Robin B. Williams, Savannah College of Art and Design
Table of Contents
Street Pavements before Asphalt
The Labor of Street Paving
Cleaning Streets
Heritage Work
Notes
Introduction
The paving of streets with macadam, blocks or bricks represented a vital development in the modernization of cities beginning in the nineteenth century. It also represented the product of extensive and often highly skilled human labor. Images of anonymous work crews installing pavement frequently appeared in the pages of municipal reports, underscoring a city’s commitment to invest in such labor-intensive and costly public works. Occasionally the labor involved in street paving generated surprising public acclaim for individual craftsmen, most notably James Garfield “Indian Jim” Brown, whose skill and efficiency defied belief. But making street pavement successful went well beyond its installation. From the preparatory harvesting and transporting of materials and their shaping into usable pavements to their maintenance through the prominent efforts of street cleaning crews, human labor was the historical agent shaping the interrelationship of advancements in modes of transit and the evolution of surface pavements. That tradition gained renewed importance with the spread of the historic preservation movement to street pavement in the 1970s, which highlighted the importance of skilled labor needed to restore historic street surfaces.
Street Pavements Before Asphalt
Before modern synthetic sheet asphalt assumed its dominion over streets and highways in the 1920s, North American cities employed a wide array of street pavement materials. The remarkable breadth of materials was matched by the labor skills required to create and install them. Beginning with cobblestones in New York in the seventeenth century and in Philadelphia by the early eighteenth century, most cities experimented with diverse materials beginning in the 1800s depending on their geographic location, economic resources and needs.[1] Early nineteenth-century use of macadam (a kind of layered gravel) led to midcentury experiments with wood blocks, granite or sandstone Belgian blocks, and later asphalt blocks and vitrified bricks, among others, sometimes all at the same time in the same city.
The earliest municipal efforts to pave streets in American cities sought the most expedient and affordable materials and involved more brute muscle than skilled craftsmanship. Beginning in the seventeenth century, East Coast port cities made use of cobblestones, irregular naturally rounded stones that arrived in the holds of ships as ballast. To make room for the heavy loads of raw materials for export, the ballast stones were manually removed from the ships and typically deposited on a wharf, where they became a ready resource for street pavement. Princess Street in Alexandria, Virginia, believed to have been installed by Hessian soldiers, is typical in comprising a wide variety of stone types and sizes laid in a loose and random pattern (figures 1 and 2).[2] By the mid-nineteenth century, however, cobblestones began to fall out of favor as pavement experts like William Gillespie, a professor of civil engineering at Union College in Schenectady, New York, considered them a “common but very inferior pavement which disgraces the streets of nearly all our cities.”[3]
Figure 2. Interpretative signage about cobblestone pavement, Princess Street, Alexandria, Virginia, 2016. Photo by author.
Achieving road surfaces better suited to the growing number of wheeled vehicles in industrial cities would require more skilled and intensive labor. Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam developed a layered pavement, macadam, as it came to be known, that involved workers breaking stones to a consistent size able to be passed through a two-inch ring (figure 3). The rule of thumb for laborers was that no rock should be too large to fit into their mouth. Constructing the roadbed itself was equally labor intensive, with a layer of broken stone followed by a binder layer of some kind, such as sand, lime or bitumen, then compacted with a roller. Some macadam roads involved multiple such layers. First used in London in 1820 and in the United States by 1823, macadam enjoyed extensive use throughout the nineteenth century and even into the first decades of the twentieth century due to its relative affordability.[4] It remained in 1904 the most common type of pavement in some major cities, including Boston, New York and St. Louis (figure 4).[5] Macadam, however, was far from permanent and prompted complaints about dust.[6] In response, municipal engineers in each city experimented after 1850 with more expensive block, brick and cylinder pavements of wood, stone, asphalt and fired clay to solve the pavement problem.
Figure 3. Carl Rakeman, “First American Macadam Road,” 1823, depicting workers constructing the Boonsborough Turnpike Road between Hagerstown and Boonsboro, Maryland. Courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration.
Figure 4. Diagram showing relative proportions of different types of street pavement used in major American cities in 1904. Source: John W. Alvord, “A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago” [Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904], exhibit no. 2).
