{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":113,"pdf_page":69,"physical_index":69,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d4a9a4930c12bc0561ea9beb31695e5c545c8107ecb105051aebb0e84643c672"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"It is an economic law that large profits can be permanently assured only by efficient operation. . . . The supreme importance of efficiency as an economic factor was first realized by the Germans, and it is this fact that has enabled them to advance their industrial condition, which twenty years ago was a jest, to the first place in Europe, if not in the world. We naturally want to know in detail the methods they have used; and the reply is that they have recognized the value of the scientifically trained engineer as an economic factor.\n\nIn the United States, superb natural resources have enabled us to make phenomenal progress without much regard to the teachings of science, and in many cases in spite of our neglect of them. The progress of Germany warns us that we have now reached the point where we must recognize that the proper application of science to industry is of vital importance to the future prosperity of this country. . . . Our universities and schools of higher learning are still dominated by those whose training was largely literary or classical, and they utterly fail to realize the difference between a classical and an industrial age. This difference is not sentimental, but real; for that nation which is industrially most efficient will soon become the richest and most powerful.\n\nThus, early in the era of monopoly capitalism, the borrowings from Germany left a trail through American higher education and industry. It was not only the brewing industry which imported scientifically trained specialists (in its case brewmasters) from Germany: Carnegie put a German chemist to work at the start of the 1870s and in part through his efforts dispelled much of the uncertainty that had previously surrounded the manufacture of pig iron; and General Electric enlisted C. P. Steinmetz, the German physicist, chiefly to 15 help design alternating current equipment.\n\nThe corporate research laboratories of the United States begin more or less with the beginnings of the era of monopoly capitalism. The first research organization established for the specific purpose of systematic invention was set up by Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, and the first government laboratories were established by the Department of Agriculture under the Hatch Act of 1887. Arthur D. Little began his independent research laboratory in 1886. These were the forerunners of the corporate research organizations: Eastman Kodak (1893), B. F. Goodrich (1895), and most important, General Electric (1900). General Motors did a great deal of its research through Charles F. Kettering's Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), organized in 1909, and acquired by GM in 1919, although at the same time the corporation set up other laboratories, such as the one organized for it by the Arthur D. Little Company in 1911 to do materials testings and analysis; in 1920, all GM research activities were combined to form the General Motors Research Corporation at Moraine, Ohio. Frank B. Jewett began research for Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1904. The Westinghouse Research Laboratories were begun in Pittsburgh in 1917. By 1920 there were perhaps 300 such corporate laboratories, and by 1940, over 2,200. By then, corporations with a tangible net worth of over \\$100 million averaged research staffs of 170, and those with a net worth exceeding a billion dollars averaged research staffs of 1,250. The Bell Telephone laboratories, employing over 5,000, was by far the largest research organization in the world.\n\nAlong with these research laboratories came the increase of scientific and engineering education in new or expanded university departments in the physical sciences, through learned journals and societies, and at trade association research facilities, as well as a growing government role in research. For a long time, however, imitation of the German example was imitation of manner rather than matter. The tradition of a thin and facile empiricism did not offer favorable soil for the development of basic science, and the corporate magnates, still impatient of free and undirected research and anxious for nuts-and-bolts engineering innovations, hardly bothered to conceal beneath their new commitment to science a contempt for its most fundamental forms. The most important of the corporate research laboratories, that organized by General Electric at Schenectady eight years after the merger ofEdison General Electric and Thomson-Houston, was typical in this regard. \"It was soon recognized by the directors of this new company that the amount of technological development which could be drawn out of the scientific knowledge already accumulated, though large, was finite and that there would be a greater chance of ingenious developments if there were more science to work with.\"7 But the directors of the new company, and those of many others as well, were slow to understand the importance of the work of such pioneer scientists in the United States as Willard Gibbs, who helped establish a basis for physical chemistry by his use of thermodynamics in the study of chemical reactions. The general characteristic of the work required of scientists in these corporate laboratories remained Edisonian, with the modification that in place of Edison's laborious trial and error, scientific calculation was to lead to quicker solutions. Thus General Electric put Irving Langmuir to work studying the effect of various gases in lamp bulbs on the radiation of thermal energy from the filament, and on the rate of evaporation of the filament material.18 In other corporate laboratories, particularly those of the automotive industry, interest in “science\"” was confined to trouble-shooting (gear noise, vibration, etc.) and product engineering (transmission fluids, paints, fuels, compression problems, etc.). The guiding principle seems to have been almost entirely fast payoff; it was this motivation which led to the disaster of the early 1920s when the entire operating force of several divisions of General Motors awaited, from day to day, the outcome of Kettering's attempts to get his so-called copper-cooled (air-cooled) engine ready for production.\n\n112 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Scientific-Technical Revolution\n\n113\n\nand asked to come back the next day. On so doing, he was told by the Secretary of War that while he appreciated the offer of the chemists, he found that it was unnecessary as","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}