The Modern Mind
Page 14
The Graduate School of Business Administration opened in October 1908 with fifty-nine candidates for the new degree of Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.).20 At the time there was conflict not only over what was taught but how it was to be taught. Accountancy, transportation, insurance, and banking were covered by other institutions, so Harvard evolved its own definition of business: ‘Business is making things to sell, at a profit, decently.’ Two basic activities were identified by this definition: manufacturing, the act of production; and merchandising or marketing, the act of distribution. Since there were no readily available textbooks on these matters, however, businessmen and their firms were spotlighted by the professors, thus evolving what would become Harvard’s famous system of case studies. In addition to manufacturing and distribution, a course was also offered for the study of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management.21 Taylor, an engineer by training, embraced the view, typified by a speech that President Theodore Roosevelt had made in the White House, that many aspects of American life were inefficient, a form of waste. For Taylor, the management of companies needed to be put on a more ‘scientific’ basis – he was intent on showing that management was a science, and to illustrate his case he had investigated, and improved, efficiency in a large number of companies. For example, research had discovered, he said, that the average man shifts far more coal or sand (or whatever substance) with a shovel that holds 21 pounds rather than, say, 24 pounds or 18 pounds. With the heavier shovel, the man gets tired more quickly from the weight. With the lighter shovel he gets tired more quickly from having to work faster. With a 21-pound shovel, the man can keep going longer, with fewer breaks. Taylor devised new strategies for many businesses, resulting, he said, in higher wages for the workers and higher profits for the company. In the case of pig-iron handling, for example, workers increased their wages from $1.15 a day to $1.85, an increase of 60 percent, while average production went up from 12.5 tons a day to 47 tons, an increase of nearly 400 percent. As a result, he said, everyone was satisfied.22 The final elements of the Harvard curriculum were research, by the faculty, shoe retailing being the first business looked into, and employment experience, when the students spent time with firms during the long vacation. Both elements proved successful. Business education at Harvard thus became a mixture of case study, as was practised in the law department, and a ‘clinical’ approach, as was pursued in the medical school, with research thrown in. The approach eventually became famous, with many imitators. The 59 candidates for M.B.A. in 1908 grew to 872 by the time of the next stock market crash, in 1929, and included graduates from fourteen foreign countries. The school’s publication, the Harvard Business Review, rolled off the presses for the first time in 1922, its editorial aim being to demonstrate the relation between fundamental economic theory and the everyday experience and problems of the executive in business, the ultimate exercise in pragmatism.23
What was happening at Harvard, in other business schools, and in business itself was one aspect of what Richard Hofstadter has identified as ‘the practical culture’ of America. To business, he added farming, the American labor movement (a much more practical, less ideological form of socialism than the labor movements of Europe), the tradition of the self-made man, and even religion.24 Hofstadter wisely points out that Christianity in many parts of the United States is entirely practical in nature. He takes as his text a quote of theologian Reinhald Niebuhr, that a strain in American theology ‘tends to define religion in terms of adjustment to divine reality for the sake of gaining power rather than in terms of revelation which subjects the recipient to the criticism of that which is revealed.’25 And he also emphasises how many theological movements use ‘spiritual technology’ to achieve their ends: ‘One … writer tells us that … “the body is … a receiving set for the catching of messages from the Broadcasting Station of God” and that “the greatest of Engineers … is your silent partner.” ’26 In the practical culture it is only natural for even God to be a businessman.