Perhaps because of the relative ease with which it can be shaped and its availability in many regions across North America, wood enjoyed early widespread use as a pavement material beginning in the 1830s. Whether cut into planks or rectangular or hexagonal blocks, wood pavements required not only the labor of loggers to fell trees and workers at saw mills, but were the first North American pavements to require the craftsmanship of carpenters or masons at the point of installation (figure 5). The use of wood cylinders, such as those in Detroit (figure 6), simplified the shaping process, but necessitated careful sorting and placement of pieces of differing diameters to minimize the spaces between them. Wood pavements were smooth, affordable and “noiseless,” but struggled, however, with durability, even when later coated in creosote (figures 7 and 8), which limited their use in most cities to streets with relatively light vehicular traffic or where reducing noise was essential, such as by court houses.[7]
Figure 5. Workers laying Nicolson wood blocks in Chicago. Source: “The Nicolson Pavement, Invented by Samuel Nicolson,” 1859.
Figure 6. “Cedar block resurfacing gang” installing wood cylinders in Detroit. Source: “Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1901-1902,” in Annual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1901-1902 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1903), opposite page 40.
Rectangular Belgian blocks, usually of granite but also of sandstone in the Midwest, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the pavement of choice for industrial areas where heavy traffic was most common (figure 9). Shaped by arduous hand chiseling, Belgian blocks are generally rectangular in shape and often vary in size, reflecting the manual-labor nature of its production – as seen in the paving of The Esplanade in Toronto in 1905 (figures 10 and 11). Introduced in the early 1880s, vitrified brick gradually became the most widespread and versatile pavement for both city streets and early automobile highways prior to the introduction of synthetic asphalt in the 1920s due to its combination of durability, smoothness and being waterproof (figure 12). Unlike all previous pavement types, vitrified brick was industrially produced in brick-making factories, which nonetheless required extensive human labor to collect the clay, form it into molds, place the clay into and remove it from ovens and stack for shipment. Its introduction coincided with the rising popularity of bicycles, whose promoters launched the Better Roads Movement to advocate for smoother pavement, which helped spread the use of vitrified brick by the end of the century.
Figure 9. Granite Belgian blocks, Thames Street, Baltimore, 2017. Photo by author.
Figure 10. Workers installing granite Belgian block pavement on The Esplanade in Toronto, 1905. Source: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 376, File 4, Item 114.
Figure 11. Workers installing granite Belgian block pavement on The Esplanade in Toronto, 1905. Source: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 376, File 4, Item 115.
Figure 12. Vitrified brick pavement, intersection of Woodbine Avenue and Crescent Place, Wilmette, Illinois, 2016. Photo by author.
The Labor of Street Paving
The labor-intensive work of installing block or brick pavements was the public face of the whole pavement production cycle. Municipal engineering or public works department annual reports, as well as pavement manuals, frequently included images of large crews of workers, a vivid testament to the significant financial and human investment permanent pavements represented. The ethnicity of the anonymous laborers varied, with crews of all African Americans (though usually under the supervision of a white foreman) being very common (figure 13). Yet, even in the era of Jim Crow with racial segregation, whites and blacks appear working alongside each other (figure 14). Minneapolis documented both mixed crews and all-white crews, including this 1907 view depicting workers installing pavement in decidedly cold weather, to judge by their heavy coats (figure 15). In Toronto, a range of ethnicities and an equal diversity of hat styles can be seen in the workers laying gravel pavement, likely macadam, on Bloor Street in 1903 (figure 16).
Figure 13. African American brick setters and their white foreman. Source: Specifications for the Construction of Vitrified Brick Street Pavements and Country Roads (Cleveland: National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association, 1916), 20.
Figure 14. Crew of white and black brick setters. Source: Clarke Mandigo, A Text Book on Brick Pavements (Kansas City, Missouri: Western Paving Brick Manufacturers Association, 1917), 63.
Figure 15. All-white crew of workers setting creosoted wood blocks in Minneapolis. Source: “Annual Report City Engineer, 1907,” in Annual Reports of the Various City Officers of the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the year 1907 (Minneapolis: Press of Heywood Mfg. Co., 1908), 51.
