At this time, the phrase push a button arose to indicate a mechanical actuation that completes an electrical circuit. For example, in 1879, the news described an invention in France that would allow a horse’s rider to push a button to deliver an electrical shock to the horse, a system that could be used to discipline a misbehaving horse.10
Labor-Saving Inventions and the Depression of the 1890s
Such inventions only exacerbated fears of unemployment. An 1894 editorial in the Los Angeles Times blamed the severity of the 1890s depression on labor-saving inventions:
There is no doubt that the introduction of labor-saving machinery and the consequent increase of production has had more than a little to do with the present depression in business.… It is true that during the past few years the increase in the invention and adoption of labor-saving machinery has been so great that the community has scarcely been able to keep up with it.11
The article then went on to list recent examples of labor-saving innovations:
In the manufacture of hats machinery has multiplied the productive power of labor nearly nine times. Manifestly we can’t wear nine times as many hats as formerly.
By the adoption of improved processes the labor involved in the production of flour has been reduced 80 percent, yet we can each eat no more flour.12
That same year, the San Francisco Chronicle chimed in with an editorial about labor-saving machinery. The editorial was entitled “The Great Problem”:
The rich have grown richer and the poor have grown poorer. Side by side with the growth of enormous fortunes the hovels of the struggling laborers have become more dilapidated.… And to further emphasize the seriousness of these considerations it may be said that this problem must soon be solved or there will come a cataclysm which will destroy modern civilization.13
In 1895 a new dumbwaiter system was installed in US kitchens in multifloor buildings. The dumbwaiter had an array of buttons, one for each floor of the building. Press the number of the floor, and the elevator would automatically ascend to that floor and stop there, to return if a button was then pressed from that floor.
In “Stores Are Merely Labor-Saving Machines,” an 1897 letter to the editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune, the letter writer adds to the growing list of labor-saving innovations. He refers to the department store movement, the movement to build gigantic stores that sold everything imaginable under one roof. The movement had started in 1838 with the Bon Marché department store in Paris. By the 1890s, department stores were an accelerating international epidemic, with continued expansions, glamorizing, and advertising over succeeding decades. The letter writer notes that even further expansion of department stores could yet “do away with so many people employed to distribute where one-third of them could do as well.”14
In Chicago, Marshall Field & Co., established in 1881, built a seven-story department store in downtown Chicago in 1887. It then built an even more glamorous nine-story store in 1893, to coincide with the large crowds expected to attend the international fair, the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1897, Chicago’s elevated street railway, called “The Loop,” was completed, connecting many more people to Marshall Field’s, marking an innovation in efficient retailing that may have prompted this letter writer.
Particularly striking during the 1893–99 depression was a spike in public anger about trusts, combinations of companies that fixed prices at a high level. In an 1899 talk in New York, John C. Chase, mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and former trade unionist, said, “The trust is, in my opinion, a labor saving machine,” apparently meaning that the modern trust adopts such machines in its inhuman effort to dispense with labor.15
Machines, Robots, and Future Technological Unemployment
The notion of a world without labor became more vivid with E. M. Forster, the English novelist famous for such classics as A Room with a View, A Passage to India, and Howards End. Forster’s 1909 science fiction story “The Machine Stops” described a future in which machines do everything:
Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.16
Forster’s story ends when the machine unexpectedly malfunctions, bringing death and destruction to a world that has grown too dependent on it.
A little more than a decade later, during the 1920–21 depression, the labor-saving machine narrative mutated again, leading to the idea of robots. A 1921 Czech play, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, by Karel Čapek, coined the word robot, from the Czech word for worker, to replace the earlier terms labor-saving invention and automaton. The play first appeared in English translation in New York in October 1922, to strong reviews. The play was not a big immediate success, and it was not made into a movie until 1948. But it started a narrative epidemic.
The play and its ideas went viral enough to cause the word robot to enter most of the world’s languages. The play tells the story of the scientist Rossum, who invents a robot, and the businessman Domin, who starts manufacturing robots and who ultimately faces a revolt of the robots, who have developed minds of their own. The idea of a mechanical man who walks, talks, and fights might seem to be more inherently contagious than stories of push-button devices, but Čapek’s initial story reached only a small base of people, and so the robot epidemic was gradual. Perhaps the recovery rate was also low because of the constant reminders of technological innovations in the following decades. Very few newspapers mentioned robots in the 1920s, but use of the term grew over the decades. To become more contagious, the idea of a robot may have needed further development by creative people.