The intersection in New York’s Manhattan of Broadway and Twenty-third Street has always been a busy crossroads. Broadway cuts through the cross street at a sharp angle, forming on the north side a small triangle of land quite distinctive from the monumental rectangular ‘blocks’ so typical of New York. In 1903 the architect Daniel Burnham used this unusual sliver of ground to create what became an icon of the city, a building as distinctive and as beautiful now as it was on the day it opened. The narrow wedge structure became known – affectionately – as the Flatiron Building, on account of its shape (its sharp point was rounded). But shape was not the only reason for its fame: the Flatiron was 285 feet – twenty-one storeys – high, and New York’s first skyscraper.27
Buildings are the most candid form of art, and the skyscraper is the most pragmatic response to the huge, crowded cities that were formed in the late nineteenth century, where space was at a premium, particularly in Manhattan, which is built on a narrow slice of an island.28 Completely new, always striking, on occasions beautiful, there is no image that symbolised the early twentieth century like the skyscraper. Some will dispute that the Flatiron was the first such building. In the nineteenth century there were buildings twelve, fifteen, or even nineteen storeys high. George Post’s Pulitzer Building on Park Row, built in 1892, was one of them, but the Flatiron Building was the first to rule the skyline. It immediately became a focus for artists and photographers. Edward Steichen, one of the great early American photographers, who with Alfred Stieglitz ran one of New York’s first modern art galleries (and introduced Cézanne to America), portrayed the Flatiron Building as rising out of the misty haze, almost a part of the natural landscape. His photographs of it showed diminutive, horse-drawn carriages making their way along the streets, with gaslights giving the image the feel almost of an impressionist painting of Paris.29 The Flatiron created downdraughts that lifted the skirts of women going by, so that youths would linger around the building to watch the flapping petticoats.30
The skyscraper, which was to find its full expression in New York, was actually conceived in Chicago.31 The history of this conception is an absorbing story with its own tragic hero, Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924). Sullivan was born in Boston, the son of a musically gifted mother of German-Swiss-French stock and a father, Patrick, who taught dance. Louis, who fancied himself as a poet and wrote a lot of bad verse, grew up loathing the chaotic architecture of his home city, but studied the subject not far away, across the Charles River at MIT.32 A round-faced man with brown eyes, Sullivan had acquired an imposing self-confidence even by his student days, revealed in his dapper suits, the pearl studs in his shirts, the silver-topped walking cane that he was never without. He travelled around Europe, listening to Wagner as well as looking at buildings, then worked briefly in Philadelphia and the Chicago office of William Le Baron Jenney, often cited as the father of the skyscraper for introducing a steel skeleton and elevators in his Home Insurance Building (Chicago, 1883a–5).33 Yet it is doubtful whether this building – squat by later standards – really qualifies as a skyscraper. In Sullivan’s view the chief property of a skyscraper was that it ‘must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from top to bottom it is a unit without a single dissenting line.’34
In 1876 Chicago was still in a sense a frontier town. Staying at the Palmer House Hotel, Rudyard Kipling found it ‘a gilded rabbit warren … full of people talking about money and spitting,’ but it offered fantastic architectural possibilities in the years following the great fire of 1871, which had devastated the city core.35 By 1880 Sullivan had joined the office of Dankmar Adler and a year later became a full partner. It was this partnership that launched his reputation, and soon he was a leading figure in the Chicago school of architecture.