Figure 16. An ethnically diverse crew of road workers on Bloor Street in Toronto, 1903. Source: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 376, File 4, Item 24.
While most manual laborers documented in photos of paving projects were anonymous, occasionally a worker was so exceptional that he received acclaim and individual recognition. Arthur Hurd, a native of Louisiana, moved to Nebraska the early 1920s and quickly distinguished himself as “the fastest bricklayer in the state” (figure 17).[8] To facilitate his bricklaying, “Ten men, five on each side, carried the bricks in tongs, five bricks to a tong, and piled them on either side of Hurd who laid them in the street.”[9] In an interview with his widow, Dollie, in 1973, journalist John McNeil learned that “Being the fastest bricklayer in the state meant so much to Arthur Hurd that during the bricklaying season he changed his diet. Kneeling down and bending over to lay brick paving is hard work on a full stomach, so Arthur ate his big meal in the evenings. For breakfast he had only toast and a small bowl of cereal, and for lunch one sandwich and a hard-boiled egg.”[10]
Figure 17. Arthur Hurd, “the fastest bricklayer in Nebraska.” Source: John McNeil, “NP Streets have special meaning to Dollie,” North Platte Telegraph, May 23, 1973. Courtesy of The North Platte Bulletin.
Likely the most famous American street brick layer of all time was James Garfield Brown, more commonly known as “Indian Jim.” A Native American born in the 1880s on the Oneida Reservation in central New York state, “Indian Jim” Brown (figures 18 and 19) garnered notable press attention during his lifetime and commemoration with a marker and a documentary film after his death. Already considered a “champion bricksetter,” he participated in a head-to-head competition in Olathe, Kansas, on September 12, 1925, against Frank Hoffman of Eldorado, Kansas, to help complete the Kansas City Road. Press coverage reported that “The work of the Indian, who was a discovery of The [Kansas City] Star, was a demonstration that brick-setting may be made an art, not a drudgery. When Indian Jim stretched up from his completed task to hear the cheers of the crowd in his ears, he knew he had been working.”[11] Indian Jim set 46,644 bricks, 1,755 more than Hoffman, in six hours and 45 minutes. According to a monument in Olathe commemorating the day’s events, Senator Charles Curtis, Kansas Governor Ben Paulen and prominent local citizens laid ceremonial bricks as well.
Figure 18. Portrait of James “Indian Jim” Garfield Brown. Source: Overland Park Historical Society, OPH-2005-009-013-1.
Figure 19. “Indian Jim” and brick road workers, Kansas City-Olathe Road. Source: Overland Park Historical Society, LHS142.
No matter where he worked, Indian Jim attracted attention. Two years later, in Texas, the Pampa Daily News ran articles on him, including a “Paving Edition” of their paper on November 13, 1927, which extolled his prowess as the “world’s champion bricklayer” able to lay three bricks per second![12] In 1937, a WPA publicity film, “A Better Illinois,” documented an unnamed worker rapidly setting bricks from short stacked piles who may in fact be Indian Jim, with the narrator noting “one of the men engaged in this project is said to be the champion bricklayer of the world; at least he gives the younger hands something to think about” (figure 20). The filmmaker clearly had fun documenting his unusual expertise, speeding up the footage while the narrator wryly intones “this is about how he looks to the greenhorns.” By 1939 his reputation merited inclusion in a Ripley’s Believe or Not cartoon that appeared in newspapers around the country. The cartoon proclaimed “Indian Jim Brown – Full blood Oneida Indian – Lays 58,000 bricks a day – 207 tons. This is his daily average. He challenges any man” (figure 21).[13] His reputation lives on: a marker erected in 2007 in Olathe commemorates Brown’s achievement in the completion of the Kansas City Road;[14] and in 2011, filmmaker Gregory Sheffer cast the actor Raw Leiba to portray Indian Jim in a documentary short film called “The Bricklayer: Indian Jim and the Kansas City Olathe Highway,” part of a documentary series called “Olathe – The City Beautiful” that premiered at the AMC Kansas City Filmfest in April 2011; out of a total of 135 films it won first place in its division for “Best Heartland Documentary Short film.”[15]
Figure 20. Promotional film, “A Better Illinois,” 1937, by the Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, documenting the unnamed “champion brick layer of the world.” Source: Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/ABetterIllinois1937.
