Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

222 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
said to have "used more capital and employed more men 'than in any single
line of private enterprise." At the same time, private construction, con-
suming vast quantities of brick, steel, stone, tile, cement, lumber, hardware,
and plumbing supplies, changed metropolitan skylines and pushed up row
houses and apartments along ever-lengthening radii out of the cities.
Technology and the plant facilities to make consumer products were
far in advance of demand. "For every hundred people in American cities
in 1920 there were only thirteen bathtubs and six telephones. One Amer.
ican in every thirteen had an automobile, but not one in ten thousand had a
radio. Almost no farmhouses, and but one in every ten city homes, were
wired for electricity; only in such homes, therefore, were there potential
customers for washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, floor lamps,
incandescent bulbs, fans, and flatirons." In city and suburb, technology
thus stood ready to invade the home as the automobile, radio, telephone,
bathroom plumbing, and kitchen appliances became essentials of the good
life. Wages rose steadily, but not fast enough to sustain the buying power
needed by the pace of mass production, and advertising and installment buy.
in'g became giant adjuncts of industry to maintain mass consumption.5 The
promise of the decade appeared in the extraordinary boom that followed the
end of wartime controls as industry, enriched by research and mechanization,
sought to satisfy pent-up demands.6 There was to be a severe postwar
depression but it was delayed until late in 1920.
'Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of
Industrial America (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 298. Highway, road, and street
construction expenditures, for example, rose from just over a half billion dollars in
1920 to a billion in 1921 and close to two billion by 1928. U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics, p. 382.
Ibid., p. 309. All these appliances, as well as air conditioners, electric ranges, water
heaters, and garbage-disposal units, though some were yet crude and costly, were on the
market before the end of the decade.
In the 28 million homes in the United States at the end of 1928, it was estimated that 19
miilkn wired for electricity, 17 million had an automobile outside the door, 13
million had a telephone, 13 million a phonograph, and 9 million had factory-built radio
sets. Dellinger, "Radio," in A. B. Hart and W. M. Schuyler, eds., The American Year
Book, 1929 (New York: Am. Year Book Corp., 1930), p. 460.
Between 1900 and 1920 the volume of manufactured products went up 95 percent while
population increased only 40 percent. Duffus, "1900—1925."
6 In its haste to convert to peacetime production, industry often neglected new materials
or sources developed during the war. Pointing specifically to the renewed but now
unnecessary importation of German clays for glassmaking, Dr. Stratton deplored the
"tendency on the part of manufacturers to revert to the old order of things just as soon as
they could * * * [following] the path of least resistance and of the least financial
risk." Letter, SWS to A. V. Bleininger, Feb. 3, 1919 (NBS Box 14, IR).