Category: Industrial & Technological art

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This article comes from a volume of Popular Mechanics that I have been enjoying for a few days now.  “Your Victory Car”, written by Brooks Stevens for the December 1942 issue, discusses a vision for the future, a nod to “normalcy” at a supremely difficult time in the world history of the 20th century. Car design went off in another direction, of course–a lot of what we see in these pages looks like offshoots of the Fuller Dymaxion car from a decade or so earlier–though some of the ideas present here (more streamlining, lighter design, smaller engines) wound up in cars in the future…it is just that the cars didn’t quite look like these cars.  

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The following photos are from a pamphlet entitled The Miracle Workers, a product of the Cheney Silk Company, extolling more the virtues of the considerable workforce and their living conditions more so than the product. My guess is that the pamphlet (with no publishing info) was printed around 1910, evidently when the company was coming towards its zenith after having been in business for 40+ years.  I thought it would be worthwhile to share industrial/production images from uncommon sources like this one–especially since the “wrapper” holding the text wouldn’t necessarily invite a reader inside.  In any event, here are the few photos dealing with the interior of the factory, though there are others (like the one showing a worker’s lunch room) that show the school, and church , and other such social buildings that were constructed for the workers by the company.  It seems that the company had an unusual trajectory–getting a boost during the Civil War by producing the famous Spencer Rifle, then concentrating on the silk business, and then after suffering through the Depression and the failure of the silk market selling itself off to a company in teh 1950’s that switched gears from silk to velvet

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I don’t mean to trivialize the contents of this pamphlet by focusing solely on its cover design, but I guess that is what I am doing, not having any real interest in the content. That said, the work is by Bob Edwards (1905-1990) who led a long and very interesting life as a union person, labor organizer, Socialist, MP, and a fighter against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. (He was also the author of another interesting pamphlet that appears elsewhere on this blog on the British chemical industry in 1944 and its “Nazi associates” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/09/superior-cover-design-chem-industry-nazism-and-race-suicide-1944.html).  In this present pamphlet Edwards looks at the history of the CIO “and the sit-down strikes” while concentrating on its role in the U.S. during WWII. This is pretty dicey stuff (as John Lewis would discover when his vehement pro-Union and non-interventionist/Isolationist policy proposals was defeated by his membership) and rubbed up the wrong way against U.S. defense and war policies. But Edwards was looking for something different, writing in this pamphlet well deep into (the U.K.’s) WWII about the need to change capitalist industry in the U.S. and a “REVOLUTIONARY OCCUPATION OF INDUSTRY” (caps in the original) to be achieved through “Workers Power and Socialism”, all of which would probably not play all that well int eh U.S. at this point. (It is unclear exactly when in 1941 this pamphlet was published, but I assume it is probably after the Nazis ended their cordial entente with the Soviet Union.) 

Anyway, there is an interesting history of sit-downs in the pamphlet–I still like it more for its cover, though. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This lovely pamphlet has a design that seems to me deeper into the modern future than it was–it seems a product more of the 1930’s and perhaps into the 1930’s than the 1909 item that it is.  The pamphlet was on a proposed gyro-monorail, a project funded by publisher August Sherl (1849-1921), who had the idea for constructing separate high speed (200 kph) rapid transit lines while maintaining existing rail for shipping. But as sleek and as stable as it may/might be, the gyro-monorail is one idea that never really got past prototypes and development, as was the case with Sherl’s project, which did actually get to a full-size prototype which was demonstrated in Berlin, but the idea did not flourish, and the project was cancelled.