Figure 21. Ripley’s Believe or Not cartoon depicting “Indian Jim Brown,” appearing in The Portsmouth Times, April 14, 1939. Courtesy of the Portsmouth Daily Times.
Cleaning Streets
Human hands also played a critical role in keeping streets clean. New, permanent street pavements were seen as critical to the progress and health of a modern city, but so too was street cleaning. At a time when horses and other draft animals still filled the streets and regular residential garbage collection did not yet exist, trash, animal urine and excrement, and even dead animals could quickly make newly paved streets objectionable, if not a health hazard. Recognition of the human labor involved in street cleaning appears in a unique graphic using broom sizes to represent the amount of labor required based on the relative cost of cleaning different kinds of pavement in New York (figure 22). No city took greater pride in their street cleaning crews than Detroit, which introduced its highly influential “White Wings Brigade” in 1897 – a force of fifty white men dressed in white suits, each accompanied by a pushcart with a receptacle (figure 23). Leaders in the city’s Public Works department boasted that “Detroit is one of the cleanest of cities. Broad avenues of asphalt and brick and lovely residence streets of cedar block would be given scarcely a passing notice by the visitors were it not for the fact that brush and broom in the hands of expert workers make the streets as scrupulously clean as it is possible for them to be.”[16] The idea immediately proved successful, spawning similar crews within that first year in twenty other cities.[17] By 1902, the brigade had grown to 100 men and continued to be proudly illustrated in the pages of reports.[18] As late as 1923, the city of Los Angeles used the same term “White Wings” to describe their street cleaning workers.[19]
Figure 22. Diagram showing relative labor involved in cleaning different types of street pavement in New York. Source: John W. Alvord, “A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago” [Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904], exhibit no. 8).
Figure 23. “White Wings Brigade” of street cleaning workers, Detroit. Source: “Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1897-8,” inAnnual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1897-8 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1898), opposite p. 48.
Heritage Work
The arrival of synthetic asphalt in the 1920s gradually curtailed the use of bricks or blocks for new streets, and most old streets disappeared under blacktop before long. Yet, an appreciation for old, hand-made pavements helped some communities keep their old streets intact. For example, streets in Wilmette, Illinois, saw their bricks “Relayed by WPA” (as noted by embedded plaques) – a potentially unique project of that Depression-era government make-work program that involved workers inverting the bricks so that their worn tops were placed face down (figures 13 and 24). One intersection involves obliquely oriented brick rows meeting at a large triangle, displaying a remarkably high level of care and attention to detail. Multiple varied iterations of similar triangular patterns exist around eight of the squares in downtown Savannah, where T-shaped intersections prompted their installation. Early twentieth-century asphalt blocks – a historic paving material that survives in very few cities – form the triangles by having blocks rotated 45 degrees to keep them perpendicular to the turning wheels of two-way traffic. Although movement around the squares is now one-way only (like a round-about), the city maintains the triangles, which require careful attention to detail, as can be seen in the various shades of blocks, with the darker ones being oldest (figure 25).
Figure 24. Embedded concrete plaque installed by the Works Progress Administration in the vitrified brick pavement, intersection of Woodbine Avenue and Crescent Place, Wilmette, Illinois, 2016. Photo by author.
Figure 25. Asphalt blocks laid in a triangular formation and showing the insertion of lighter newer blocks, intersection of Barnard and West Gordon Streets, Savannah, Georgia, 2013. Photo by author.
