass production and the buildings in which the new assembly lines were housed.  Focusing primarily on the Ford Motor Company, with supporting evidence ranging from Oliver Evans' flour mill to the professionalization of engineering, Biggs argues that the rational factory combined people, machines, and architecture into an organic, highly efficient machine.

Biggs tells a rather linear narrative of the development of the rational factory.  While Oliver Evans had designed a mill in the 1780s that could continuously process wheat into flour (wheat entered the top floor and exited the bottom floor as flour), his integration of form and workflow was relatively ignored until the second half of the 19th century.  Early 19th century textile mills had only minor interest in controlling workflow.  However, after the civil war, the rise of the new profession of industrial engineering, in combination with the proliferation of new "processing industries" like meatpacking and steelmaking, led to renewed interest in workflow design, especially in the context of both a competitive market and worker resistance.

142: Marcus & Segal's Technology in America

Alan Marcus and Howard Segal's Technology in America: A Brief History is a clear, readable, social constructivist history of technological development in the United States from the early 17th century to the late 20th.  While its scope keeps the history of any particular technological development to the length of an encyclopedia article, its investment in social construction means that technologies are contextualized within social, economic, cultural, and historical developments.  The result is a history of America told through the history of technology, with an emphasis on the ways in which American culture determines technological development.

Throughout, Marcus and Segal focus not on why things didn't happen, but on how things did happen.  What made a technology acceptable and therefore applicable was a) how it was conceptualized and b) how it was explained to and understood by the people who would use it.  Both technologies & their implementation are the products of what their inventors, investors, and potential users understand of their situation and whether they think a particular