Before 1930: Increasingly Vivid Narratives of Machines Replacing People
The story of an automated future was growing more and more vivid, but the stories still seemed mostly remote. The word robot did not become common in newspapers and books until the 1930s, though there were some dramatic exceptions, such as a traffic light, described in the Los Angeles Times in July 1929, that replaced policemen who had been directing traffic at an intersection in Medford, Massachusetts:
The robot, which is made up in the usual form of red, yellow and green-light traffic tower, is operated automatically by the automobiles themselves as they pass over sensitive plates set in the street surface. No car is required to wait when there is no opposing traffic. When the car reaches an intersection and the way is clear the control from the plate in the pavement will give it a green light. If a car is waiting to cross an intersection and the opposing traffic is heavy the light permitting the car to cross will automatically set in its favor whenever there is a gap and will immediately return in favor of the heavy traffic once the car is clear. The robot handles multiple numbers of machines on the same principle, the streets containing the greatest amount of traffic being emptied or partially emptied first, thus using a smooth even flow of traffic through all parts of the complicated square here.17
Reading this paragraph today, almost a century later, we may wonder why we still find ourselves occasionally waiting in our cars at a red light when there is no opposing traffic. There must have been problems with this particular robot, problems that still do not have an inexpensive and practical solution. But this 1929 story was beginning to have an impact.
A decade earlier, a new phrase had appeared in the English language to describe the effects of labor-saving inventions. The phrase was technological unemployment. This phrase appeared first in 1917, but it started its epidemic upswing in 1928. The count for technological unemployment skyrockets in the 1930s in Google Ng
rams into an epidemic curve much like the Ebola epidemic curve in Figure 3.1. The technological unemployment curve peaked in 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. A parallel epidemic occurred with the term power age, which is now mostly gone. The power age referred to the perception that activities once done by muscle are now done by powerful machines. During the 1870s depression, about half the US labor force worked in agriculture, and the labor-saving machinery of that decade tended to be agricultural equipment, pulled by horses. By 1880, only a fifth of the US labor force worked in agriculture, and the narratives focused instead on new fuel-powered and electronic machines, threatening the jobs to which agricultural people fled from the farms. (Less than 2% of the US workforce is in agriculture today.) Technological unemployment became a new and persistent worry.
It is curious that the narrative epidemic of technological unemployment began in 1928, a time of prosperity well before the Great Depression. Still, 1928 was a time of heightened concern about unemployment, which was blamed entirely on technological unemployment and not connected in public talk to any weakness in the US economy. Philip Snowden, former and future chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, wrote in the New York Times in 1928 that the United States, then the leader in developing labor-saving devices, had a unique problem of technological unemployment:
But if other countries are compelled to follow America in specialization and in the displacement of human labor, the problem of unemployment in these countries will assume the feature of the existing unemployment problem in America.
This, indeed, is the great problem which every industrial nation must face, namely, to avoid the present hardship which mechanical and scientific advance inflicts upon a mass of the wage-earning class. In other words, the problem is to free the human being from slavery to the iron man.18
By the 1920s, there was much talk about “efficiency experts” whose “time and motion studies” treated workers as if they were machines. The experts’ goals were to eliminate any unnecessary motions, thereby saving time and labor cost. Like other narratives that took form in the late 1920s and went viral in the Great Depression of the 1930s, efficiency was associated with technological unemployment.
How did the epidemic of technological unemployment fears start? In March 1928, US senator Robert Wagner stated his belief that unemployment was much higher than recognized, and he asked the Department of Labor to do a study of unemployment. Later that month, the department delivered the study that produced the first official unemployment rates published by the US government. The study estimated that there were 1,874,030 unemployed people in the United States and 23,348,602 wage earners, implying an unemployment rate of 7.4%.19 This high estimated unemployment rate came at a time of great prosperity, and it led people to question what would cause such high unemployment amidst abundance.
In April 1928, a month later, the Baltimore Sun ran an article referring to the theories of Sumner H. Slichter, who later became a prominent labor economist in the 1940s and 1950s. In the article, readers are told that Slichter noted several causes of unemployment but pointed out that “at present the most serious is technological unemployment.” Specifically, “The reason we have this unemployment is because we are eliminating jobs through labor-saving methods faster than we are creating them.”20 These words, alongside the new official reporting of unemployment statistics, created a contagion of the idea that a new era of technological unemployment had arrived, and the Luddites’ fears were renewed. The earlier agricultural depression, with its associated fears of labor-saving machinery, began to look like a model for an industrial depression to follow.