The rise of the historic preservation movement nationwide for buildings in the 1950s and 60s spread to pavement preservation and restoration in a few cities by the 1970s. The City of Tampa has been a leading city in protecting and maintaining its vitrified brick streets. The restoration of a small section of Morgan Street in 1974 garnered newspaper coverage, which lamented that “although brick-laying probably is a lost art by now, these men chiseled, paced and pounded the bricks with astonishing efficiency.”[20] Like the brick layers of the 1920s, most of the workers are anonymous in such reports, but one street restoration master craftsman, Woodrow Pippin of Tampa, enjoyed a level of recognition that recalls Arthur Hurd and Indian Jim Brown. A 1978 Tampa Times article profiling Pippin characterized him “Like some whiz-bang mathematician sizing a row of five-digit figures… with the eyes of a calculating mathematician.”[21] In Philadelphia, the National Park Service’s restoration of cobblestone pavement on Library Street in the 1970s as part of the Independence Mall project evidently privileged craftsmanship over authenticity, with large pavement stones neatly arranged down the middle of the roadway and much smaller stones laid in elegant sets of arcs along the sides (figure 26), rather than the random irregularity of historic cobblestone pavement, as in Alexandria.
As more cities consider restoring brick and block streets, skilled craftsmen and supportive crews of laborers will be needed once again, a vivid reminder of the central role manual labor has played in the creation of our transportation networks.
Notes
Regarding New York, see Niko Koppel, “Restoring New York Streets to Their Bumpier Pasts,” The New York Times (July 18, 2010); regarding Philadelphia, see “Historic Street Paving Thematic District” nomination form, Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, 1998, Description section, page 2, accessed June 10, 2018, from https://www.phila.gov/historical/PDF/Historic%20Paving%20Thematic%20District.pdf.
A marker at the intersection of Princess Street and North Washington Street reads “In the 1790’s many Alexandria streets were paved with cobblestones. According to legend, Hessian soldiers provided the labor to cobble Princess Street.”
W. M. Gillespie, A manual of the principles and practice of road-making: comprising the location, construction, and improvement of roads (common, macadam, paved, plank, etc.); and railroads (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1848), 216-17.
“1823 – First American Macadam Road,” The Paintings of Carl Rakeman, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration. Accessed April 25, 2018 from http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/rakeman/1823.htm.
John W. Alvord, “A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago” (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904), exhibit no. 2. Macadam represented 50.1, 30.1 and 28.35 percent of all street surfaces in Boston, New York and St. Louis, respectively.
Daily Morning News [Savannah], October 25, 1859, p.2, col. 1.
An early use of this term is “A Noiseless Pavement,” Daily Alta California (September 16, 1876), 1.
John McNeil, “NP brick streets have special meaning to Dollie,” North Platte Telegraph (May 23, 1973).
Ibid.
“Olathe Celebrated a New Brick Road Saturday—and `Indian Jim’ Wins,” The Olathe Mirror (September 17, 1925), 5, reprinted in Pat Davis, “’Indian Jim’s’ victory recalled as K.C. brick road is removed,” The Daily News [Olathe, KS] (October 22, 1971), 6A.
Mike Cox, Texas Panhandle Tales (History Press Library Editions, 2012).
“Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1897-8,” in Annual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1897-8 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1898), 48 (Detroit Public Library).
Ibid., 49.
“Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1901-1902,” in Annual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1901-1902 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1903), 60 and accompanying image between pages 57 and 59 (Detroit Public Library).
John Griffen, “Annual Report of the Engineering Department of the City of Los Angeles, July 1st, 1922, to June 30th, 1923,” 19 (City Archives and Record Center, Los Angeles).
“Streets of Brick,” The Tampa Tribune (August 16, 1974), 6-Metro. Copy in the “Tampa-Streets / (1800’s – 1970’s)” vertical file, Special Collections, Tampa Public Library.
Dale Wilson, “Brick laying doesn’t put them on easy street,” The Tampa Times (June 5, 1978), section B Copy in the “Tampa-Streets / (1800’s – 1970’s)” vertical file, Special Collections, Tampa Public Library.
Robin B. Williams, Ph.D., chairs the Architectural History department at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and cities, currently focusing on the evolution of street and sidewalk pavement in North America. He is the lead author of Buildings of Savannah (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the inaugural city guide in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series.
Figure 1. A Parking Lot Full of Cars That Were Traded in Because They Contained Defective Takata Airbags, January 2017. Courtesy of The New York Times.
