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From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. By David A. Hounshell. (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. xxi + 330 pp. $37.50.)

David A. Hounshell's evocative title suggests a sweeping, even encyclopedic study of the development of American manufacturing technology. In fact, his more modest, and more reasonable, objective is to trace the roots of modern high-volume (mass) production of complex durables, of which the automobile is the ultimate expression. In telling this story, Hounshell offers a rich tapestry of enticing details of critical changes in production practices and of decisive influences of key individuals in the manufacturing history of guns, clocks, sewing machines and wooden sewing-machine cases, wagons, grain harvesters, bicycles, and automobiles. But he thinks that only specialization in machines (rather than in work generally or in organization) is relevant to this story, insists that New England "armory practice" was the wellspring of mass production technology, and presumes that adoption of this approach was itself the ultimate and necessary objective of enterprise management, rather than a means to an end. Such attitudes blind him to the diversity of influences to which his often excellent research points and to several critical and seemingly obvious questions suggested by his material. Hounshell opens with a useful discussion of the origins and changing meaning of the term "American system" of manufacturing. He correctly identifies the ambiguity of the concept and argues forcefully that the real cornerstone of American production technology (and what had really impressed those seemingly ubiquitous British observers) was "armory practice—that is, the concepts and procedures that developed in the U.S. armories, procedures that relied on the use of special(single-) purpose machine tools to produce interchangeable parts. Hounshell then attempts to reconstruct the diffusion of this distinctive practice through a series of industry studies that pay particular attention to leading companies—Singer, Studebaker, McCormick, Western Wheel, Ford. He argues that the diffusion occurred primarily through the agency of individual mechanics experienced in armory practice (especially at Colt's Hartford factory) who carried the knowledge of that practice to these firms. The execution of this line of argument is uneven, often based on weak evidence. And where Hounshell pushes his central arguments most tenaciously, he is at his worst—errors of both fact and interpretation plague the sections on Singer's production of sewing machines and on McCormick's technology and product design. But where Hounshell largely ignores his central arguments—in discussions of the Singer Company's woodworking technology (chapter 3), of the development of the bicycle industry (chapter 5), of Ford's initial development of the moving assembly line (chapter 6), and of Ford's struggle to produce the Model A (part of chapter 7)—he conveys the complexities and nuances of the development of the technologies. These sections are well done and represent the best parts of the book.