Though Chicago became known as the birthplace of the skyscraper, the notion of building very high structures is
of indeterminable antiquity. The intellectual breakthrough was the realisation that a tall building need not rely on masonry for its support.*
The metal-frame building was the answer: the frame, iron in the earlier examples, steel later on, is bolted (later riveted for speedier construction) together to steel plates, like shelves, which constitute the floors of each storey. On this structure curtain walls could be, as it were, hung. The wall is thus a cladding of the building, rather than truly weight bearing. Most of the structural problems regarding skyscrapers were solved very early on. Therefore, as much of the debate at the turn of the century was about the aesthetics of design as about engineering. Sullivan passionately joined the debate in favour of a modern architecture, rather than pastiches and sentimental memorials to the old orders. His famous dictum, ‘Form ever follows function,’ became a rallying cry for modernism, already mentioned in connection with the work of Adolf Loos in Vienna.36
Sullivan’s early masterpiece was the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis. This, again, was not a really high structure, only ten storeys of brick and terracotta, but Sullivan grasped that intervention by the architect could ‘add’ to a building’s height.37 As one architectural historian wrote, the Wainwright is ‘not merely tall; it is about being tall – it is tall architecturally even more than it is physically.’38 If the Wainwright Building was where Sullivan found his voice, where he tamed verticality and showed how it could be controlled, his finest building is generally thought to be the Carson Pirie Scott department store, also in Chicago, finished in 1903–4. Once again this is not a skyscraper as such – it is twelve storeys high, and there is more emphasis on the horizontal lines than the vertical. But it was in this building above all others that Sullivan displayed his great originality in creating a new kind of decoration for buildings, with its ‘streamlined majesty,’ ‘curvilinear ornament’ and ‘sensuous webbing.’39 The ground floor of Carson Pirie Scott shows the Americanisation of the art nouveau designs Sullivan had seen in Paris: a Metro station turned into a department store.40
Frank Lloyd Wright was also experimenting with urban structures. Judging by the photographs – which is all that remains since the edifice was torn down in 1950 – his Larkin Building in Buffalo, on the Canadian border, completed in 1904, was at once exhilarating, menacing, and ominous.41 (John Larkin built the Empire State Building in New York, the first to have more than 100 floors.) An immense office space enclosed by ‘a simple cliff of brick,’ its furnishings symmetrical down to the last detail and filled with clerks at work on their long desks, it looks more like a setting for automatons than, as Wright himself said, ‘one great official family at work in day-lit, clean and airy quarters, day-lit and officered from a central court.’42 It was a work with many ‘firsts’ that are now found worldwide. It was air-conditioned and fully fireproofed; the furniture – including desks and chairs and filing cabinets – was made of steel and magnesite; its doors were glass, the windows double-glazed. Wright was fascinated by materials and the machines that made them in a way that Sullivan was not. He built for the ‘machine age,’ for standardisation. He became very interested also in the properties of ferro-concrete, a completely new building material that revolutionised design. Steel was pioneered in Britain as early as 1851 in the Crystal Palace, a precursor of the steel-and-glass building, and reinforced concrete (béton arme) was invented in France in the same year, by François Hennebique. But it was only in the United States, with the building of skyscrapers, that these materials were exploited to the full. In 1956 Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper for Chicago.43
Further down the eastern seaboard of the United States, 685 miles away to be exact, lies Kill Devil Hill, near the ocean banks of North Carolina. In 1903 it was as desolate as Manhattan was crowded. A blustery place, with strong winds gusting in from the sea, it was conspicuous by the absence of the umbrella pine trees that populate so much of the state. This was why it had been chosen for an experiment that was to be carried out on 17 December that year – one of the most exciting ventures of the century, destined to have an enormous impact on the lives of many people. The skyscraper was one way of leaving the ground; this was another, and far more radical.
At about half past ten that morning, four men from the nearby lifesaving station and a boy of seventeen stood on the hill, gazed down to the field which lay alongside, and waited. A pre-arranged signal, a yellow flag, had been hoisted nearby, at the village of Kitty Hawk, to alert the local coastguards and others that something unusual might be about to happen. If what was supposed to occur did occur, the men and the boy were there to serve as witnesses. To say that the sea wind was fresh was putting it mildly. Every so often the Wright brothers – Wilbur and Orville, the object of the observers’ attention – would disappear into their shed so they could cup their freezing fingers over the stove and get some feeling back into them.44
Earlier that morning, Orville and Wilbur had tossed a coin to see who would be the first to try the experiment, and Orville had won. Like his brother, he was dressed in a three-piece suit, right down to a starched white collar and tie. To the observers, Orville appeared reluctant to start the experiment. At last he shook hands with his brother, and then, according to one bystander, ‘We couldn’t help notice how they held on to each other’s hand, sort o’ like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again.’45 Just after the half-hour, Orville finally let go of Wilbur, walked across to the machine, stepped on to the bottom wing, and lay flat, wedging himself into a hip cradle. Immediately he grasped the controls of a weird contraption that, to observers in the field, seemed to consist of wires, wooden struts, and huge, linen-covered wings. This entire mechanism was mounted on to a fragile-looking wooden monorail, pointing into the wind. A little trolley, with a cross-beam nailed to it, was affixed to the monorail, and the elaborate construction of wood, wires and linen squatted on that. The trolley travelled on two specially adapted bicycle hubs.