Ashley Parham was eighteen-years old and had just graduated from high school in 2009, when she went to pick her younger brother up from football practice. She was driving around the parking lot looking for a space when she accidentally bumped into another car. The minor collision was just significant enough to deploy the airbag. But something went wrong. Not only did the airbag fail to inflate correctly, it also threw metal shrapnel at Parham, slicing her carotid artery, leaving her bleeding to death. When police found her, they thought she may have been murdered. Instead, she was likely the first victim of defective airbags produced by the Takata corporation that, in time, led to one of the largest recalls in history.
In April and May of 2013, BMW and a range of Japanese automakers recalled millions of vehicles containing these airbags. A year later, Ford, Chrysler, and several other companies announced that they too were recalling millions upon millions of cars. Eventually, these defective airbags would be linked to at least 12 deaths and hundreds of injuries in the United States alone. Over 60 million cars would be recalled before it was all over, and in 2017, Takata folded in bankruptcy.
Later investigations uncovered that some automakers knew the airbags could be defective for more than a decade. This discovery led some people to ask, how could defective technologies that violated federal law be sold for so long without the authorities becoming aware? Answering that question requires us to think about all of the work regulators do to enforce safety standards—work that is at best imperfect and whose successes and failures often hinge on luck. Regulators and contract firms that work for the U.S. government regularly conduct crash tests and other enforcement activities to ensure that automobiles sold in the United States live up to existing rules. These activities take place out of sight. They involve largely anonymous individuals. They are messy, on-going work that is never done. And yet the safety of the transportation systems around us depend on such mundane, nameless labor. How do we bring it into view?
Crash Tests as Necessary Work
Figure 2. A Fiat Coupe Badly Damaged After a Federal Crash Test
One answer is that activities come into view when something goes wrong. When things go awry in regulation—when we discover that products do not conform to safety rules—regulators and others create paper trails that we can use to reconstruct enforcement efforts. A safety enforcement and vehicle recall effort involving Fiat cars that the U.S. federal safety agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), conducted from 1969 to 1971, helps illustrate some general structures of regulatory work.
On September 24, 1969, four NHTSA staff members traveled to Los Angeles, California, to witness crash tests run by the Digitek Corporation, a private firm that did contract work for the agency.[1] They planned on testing a 1969 Fiat 850 Sedan, but their purchasing agent had accidentally sent an 850 Coupe instead. They decided to crash the car anyway, and the test did not go well for the Fiat Coupe. It badly violated a federal safety standard. This test—which was a matter of luck—began an investigation that lasted for a year and led to Fiat recalling thousands of vehicles.
Instrumenting a Car for Crashing
Figure 3. Photographic Diagrams in Federal Records Show a Tester Instrumenting a Fiat Car for Crash Testing
The Fiat car had violated Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 204—Steering Control Rearward Displacement. Standard 204 set a threshold for the distance that the steering wheel could “displace” backwards towards the driver’s body in a front-end collision. The basic test for Standard 204 involved driving a car into an immobile wall at thirty miles per hour and measuring the rearward displacement of the steering wheel.
In the picture above, which was found in federal records, we can see a tester demonstrating how cars are instrumented for testing under Standard 204. Preparing the car for testing required a great deal of labor. In this case, staff members at Digitek attached a measuring device to the steering wheel and an anchor in the back windowsill. They removed both front seats and mounted metal frames that held a high-speed camera and the measurement grid that can be seen behind the steering wheel. The high-speed camera recorded the steering wheel moving in front of the grid, as car smashed into the crash barrier. Finally, when the car was successfully instrumented, they crashed the car into the barrier and began the long process of examining the resulting data, including the high-speed film, before preparing a report on the test.
Standard 204 limited rearward displacement of the steering wheel to 5 inches. In the initial test, the Fiat Coupe’s steering wheel displaced 6.75 inches.[2] In a later test, another Fiat Coupe’s steering wheel displaced backwards 9.21 or nearly twice the limit.[3] The steering wheel moved backwards so far it left the frame of the high-speed camera. It would have badly injured or killed the driver going into his or her upper-chest or head, possibly even leading to decapitation.
