After 1880, mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological improvements. This can be traced back to Thomas Edison’s labs in New Jersey, where he practiced systematic invention to exploit the great commercial opportunities that modern life created. The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of science and the useful arts during this era. By the 1920s, engineers had been formally integrated into the management hierarchies of countless American industries.
Reorganization of production merged with technological improvement had made mass production possible long before Ford developed the assembly line. James Bonsack’s cigarette rolling machine, for example, patented in 1881, could produce 70 000 cigarettes in a single 10‐hour day. By the end of that decade, it could produce 120 000 cigarettes in a day (Chandler 1977). When James “Buck” Duke bought exclusive rights to this machine in 1885, it became the basis of his American Tobacco Company, which quickly controlled most of the industry.
By the 1920s, mass production had arrived in industries that produced goods that were much more expensive than cigarettes. Ford’s principles of mass production spread quickly throughout the manufacturing sector, to products of all kinds, because Henry Ford was so open about the way he designed his factories. Among the other manufacturers that used Ford’s principles during the 1920s were the makers of home appliances, like refrigerators and radios. General Electric, for example, built an $18 million assembly line for its Monitor Top refrigerator and sold 1 million refrigerators just 4 years after its introduction in 1927 (Cowan 1985).
Even craft‐dominated industries like furniture making came to depend upon mass production to make their products more available to the masses. People who moved from farms to cities desperately needed furniture for their new urban residences, but in industrial towns like Grand Rapids, Michigan, they could not afford pieces made by craftsman. New mass‐produced models made with minimal carving and overlays, based on stylish patterns, found a market all over the country. It helped that companies like Bassett, founded in Virginia in 1902, discouraged their workers from forming unions, just like Ford did. An unorganized workforce made it easier for industrialists to impose changes in the production process without resistance from employees.
The changeover from the Model T to the Model A, in 1927, demonstrated the limits of industrialized mass production. The Model A was incredibly expensive, and Ford had to shut his main plant for months to retool the production line for his new models. While the new car sold well initially, sales dropped precipitously as the Depression deepened. “Mass production is not simply large‐scale production,” wrote the department store magnate Edward Filene, in 1932. “It is large‐scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying” (Hounshell 1984). Mass buying became difficult when people had little money with which to buy the products of industrialization. Urban building slowed precipitously during the Depression too. Since cities were the focal points of industrialization, urban citizens suffered disproportionately when production waned. Of course, when the United States sank into the economic downturn of the Great Depression, both urban and industrial growth decreased sharply.
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