The Technology Trap

by Carl Benedikt Frey

  The average American home soon had “everything electric except the canary bird and the janitor.”32 As prices came down, low- and middle-income households were the greatest beneficiaries. Wealthy households previously had human servants to do the most unappealing tasks and hard physical work. It was only with the household revolution that the rest eventually were able to afford servants, albeit mechanized ones. By 1940, modern conveniences had started to trickle down to a sizable share of the population. From then on, the wealthy and poor alike tapped into the networks of electricity, gas, water, and sewers to which all citizens gradually got equal access. The price of technologies like washing machines, refrigerators, and dishwashers meant that they reached the poor later, but mass production and installment credit soon made them affordable to the majority of people.

  Yet the impact of the household revolution on the overall time spent on in-home production remains controversial. An early study by the economist Stanley Lebergott intuitively showed that hours fell sharply.33 According to his estimates, the workweek of the housewife was reduced by forty-two hours between 1900 and 1966—a staggering finding. However, as suggested by another economist, Valerie Ramey, it seems that Lebergott inadvertently included hours spent on in-home production by all family members as well as domestic servants, rather than only those spent by the housewife.34 Ramey’s estimates, in contrast, reveal a much more modest decline in time spent on in-home production by prime-age women: a reduction of eighteen hours between 1900 and 2005. But strikingly, this decline was offset by men spending more time on work in the home. How can this be reconciled with the obvious fact that household appliances reduced labor requirements in in-home production? One explanation offered by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a historian of technology, is that the number of hours did not decline, as technology replaced only the domestic labor of servants. To produce the middle-class standard of health and cleanliness of the 1950s, according to Cowan, the American housewife of the 1850s would have needed three or four servants. But with the help of her new electric servants, the American housewife of the 1950s could do so single-handedly.35

  It is certainly true that over this period domestic service gradually disappeared, and it was not without reason that inventions like French’s Conical Washing-Machine were looked upon with distrust, even though in 1860 a writer for the New York Times argued that washerwomen had nothing to fear: “This machine will lighten the labor, save the hands, and relieve many of the wearing and disagreeable features of hand-washing, but is not designed to, and will not, take the place of a single young woman at service, we feel confident. If young women would improve their condition, they would do well to avail themselves of all such aids for performing household work.”36 With the benefit of hindsight, we know that laundresses were right that their skills would become obsolete, yet it was only half a century later, when the electric washing machine finally arrived, that their occupation began to wane. At a meeting of the Housekeepers Club of Pittsburgh in 1921, housekeepers complained about washerwomen “playing the phonograph instead of the washing machine” and insisted on new practices where servants will have to “get in tune with the mistress or take the air.”37

  While this lends some support to the view of Cowan, it would be a mistake to think that technology didn’t affect household work beyond displacing domestic servants. First, as electric appliances greatly reduced the need for hard physical labor in the home, many women began to spend more of their time on less tedious domestic work, such as teaching and looking after their children. Second, standards of cleanliness and nutrition increased as new technologies emerged.38 As household tasks were made simpler, they were performed more often. People changed their clothes more regularly, took more frequent baths, and cleaned their homes more routinely: “Instead of dragging rugs outside a few times a year and beating them, the whole house could be vacuumed once a week.”39 Third, Ramey’s estimates make more sense when converting hours per person into hours per household: hours spent on in-home production per household fell by a staggering 38 percent in the period 1900–2005. Of course, it is true that the size of the American household also declined over this period, but to suggest that hours per person of in-home production did not fall ignores economies of scale.40 It doesn’t make much difference if dinner is prepared for a family of two or five. Research showing that female labor force participation expanded much more rapidly in areas where electric appliances were used more extensively provides evidence in favor of this view. Figure 7 shows the staggering increase in female labor force participation over the course of the twentieth century. In the period 1900–80, the female workforce expanded by 51 percentage points. An influential study by the economists Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimates that the household revolution alone can account for 55 percent of this increase.41 As the home became increasingly mechanized, more women entered the labor market to take on paid and often more fulfilling jobs, and more families suddenly had two incomes, making many American households richer in the process.

  FIGURE 7: U.S. Labor Force Participation Rates for People Ages 25–64 by Sex, 1870–2010

  Sources: 1870–1990: Historical Statistics of the United States (HSUS), Millennial Edition Online, 2006, ed. S. B. Carter, S. Gartner, M. R. Haines, A. L. Olmstead, R. Sutch, and G. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Table Ba393-400, Ba406-413, Aa226-237, Aa260-271, http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/HSUS EntryServlet; 2000–2010: Statistical Abstract of the United States 2012 (SAUS) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), Table 7 and 587. See also Gordon, 2016, figure 8-1.