How to Standardize a Wall
Figure 4. Diagram of the Standardized Crash Test Barrier Mandated in Federal Tests
Crashing cars may be the most dramatic aspect of federal regulatory enforcement, but the vast majority of enforcement involves white collar labor: filling out forms and producing paperwork, attending meetings and making phone calls, writing, editing, and publishing reports. When NHTSA staff members returned from observing the crash test in California, they began the work of examining the results and producing the documents that would eventually support their case against Fiat.
Federal regulators were faced with a question: Fiat had claimed in official filings that its cars met US federal safety standards, so what had gone wrong? The investigation quickly came to focus on how Fiat had done its own tests at its headquarters in Turin, Italy—most directly, the company’s failure to follow federal standards properly.
Technical standards are often complex. U.S. federal automotive safety standards brought together a variety of standards from other places to define how testers should do their work. In this way, regulatory enforcement depended on concatenations—or long chains—of paperwork developed over years, in this case, involving both committees within the Society of Automotive Engineers and regulators within federal agencies. Standard 204 included a standard from the Society of Automotive Engineers, Recommended Practice J850, which standardized the dimensions and characteristics automotive crash test barriers should have.[4] It mandated that crash test barriers should be concrete walls backed 200,000 pounds of compacted earth or the equivalent thereof. The key point is that the barrier should be immobile, pushing all of the force in the crash test into the crashing vehicle itself.
The Fiat cars were failing this test dramatically. Regulators found that, because Fiat’s cars had rear engines with trunks in front, steering wheels moved upwards at an extreme angle during crash tests, directly at a driver’s head. The injuries in such an accident would have been gruesome and catastrophic.[5]
Fiat’s Non-Conforming Testing Grounds
Figure 5. Artist’s Rendering of a Fiat Car Crashed on the Company’s Grounds
The regulatory investigation uncovered that Fiat’s crash test barrier and, therefore, its tests did not come anywhere near U.S. government rules. The issue was that Fiat did not have a dedicated testing facility.[6] Instead, Fiat’s leaders decided to use the runways at the company’s private airport as its test area. However, they still wanted to use the airport as an airport, flying in and out of it with private jets for company business. Having crash test barriers on the runway would be a problem for planes. For this reason, the labor of testing worked differently at Fiat than it was supposed to according to the U.S. government: testers at Fiat built temporary crash test walls out of concrete cubes. They would use forklifts to form a wall with the cubes, and then take the wall back down after the tests. U.S. regulators found that the temporary walls in fact moved during the tests, thereby absorbing some of the energy during impact. Fiat’s cars had, in effect, “passed” its own tests because Fiat employees were doing the tests wrong. In 1970, NHTSA pushed Fiat to recall and modify 9,000 vehicles which had been sold in the United States, and the agency fined the company $100,000, the largest fine to that date. Newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, hailed the fine as a success for the federal agency with titles like, “Italian Auto Firm Allegedly Didn’t Meet Federal Steering-Column Standards; Fine is Highest Yet.”
Conclusion—Keeping Dangerous Technologies Off the Road
Figure 6. Diagram of Three Fiat Steering-Columns – The Bottom Two Failed Safety Standards
In the end, NHTSA staff members found that, because Fiat had done the tests incorrectly, it had claimed its steering-columns to be “safe” when they were quite dangerous. So-called “energy-absorbing steering-columns” had existed in the US since the early 1960s, and Fiat had its own version, which featured three-segments that collapsed into each other upon impact. However, the company had continued importing steering-columns that consisted of single steel bars, which sometimes impaled drivers during frontal collisions.[7]
The Fiat case has several important lessons to teach us. First and most simply, it draws our attention to the crucial, ordinary work of regulatory enforcement—the labor of ensuring technologies live up to our legal expectations. Second, the Fiat case shows us how regulatory enforcement involves not only seeing if technologies conform to standards but guaranteeing that testers at different times and different places and within different organizations follow standardized procedures. It’s about standardizing the testing work as well as the regulated object. Fiat had failed to follow procedure. And, finally, the Fiat case reminds us that budgets for regulatory agencies and other government organizations matter. Enforcement and testing cost money. When we cut federal budgets, as we are doing again these past few years, we do fewer tests and have less bandwidth to enforce rules. The chances go up for dangerous technologies to be sold on the market without being discovered.
