AMERICAN GENESIS
By Thomas P. Hughes
Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989, 529 pages
Reviewed by Michael Beach
One theme shared in American Genesis by Thomas P. Hughes refers to a sort of pendulum. Close to the turn of, and well into, the 20th century, technology was seen in many ways as a metaphor for improvement or advancement. Technology became a tool to put order into the chaos of nature, a means of control. Hughes points out, through lots of examples, how technology tends to evolve from the independent inventor working towards some sort of innovation, who is at some point taken over by, or creates, large institutions which then advance technology more incrementally. Once the larger institutions get involved, the scale ramps up. The institutions can be varied; commercial industry for profit, or maybe government organizations for social welfare. Whatever the motivation, upping the scale and improved efficiency tend to go hand-in-hand. Towards the end of the 20th century the pendulum, Hughes argues, began to swing in the other direction. As life became more standardized, more urbanized, more crowded, there has been a call to better balance the modern with the natural. Interestingly enough, it is technology that is making this movement more possible. As electricity, communications, and transportation have been able to reach ever more rural parts of a given country, the need for physical centralized workers and resources has lessened. Even in industries that require physical assets such as manufacturing, the days of placing all the stages of manufacture (raw materials, parts manufacture, and assembly) in a single mega-complex are giving way to a more dispersed chain. Automobile manufacture and assembly are no longer concentrated in the US in Detroit for example.
Similar to a portion of the Hughes argument on the tendency toward up-scaling, Susan Douglas in her work Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 uses the example of Marconi, among others. The focus of the book, and the story of the Marconi group of companies, is narrower than American Genesis. In the Douglas work Marconi makes the evolution from innovative inventor, to corporate controlled strategy, to incremental technological improvement. Unfortunately for Marconi, the rest of the industry shifted with customer expectation. Marconi attempted to shape customer expectation which worked for a while, until it didn’t. The example Hughes shares about Ford and his creation of the Highland Park and River Rouge facilities that literally housed all aspects of car manufacture, including a smelting plant for turning ore into steel, shows that Ford eventually recognized the need for change. Moving around portions of the car manufacture to put smelting close to the mining sites, parts manufacture in other locations, and assembly in yet other locations was a responsiveness to advantages of decentralization as the support technologies made it possible. Douglas shows the pattern through the experience of multiple companies in a single industry. Hughes shows the pattern through multiple companies in multiple industries, including large government efforts such as nuclear energy and electrification. Then he takes it a step further to show the reflection of the pattern in art and architectural trends.
What Hughes brings forward in this work is to show how patterns of thought that relate to the intersection of technology and society are much more widespread than is evident in just one industry, or just in industry. Growing scale, and a need to improve efficiency to improve profit, lower costs, or any other motivation comes with a cost. At some points in history the cost was seen as a benefit, at other points as a negative. The “main” message of the author, if there is one, is not always clear. Because he is simultaneously documenting other trends as well, the work feels as if there is no specific central message. Perhaps there isn’t one intentionally. The pendulum I mentioned, for example, only becomes clear toward the latter half of the work. Other threads, such as societal perspectives and the resultant variation of approach to technology, are also woven through the book. Individual history of inventors and how that affects their individual approach is another early theme. The US model of increased productivity in a capitalistic society is contrasted with how other political and societal situations adapted the approach with varying success, is another theme. If the intended audience is academia and the specialized disciplines considering how society and technology interact, then there are plenty of areas for the student to focus on. However, if a reader does not approach the work from that perspective, they could find the work feels less organized. If I were considering my own future research, I think my own approach would be to focus on a more central theme or idea, any theme Hughes used would work, then consider the other areas of focus as supportive, or not supportive, of that theme.
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