While standardization was supposed to bring some order to the chaos produced by unregulated competition, the standardizing work of engineers was also seen as a preferable alternative to state regulation.31 The role of professional engineering organizations was to encourage voluntary standardization, as opposed to top-down standards imposed by government. Pioneering engineer and entrepreneur George Westinghouse, addressing a meeting of engineers from diferent national associations, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, proclaimed: “By a combined efort of all the engineering societies, with the financial support of all manufacturers . . . it seems to me that such a bureau [of standardization] could be established and could work a reform of incalculable value in our present practice and thus forestall government activity in the same direction.”32 As Westinghouse’s comments indicate, to an extent the voluntary movement toward shared standards on the part of business was motivated by a desire to preempt rulings by the National Bureau of Standards. In the vanguard of the efort to advance voluntary standardization was the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which was founded in 1905. The standardization work of the SAE was widely known and, like that of other crusading engineering organizations, not infrequently extolled. An article in the Boston Globe described the SAE in the following glowing terms: “Its work is of interest not merely to the technician but to the layman who demands eficiency, safety and comfort in the use of his motor car, but who has little idea how largely these desired qualities are the fruit of vast research and labor.”33 Similarly, a piece in the New York Times to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the SAE depicted those who led the organization as the unsung heroes of the rise of the industry, saving the American consumer huge amounts of money as a result of production of standards for auto parts while conducting vitally important research on automobiles.34
The appeal of standardized production was then not just that it resonated with the eficiency-driven engineering mind-set. Standardization was also supposed to secure concrete material benefits for consumers. The 1930 Year Book of American Standards, for example, promised that standardization would ofer great benefits to the “ultimate consumer.”35 At the same time, the interests of the consumer were seen as being in alignment with the broader goal of economic eficiency. J. N. Willya, maker of the Overland automobile, emphasized the advantages to consumers of standardized mass production: “Quantity of production gives quality of product. It also ofers a fixed and definite dollar value to the consumer, much greater dollar for dollar than do the small operations of the concern that tries to accomplish big things on a small scale” [and all this is a result of the fact that] “standardization is absolute.”36 Harry Lord, of the Lord Auto Company made similar arguments about the new era of standardization, commenting that; “The automobile world is fast awakening to the importance of standardization. In standardization two great principles are involved. First, the elimination of useless and needless variations from the normal. In lessening the field of certainties, logically you enhance the opportunities for maximum eficiency. Second is the selection and combination into a single product of all that is most useful and best adapted to its purpose. . . . The motor vehicle industry [following an early period of disorder and chaos brought about by] countless crass attempts at individualism . . . is entering into the Utopian stage of standardization.” Reduction of waste, improvements in eficiency, and the perfecting of products were seen as complementary consequences of standardization, distinct virtuous dimensions of the same process.
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Time for Things