Orville studied his instruments. There was an anemometer fixed to the strut nearest him. This was connected to a rotating cylinder that recorded the distance the contraption would travel. A second instrument was a stopwatch, so they would be able to calculate the speed of travel. Third was an engine revolution counter, giving a record of propeller turns. That would show how efficient the contraption was and how much fuel it used, and also help calculate the distance travelled through the air.46 While the contraption was held back by a wire, its engine – a four-cylinder, eight-to-twelve-horsepower gasoline motor, lying on its side – was opened up to full throttle. The engine power was transmitted by chains in tubes and was connected to two airscrews, or propellers, mounted on the wooden struts between the two layers of linen. The wind, gusting at times to thirty miles per hour, howled between the struts and wires. The brothers knew they were taking a risk, having abandoned their safety policy of test-flying all their machines as gliders before they tried powered flight. But it was too late to turn back now. Wilbur stood by the right wingtip and shouted to the witnesses ‘not to look sad, but to laugh and hollo and clap [their] hands and try to cheer Orville up when he started.’47 As best they could, amid the howling of the wind and the distant roar of the ocean, the onlookers cheered and shouted.
With the engine turning over at full throttle, the restraining wire was suddenly slipped, and the contraption, known to her inventors as Flyer, trundled forward. The machine gathered speed along the monorail. Wilbur Wright ran alongside Flyer for part of the way, but could not keep up as it achieved a speed of thirty miles per hour, lifted from the trolley and rose into the air. Wilbur, together with the startled witnesses, watched as the Flyer careered through space for a while before sweeping down and ploughing into the soft sand. Because of the wind speed, Flyer had covered 600 feet of air space, but 120 over the ground. ‘This flight only lasted twelve seconds,’ Orville wrote later, ‘but it was, nevertheless, the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised
itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it had started.’ Later that day Wilbur, who was a better pilot than Orville, managed a ‘journey’ of 852 feet, lasting 59 seconds. The brothers had made their point: their flights were powered, sustained, and controlled, the three notions that define proper heavier-than-air flight in a powered aircraft.48
Men had dreamed of flying from the earliest times. Persian legends had their kings borne aloft by flocks of birds, and Leonardo da Vinci conceived designs for both a parachute and a helicopter.49 Several times in history ballooning has verged on a mania. In the nineteenth century, however, countless inventors had either killed themselves or made fools of themselves attempting to fly contraptions that, as often as not, refused to budge.50 The Wright brothers were different. Practical to a fault, they flew only four years after becoming interested in the problem.
It was Wilbur who wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., on 30 May 1899 to ask for advice on books to read about flying, describing himself as ‘an enthusiast but not a crank.’51 Born in 1867, thus just thirty-two at the time, Wilbur was four years older than Orville. Though they were always a true brother-brother team, Wilbur usually took the lead, especially in the early years. The sons of a United Brethren minister (and later a bishop) in Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers were brought up to be resourceful, pertinacious, and methodical. Both had good brains and a mechanical aptitude. They had been printers and bicycle manufacturers and repairers. It was the bicycle business that gave them a living and provided modest funds for their aviation; they were never financed by anyone.52 Their interest in flying was kindled in the 1890s, but it appears that it was not until Otto Lilienthal, the great German pioneer of gliding, was killed in 1896 that they actually did anything about their new passion. (Lilienthal’s last words were, ‘Sacrifices must be made.’)53