  Clearly, the increase in the numbers of women entering the workforce was not just due to the labor-saving impact of technology. Cultural and social factors also played an enormous role, but they are beyond the scope of this book. What’s evident is that many women entered the workforce despite the continuing pressure on women to stay at home, and technology made it easier for them to do so. Just as the mechanization of in-home production increased the supply of women able and willing to enter the labor market, office machines increased the demand for them. Like the typewriter, which first appeared in 1874, office machines spawned large offices and sparked an early ascent of women in the clerical workforce. Writing in Scientific American, Vincent E. Giuliano explained:

  With the typewriter came an increase in the size of offices and in their number, in the number of people employed in them and in the variety of their jobs. There were also changes in the social structure of the office. For example, office work had remained a male occupation even after some women had been recruited into factories. (Consider the staffing of Scrooge’s office in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”) Office mechanization was a force powerful enough to overcome a longstanding reluctance to have women work in a male environment. Large numbers of women were employed in offices as a direct result of the introduction of the typewriter.42

  But as we shall see in chapter 8, most of the growth of the clerical workforce happened after 1900, when the proliferation of office machines, the mechanization of in-home production, and the desire to boost family income allowed women to make a great leap forward. In the period 1950–70 in particular, about 11.4 million women newly took up clerical occupations, while only 1.5 million men did so. The term “pink collar,” which became increasingly common in the 1970s, referred to the growth in the female, machine-tending clerical workforce.43 Much of the rise in labor force participation over the twentieth century, in other words, was due to mechanization, not just despite it.

  The Ride to Modernity

  As essential a part of this story as the transformation of the home and the factory was the revolution in the movement of goods and people. Indeed, the economic historian Alexander Field has argued that productivity growth in the period 1919–73 can be thought of as “a tale of two transitions.”44 The first involved the redesign of the factory to take advantage of the virtues of electricity, whereas the secon
d constituted a shift toward the horseless age, as motorized vehicles revolutionized transportation and distribution. The second transition gradually eclipsed the first, beginning in the 1930s. But the road to motorized transportation began much earlier.

  Despite the rapid expansion of the railroad industry, Americans before the twentieth century were still subject to the tyranny of the horse. The railroads allowed goods and people to move faster and more cheaply from railhead to railhead, but horses were needed to transport them to their final destination.45 One reason horse technology predominated long after the Industrial Revolution is that steam power failed to revolutionize intracity transportation: “Steam engines could not be used on city streets because of fear of fires started by sparks, deafening noise, thick smoke, and heavy weight that shook foundations and cracked street pavements.”46 One solution was to take transportation underground. The Metropolitan Railway, which opened in London in 1863, was initially powered by steam, but the discomfort caused by the smoke in the tunnel made it an unappealing mode of transportation. The steam-powered subway never reached America. Yet intracity transportation experienced continuous transformation during the second half of the nineteenth century, with horse-driven omnibuses, cable cars, and electrified streetcars. When the New York City subway finally opened in 1904, it was powered by electricity and traveled more than ten times faster than the horse-driven omnibus. Together, cable cars, streetcars, and subways gave rise to suburban America, allowing average citizens to escape the city. But for all their benefits, these modes of urban transport left personal transportation untouched. People were still enslaved by the network and timetables of public transportation and relied on travel by horse, which was more flexible and the equivalent of the modern taxi. Its drawbacks were significant, though. First and foremost, horse travel was slow: horse-powered carriages traveled at a speed of no more than six miles per hour, and for longer journeys the horses regularly had to be replaced. Second, horses were too expensive for most Americans. Urban homes rarely had enough space for horses, and most workers lacked the financial means to buy the supplies required to feed them. Consequently, less than a fifth of the working population relied on horsecars to commute between home and work. The vast majority had to walk—which was hardly made more pleasant by the remaining horses.47 In the late nineteenth century, horses in urban areas are estimated to have dropped 5 to 10 tons of manure per square mile, and carcasses of dead horses could be left on the street for days.48 The occupations dealing with the removal of horse manure and carcasses are probably not missed even by the most ardently nostalgic people.

  In November 1895, a new periodical appeared in New York City called The Horseless Age. It was created in response to the advent of the automobile. Despite the many drawbacks of horse technology, a horseless age looked unlikely to most contemporaries. The automotive industry was in an embryonic state.49 Four automobiles were produced in the whole of America in 1895. The only serious alternative to the horse as a flexible means of personal transportation at the time was the bicycle. However, the “ride to modernity,” as it has been called, can only aptly be described as such in that it paved the way for the automobile.50 Riding a bicycle was, for the most part, a risky undertaking. In Taming the Bicycle, Mark Twain describes his attempt to ride a high wheeler in the 1880s. The adventurous experience is best captured by the concluding words of his essay: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”51 The arrival of the safety bicycle with its smaller wheels, and the subsequent invention of the pneumatic bicycle tire, eventually brought about the golden age of cycling in the mid-1890s: “People went cycle mad; the bicycle industry appeared to be an El Dorado, and there was a rush to engage in it.”52 But cycling in America soon went out of fashion. And as the bicycle industry declined, many bicycle companies instead became producers of automobiles.

