The Automobile in Rural America
Interpretative flexibility and how users shape technology.
The automobile first traversed rural America at the hands of rich city folk out for joy rides. Farmers didn’t like these urbanites and their countryside car rides. Rural Americans called cars the “devil wagon,” citing how horses reared at noisy cars and how speedy automobiles killed chickens. In 1904, one farmer told a newspaper that cars should have their own roads and public highways should be left “for the use of people who do not care to be sent from this mundane sphere by a horse maddened by one of those ‘pesky’ automobiles.”
However, these anti-automobile crusaders failed because as the urban luxury market saturated, car manufacturers developed affordable, durable automobiles that appealed to rural Americans. The most successful example? The 1908 Model T Ford.
The Model T was designed as a transportation tool. But, to quote scholar Trevor Pinch: “Users can embed new meanings into the technology.” In other words, the same piece of technology can mean different things to different social groups. Pinch describes this phenomenon as “interpretative flexibility.”
This is what happened with the car in rural America. The Model T became more than just a transportation device –– it also became a source of electric power.
Kansas farmer George Schmidt advised readers of the Rural New Yorker in 1903 to use their cars to power “a [corn] sheller, grinder, saw, pump, or any other machine that the engine is capable of running, and see how the farmer can save money and be in style with any city man.” The car was used to power hay balers, wood saws, and cider presses. The car was used as a snowmobile and a tractor. The car was used, at least in one instance, to operate a washing machine. A 1915 Maine farmer put a car to so many uses that a tax assessor didn’t know if he should classify the car as a “pleasure vehicle” or a “piece of agricultural machinery.” (Take a peek at the cartoon at the top of this post to see how the farmer embraced the Model T as a multipurpose device.)
This is “interpretative flexibility.” To the urban user, the car meant transportation. To the rural user, the car meant transportation and farm tool and power source. Two social groups defined different uses for the same piece of technology.
There’s another social group at play, too: The car industry. A 1906 Rural New Yorker survey found that six out of seven auto manufacturers opposed the practice of using cars as stationary power sources because it could damage the engine. However, in 1912, accessory manufacturers entered the market: These firms sold kits that would convert cars into either stationary power sources or into agricultural tractors. During World War I, horses and farmhands were sent off to war, leaving farmers alone with their cars; in turn, these retrofitting kits became very popular because farmers, without their traditional sources of labor, needed to put their automobiles to work. Thus, these commercial stakeholders didn’t just respond to the “interpretative flexibility” –– they embraced it.
Perhaps the most effective response to this “interpretative flexibility” came from the car manufacturers themselves. Originally, gasoline tractors were clunky and expensive, but around 1912, farm equipment companies and auto manufacturers like Ford designed smaller, less expensive tractors. By 1940, farm families were buying these mass-produced tractors to replace horses and auto-tractor conversion kits.
Thus, while the alternative rural uses for cars were at first a threat to manufacturers, in the long run, these different use cases helped open up new markets. Manufacturers sold machines specifically designed to address each of the car’s rural uses: The tractor, the hay baler, the snowmobile. In turn, the car lost its “interpretative flexibility.” The car became a transportation technology, and the tractor became an agricultural technology. Each technology settled into its niche. Each found its unique meaning –– a meaning it holds to this day.
Notes.
Last week, Cornell University professor Trevor Pinch passed away. His research on the social construction of technology and “interpretative flexibility” changed the history of technology discipline by nuancing our understanding of technological development.
This post is adapted from one of his seminal works on the social construction of the automobile in rural America, coauthored with Ronald Kline.