{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":154,"pdf_page":162,"physical_index":162,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7d0115cec9e8f5bea176410f951d2d5644bdee0d592591f7ba882d1ee1d1d552"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The rise of the concept of standardization coincided with the tail end of the second industrial revolution—the electrification and mechanization of the American economy, which took place roughly between 1880 and 1920. Common standards were needed in order to eficiently apply the new technologies that emerged in that era to industrialized mass production.6 But although standardization is often associated with modernization, it was not, as economists have tended to suggest, an automatic consequence of marketled economic development. Standardization was a project as much as a developmental process, championed with great enthusiasm by its advocates, and actively promoted by a set of actors who arguably constituted a movement of sorts. It was led by crusading engineers, technocratic-minded politicians, and consumer activists, as well as by business figures—and indeed many of its most prominent promoters, people such as Herbert Hoover, Frederick J. Schlink, and Arthur Kallet, were several of those things at once.\n\nSome sense of the fervor with which people took up the cause of standardization is indicated by a sign hanging over the door in 1910 of the superintendent of equipment of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co. building, which served as a mission statement for the department: “Early to bed and early to Rise / Work like hell—to standardize.”7 In response to criticisms of the standardization movement in 1923, Albert W. Whitney, chairman of the American Engineering Standards Committee, issued a robust defense. Standardization, he proclaimed, lies “at the bottom of both natural evolution and of civilization” and amounts to “essentially only the selection of the best among a mass of the inferior.” It “not only opens the way to a fuller material life, but it is a condition which makes the spiritual life possible.”8 So pervasive was this new gospel of standardization that some commentators felt the need to deflate its claims: “Standardization is not by any means the new and revolutionary thing that eficiency engineers and scientific managers would have you believe. Standardization is in fact as old as the hills,” we are told in a short piece in the Chicago Defender, which went on to cite as examples of premodern standardized products buggy wheels, circus rings, and ladders.9\n\n154\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":153,"next_page":155}