Culture and Technological Design in the 19th-Century Pin Industry

Now, plenty of people do really believe that form can follow function, and that if you thoroughly analyse the activity proper to the thing you are designing, then your analysis will provide all the information needed, and the design can be derived logically from the function. Plenty of people still believe that purely functional designs are possible, and believe that they themselves produce them, what is more! But none of them has yet divulged what an analysis of a function looks like and what logical steps lead from it to the design. All you will get from them is talk about the purpose of the thing, which, as we shall see, is a statement of opinion and can never be anything else. [DAVID PYE, The Nature of Design, p. 8] If technology is indeed part of culture, then technological design must reflect the culture of the men and women who develop it. Industrial and technological enterprises exhibit a style, a culture, and a material culture. This article investigates two aspects of cultural influence in the work of the Howe Manufacturing Company, the foremost 19th-century American pin manufacturer. The first is the company's technological style, shown in the design of machines. The second is its industrial style, the nature of the interactions of owners, managers, workers, and machinery, frozen in the forms of its factory. DR. LUBAR is with the Division of Engineering and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. For their information, advice, and support, he would like to thank his colleagues at the museum--especially Brooke Hindle, David Shayt, Carlene Stephens, and Deborah Warner. He is also grateful for comments by Edwin Layton, Merritt Roe Smith, and Lisa Thoerle; for the kind assistance of Dorothy Larson, of the Old Derby Historical Society; and for the vigorous discussion generated by the earlier versions of this paper that were delivered to the NMAH Tuesday Colloquium, the Society for Industrial Archeology, and the Smithsonian-West Virginia University Workshop on Industrial History

Business · Manufacturing · Manufacturing engineering · Sociology · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Engineering · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Marketing

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