Notes
Safety Standards Engineers to Chief of Validation Division, “Trip Report, September 24-27, 1969, to Digitek Corporation, Los Angeles, California,” October 7, 1969, 1, General records, Records of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 1966-91, Record Group 416, National Archives at College Park, MD.
Robert Gardner, “CIR Background Synopsis,” October 7, 1969, General records, Records of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 1966-91, Record Group 416, National Archives at College Park, MD.
Robert H. Gardner, Safety Standards Engineer, to Chief, Validation Division and Chief, Vehicles Branch, “Trip Report, October 29-31, 1969, to Dynamic Science, Phoenix, Arizona, and Digitek Corporation, Los Angeles, California,” November 24, 1969, 1.
Federal Register, Vol. 32 (February 3, 1967), 2414.
Digitek Corporation, “Vehicle Test Report FMVSS 204 1969 Fiat Model 850 VIN 0242771,” November 5, 1969.
Letter, Robert Brenner, Acting Director, to V. A. Garibaldi, President, Fiat Motor Company, “Subject: Fiat Model 850 Coupe,” October 29, 1969, 1.
Memorandum, David E. Wells, Chief Counsel, to F. C. Turner, Federal Highway Administrator, through Douglas W. Toms, Director, NHSB, “Fiat Civil Penalty 850 Sedan and Coupe,” March 3, 1970, 1.
Lee Vinsel is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and a co-organizer of The Maintainers, an international, interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, and mundane labor with things. His book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring 2019.
Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.
Massimo Moraglio’s new book, Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, will be published by Berghahn in February 2017.
Summary: On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.
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Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?
We welcome Irene Anastasiadou, Carlos Lopez Galviz, Julia Hildebrand, Robin Kellermann, Victor Marquez, Hiroki Shin, M. Luisa Sousa, and Dhan Zunino Singh to the Executive Committee and congratulate them on their election. Read More
Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society (MIT Press).
By Sebastián Ureta
In this book, Sebastián Ureta argues that humans, both individually and collectively, are always at the heart of infrastructure policy; the issue is how they are brought into it. Ureta develops his argument through the case of Transantiago, a massive public transportation project in the city of Santiago, proposed in 2000, launched in 2007, and in 2012 called “the worst public policy ever implemented in our country” by a Chilean government spokesman.
This special issue of Technology and Culture explores the ways in which road use and road safety have changed since the 1880s, including how different road users interacted with each other, technology, regulation, engineering, design, and the built environment. Together the articles provide a look at a variety of approaches across North America, Europe, and Africa and at different road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. While most of the papers individually consider a single national example, the picture that is built up across the issue allows comparisons between countries to demonstrate how road safety and automobility technologies are historically and culturally contingent. The issue concludes with a commentary from a prominent policymaker in the hope that better understanding of how accidents, safety, and risks are co-constructed and co-produced can offer insights into how we might reduce deaths and injuries in the future.
Read about the content of Technology and Culture
![Diagram showing relative proportions of different types of street pavement used in major American cities in 1904. Source: John W. Alvord, “A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago” [Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904], exhibit no. 2).](https://t2m.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Williams_figure-4.jpg)
![Diagram showing relative labor involved in cleaning different types of street pavement in New York. Source: John W. Alvord, 'A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago' [Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904], exhibit no. 8).](https://t2m.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Williams_figure-22.jpg)
Our two new lifetime members Gijs Mom (left) and Hans-Luiger Dienel (right) between the T2M president Mimi Sheller
This special issue of Technology and Culture explores the ways in which road use and road safety have changed since the 1880s, including how different road users interacted with each other, technology, regulation, engineering, design, and the built environment. Together the articles provide a look at a variety of approaches across North America, Europe, and Africa and at different road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. While most of the papers individually consider a single national example, the picture that is built up across the issue allows comparisons between countries to demonstrate how road safety and automobility technologies are historically and culturally contingent. The issue concludes with a commentary from a prominent policymaker in the hope that better understanding of how accidents, safety, and risks are co-constructed and co-produced can offer insights into how we might reduce deaths and injuries in the future.