Modeling, Diagramming, and Early Twentieth-Century Histories of Invention and Entrepreneurship: Henry Ford, Sherwood Anderson, Samuel Insull

Abstract

The historical narrative arguing that independent artisans were increasingly transformed into mere tenders of complicated machinery during the second half of the nineteenth century, leading ultimately to Henry Ford's minute division of labor in the assembly line, is both conventional and well known. Technology became more complex, its inner workings were less self-evident or easily comprehensible, and the material conditions of production, exemplified by modern factories built around a division of labor, became too large and systematic to be understood from the viewpoint of a single worker selling his or her labor. And, while industry was imagined more and more as an intricate system at the turn of the twentieth century, American society, analogously, under the increasing pressure of urbanization and immigration, came to be regarded as too complex to be understood from a single viewpoint. Exposés, for instance, on “how the other half lives,” to quote the title of Jacob Riis's famous book, attest both to the yearning and to the perceived inability to understand society as an entirety.This article suggests and examines the ways in which two older forms of imagining large systems, specifically, the methods of model-making and diagramming, were rearticulated at the turn of the twentieth century in response to a perceived greater complexity of both technology and American society. Models and diagrams are necessary when it seems that one can no longer envision a large system; they literally provide an imaginative site for a complex system. To understand the social roles of diagramming and model-making, I detail the ways each was imagined and deployed in the cultural history of invention and entrepreneurship in the early twentieth century.