“Reign of the Robots”: The Homer Laughlin China Company and Flexible Mass Production REGINA LEE BLASZCZYK In 1936, a trade journalist writing for Ceramic Industry described recent technological innovations at Homer Laughlin China Company of Newell, West Virginia. The writer asserted that the craft potter “of poem, drama, and tale” was disappearing during “a new regime of push-button, sprocket, and bearing”; the artisan’s realm had been invaded by “automatons” that were “streaked with flashes of electric ity and backed with subtle overtones of science and research.” Among the many awe-inspiring devices was a new glazing machine, which was designed to eliminate the hazardous, time-consuming manual task of dipping ware into vats of lead glaze. Instead, a ribbon belt conveyor fed plates through a spray booth, flipped them over, and sprayed them on the reverse at a “breathless” rate of 150 pieces per minute. Another appliance, the Iron Horse, moved people, supplies, and products in the name of efficient kiln management. At Homer Laughlin, the mesmerized journalist contended, the “reign of the robots” had begun.1 Ceramic Industry’s hyperbolic story announced major technical changes along Fordist lines at the world’s largest pottery. Long estabDr . Blaszczyk is assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Studies at Boston University. A version of this article presented at the 1993 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, D.C., won SHOT’S Robinson Prize. The author thanks David A. Hounshell, Anne M. Boylan, Glenn Porter, Philip Scranton, Susan H. Myers, Steven Lubar, Bonnie Lilienfeld, and Lindy Biggs for assisting with this article in innumerable ways. Special thanks go to executives at the Homer Laughlin China Company, including Marcus Aaron II, Joseph M. Wells III, Joseph M. Wells, Jr., Jonathan O. Parry, and Ken McElhaney, who generously provided access to their factories, staff, and archives, to Carl C. Mooney and Willis G. Gaston, who shared their knowledge of mechanical engineering in the pottery industry, and to archivists at Kent State University. '“Reign of the Robots,” Ceramic Industry “¿I (December 1936): 408-13; Walter How ard Emerson, “We Move the Work and the Worker,” Ceramic Industry 23 (September 1934): 138-42, on the Iron Horse.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3604-0006$01.00 863 864 Regina Lee Blaszczyk lished as the American ceramics industry’s low-cost, high-volume pro ducer, Homer Laughlin’s reputation for innovation was virtually un rivaled among tableware manufacturers at home or abroad. This West Virginia firm was among a handful of American potteries spe cializing in quantity production and experimenting with massproduction methods at a moment when many contemporaries still exclusively used conventional batch-production techniques. The com pany survived by catering to working-class and middle-class con sumers who acquired their household ceramics as premiums with purchases of packaged cereal, from mail-order catalogs, or at hve-anddime stores. Serving mass retailers and their customers was the name of the game at Homer Laughlin. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the firm’s managers undertook an expansion and renova tion program designed to strengthen their alliances with mass mer chandisers and to safeguard their reputation as potters to “Her Maj esty—The American Housewife.”2 With the objective of meeting the demand for more goods and varied goods, Homer Laughlin’s manag ers selectively introduced Fordist methods to their Ohio River valley industrial site, deliberately shielding certain craft operations against mechanization. For decades, historians of manufacturing focused their studies on companies and industries that fit Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s paradigm of big business wherein mass- and other quantity-production prac tices represent a pinnacle of technological achievement.3 But in the 1980s, with the automobile industry in financial straits, scholars from various disciplines—economists, business theorists, sociologists, and historians—began challenging the dominant model of big business and mass production. Leading the quest for new approaches to busi ness organization and manufacturing technologies, labor economist 2Joe Dickey, “Industrial Welfare Department, Homer Laughlin China Company,” Potters' Herald (East Liverpool, Ohio) (January 22, 1925), p. 4. In claiming the patron age of “The American...