  The bicycle was in many ways the bridge to the automobile.53 The father of the American bicycle industry, Albert A. Pope, did not just predict the rise of the motor carriage; he also employed Hiram Percy Maxim to realize his prediction. The Pope Manufacturing Company never became a leading producer of automobiles—Pope declared bankruptcy in 1907—but the industry as a whole contributed to solving many of the mundane engineering problems that needed to be addressed for the later mass production of automobiles, such as accurately machined gears and pneumatic tires. Of perhaps even greater importance was that with the arrival of the bicycle, Americans first experienced the freedom of horseless personal transportation. Maxim claimed that he had first conceived of the benefits of the automobile when riding his bicycle. Looking back in 1937, he recalled: “It carried me over a lonely country road in the middle of the night, covering the distance in considerably less than an hour. A horse and carriage would require nearly two hours. A railroad train would require half an hour, and it would carry me only from station to station. And I must conform to its time-table, which was not always convenient.”54 According to Maxim, it was the experience that many people gained from cycling that created demand for convenient and cheap personal transport—and thus the automobile.

  Efforts to develop motor carriages had already begun in the eighteenth century, using steam engines. However, despite decades of experimentation, steam cars never reached the mass market. Steam engines were too heavy, unsafe, and inefficient to revolutionize personal transportation. The automobile revolution would have to await the development of the internal combustion engine. The first gas engine was patented by Nikolaus Otto in 1864, but it was unsuitable for road transportation. Practical designs of automobiles began with gasoline engines and carriages built by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach and, independently, by Karl Benz. They were the first to successfully power a road vehicle with a gas engine. All the same, for some time it looked like the electric motor might be the one to propel the horseless carriage: “In 1900 there appeared great likelihood that the electric automobile might advance to perfection as rapidly as other branches of electrical appliances had done.”55 However, a number of events tipped the balance in favor of the internal combustion engine. Charles Kettering’s invention of the electric starter made gasoline-powered cars easier to operate; the expansion of the intercity road network meant that the greater range and speed of gasoline-powered cars could be taken advantage of; large petroleum discoveries contributed to a decline in the price of fuel; and as a result of advances in mass production in Ford’s factories, the price of gasoline-powered automobiles fell rapidly, while the price of electric cars did not.

  As Pope noted, the days of the horse were already beginning to wane, but for the automobile industry to take off, good roads were required, “not only in and about cities, but throughout the entire country.”56 Such complementary infrastructure had to be built from scratch. The two million roads that existed in America at the beginning of the twentieth century are best described as a network of dirt tracks. For the few people who could afford to travel by motor carriage, flat tires and blowouts were the norm rather than the exception. In the early twentieth century, a Vermont doctor and his chauffeur were among the first to drive across the country. Their trip from San Francisco to New York took them sixty-three days.57 Days have since become hours: the same journey would now take some forty hours by car, in the absence of traffic jams, according to Google Maps. The rapid expansion of the road network during the 1920s and 1930s allowed drivers to cross America from coast to coast on highways without even having to drive through unpaved stretches on major routes. Growing traffic flows in and out of cities were helped by new displays of American engineering excellence, including the Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Golden Gate, and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges. And as the number of gasoline stations increased, roadside commerce started to flourish as well, creating a whole set of new jobs.58 Before 1920, there was virtually no commerce along American highways. A colorful description from 1928 reveals a marked contrast: “Every few hundred yards there is a … filling station, half a dozen colored pumps before it. In connection w
ith the stations and between them are huts carrying the sign ‘Hot Dogs.’ Where there is neither hut nor filling station there are huge hoardings covered with posters.”59

  Scholars disagree on whether road construction paved the way for the automobile industry or vice versa. It is probably fair to say that causality ran in both directions.60 Without the growing demand for automobiles, there would have been little incentive for both business and governments to invest in expensive infrastructure. The automobile revolution could not have happened without better production technology to make automobiles affordable to ordinary citizens. The 1901 Mercedes—the “first modern car in all essentials” and the holder of the world speed record, having reached 40.2 miles per hour—was sold on the American market at a price of $12,450, roughly twelve times the annual per capita income at the time.61 Consequently, automobile ownership was at first only attainable for a fraction of the population. Things changed markedly only with the appearance of Henry Ford’s revolutionary Model T. When its production began in 1908, it was priced at $950; by the time production ceased in 1927, its price had fallen to $263. Expressed as a ratio to annual disposable income per person, its purchase price fell from 316 percent in 1910 to 43 percent in 1923. That year, the dominance of the Model T reached its peak: over half of the cars sold in America were Model Ts. The expansion of installment credit throughout the 1920s further helped reduce the annual share of disposable income citizens had to spend to own a car, making automobiles affordable to all but the poorest Americans. The share of households with a registered motor vehicle exploded in response, growing from 2.3 percent in 1910 to 89.8 percent in 1930.62