Stuart Chase, who later coined the term the “New Deal” in the title of a 1932 book, published Men and Machines in May 1929, during a period of rapidly rising stock prices. The real, inflation-corrected, US stock market, as measured by the S&P Composite Index, rose a final 20% in the five months after the book’s publication, before the infamous October 1929 crash. But concerns about rising unemployment were apparent even during the boom period. According to Chase, we were approaching the “zero hour of accelerating unemployment”:21
Machinery saves labour in a given process; one man replaces ten. A certain number of these men are needed to build and service a new machine, but some of them are permanently displaced.… If purchasing power has reached its limits of expansion because mechanization is progressing at an unheard of rate, only unemployment can result. In other words, from now on, the better able we are to produce, the worse we shall be off. Even if the accelerating factor has not arrived, the misery of normal unemployment continues unabated.
This is the economy of the madhouse.22
The book conveyed a sense that the beginnings of the catastrophe were imminent: “Accelerating unemployment … if not already here, may conceivably arrive at any moment.”23 This is significant: the narrative of out-of-control unemployment was already starting to go viral before there was any sign of the stock market crash of 1929.
During the days of sharp US stock market drops the week before the October 28–29, 1929, stock market crash, a nationally reported National Business Show was running in New York, October 21–26, in a convention center (since demolished) adjacent to Grand Central Station that many Wall Street people passed through to and from work. The show emphasized immense progress in robot technology in the office workplace. It was described after the show moved to Chicago in November thus:
Exhibits in the national business show yesterday revealed that the business office of the future will be a factory in which machines will replace the human element, when the robot—the mechanical man—will be the principal office worker.…
There were addressers, autographers, billers, calculators, cancelers, binders, coin changers, form printers, duplicators, envelope sealers and openers, folders, labelers, mail meters, pay roll machines, tabulators, transcribers, and other mechanical marvels.…
A typewriting machine pounded out letters in forty different languages. A portable computing machine which could be carried by a traveling salesman was on exhibit.24
The 1930s: A New Form of Luddism Prevails
Soon after the 1929 stock market crash, by 1930, the crash itself was often attributed to the surplus of goods made possible by new technology:
When the climax was reached in the last months of 1929 a period of adversity was inevitable because the people did not have enough money to buy the surplus goods which they had produced.25
As noted above, fear of robots was not strong in most of the 1920s, when the word robot was coined. The big wave of fear had to wait until the 1930s. Historian Amy Sue Bix (2000) offers a theory to explain why the 1920s were fearless: the kinds of innovations that received popular acclaim in the 1920s didn’t obviously replace jobs. If asked to describe new technology, people in most of the 1920s would perhaps think first of the Model T Ford, whose sales had burgeoned to 1.5 million cars a year by the early part of the decade. Radio stations, which first appeared around 1920, provided an exciting new form of information and entertainment, but they did not obviously replace many existing jobs. More and more homes were getting wired for electricity, with many possibilities for new gadgets that required electricity. Labor unions in the 1920s tried to sound alarms about machines replacing jobs—and they sounded those alarms with increasing force as the 1920s proceeded—but the public didn’t react much. The labor unions’ alarms were not contagious because people had not heard many stories about inventions replacing jobs.
By the 1930s, Bix notes, the news had replaced stories of exciting new consumer products with stories of job-replacing innovations. Dial telephones replaced switchboard operators. Mammoth continuous-strip steel mills replaced steel workers. New loading equipment replaced coal workers. Breakfast cereal producers bought machines that automatically filled cereal boxes. Telegraphs became automatic. Armies of linotype machines in multiple cities allowed one central operator to set type for printing newspapers by remote control. New machines dug ditch
es. Airplanes had robot copilots. Concrete mixers laid and spread new roads. Tractors and reaper-thresher combines created a new agricultural revolution. Sound movies began to replace the orchestras that played at movie theaters. And of course the decade of the 1930s saw massive actual unemployment in the United States, with the unemployment rate reaching an estimated 25% in 1933.
It is difficult to know which came first, the chicken or the egg. Were all these stories of job-threatening innovations spurred by the exceptional pace of such innovations? Or did the stories reflect a change in the news media’s interest in such innovations because of public concern about technological unemployment? The likely answer is “a little of both.”
Underconsumption, Overproduction, and the Purchasing Power Theory of Wages
Unlike the technological unemployment narrative, the labor-saving machines narrative was strongly connected to an underconsumption or overproduction theory: the idea that people couldn’t possibly consume all of the output produced by machines, with chronic unemployment the inevitable result. This theory’s origins date back to the mercantilists in the 1600s, but popular use of the terms underconsumption and overproduction first appears in ProQuest and Google Ngrams around the time of the depression of the 1870s. Henry George described the overproduction theory in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, during the depression of the 1870s, concluding it was an “absurdity.”26
Narrative Economics Page 21