Dave Trott’s Blog

Dave Trott

My brother-in-law is from Indiana. One time we were in a bar discussing something over a few cold beers.

I forget exactly how the subject came up, but he made a remark that resonated with me. He said, “All the real Englishmen are in America. The ones that stayed in England are just the wimps who were happy to let the King tell them what to do.”

Now okay, that’s over-simplistic (well we were in a bar, and cold refreshment had been taken). But is there a nugget of truth there?

In the early days America was peopled by England’s rebels and Europe’s rejects. Englishmen that didn’t want to put up with the centuries old status quo went to the colonies.

Oliver Cromwell was preparing to emigrate to America when he was persuaded to stay and lead the revolution. Possibly the last real revolutionary we had.

After Cromwell died we had The Restoration. And everything went back to pretty much the way it had been.

A while ago I read a book on Industrial Design. What’s interesting is the concept of design itself started in America. Because there was a need for it.

There was no need for it in Europe. It was mass production that caused a need for design. A standardised product that could be reproduced to an exact format.

Americans needed mass production because the immigrants were Europe’s poor. People who had nothing because they were unskilled. So they tried to make a new life.

The skilled classes were happy to stay in Europe where they had a relatively good life. This meant that America had a massive, unskilled workforce. What could they do with it?

They created the production line. Products made by unskilled workers. Contrary to belief, it wasn’t Henry Ford who invented the production line.

The first time anyone in Europe had ever seen a standardised product was Samuel Colt’s pistols at The Great Exhibition half a century earlier. It was an amazing concept. Every piece on every pistol was exactly the same.

So, if you found two broken pistols on the battlefield, you could cannibalise one for parts to fix the other. Previously they’d both be useless because they were both built separately. So nothing from one would fit the other. You’d have to send both pistols back to the manufacturers.

Standardisation was a revolutionary concept. And Ford wasn’t even the first car manufacturer to employ it.

In 1905, Oldsmobile shipped three horseless carriages to England. They drove them from Southampton to London. Then they took them apart, mixed up all the parts, and rebuilt three new horseless carriages.

Then they drove them back to Southampton. (Wouldn’t that still make a great demonstration commercial today?)

At the time everyone was gobsmacked. How could a country that was made up of unskilled workers, who couldn’t get jobs in Europe, build something better than skilled craftsmen?

Worse, standardisation was something that would eventually make skilled craftsmen redundant.

Take ordinary horse-drawn wagons for instance. Before standardisation all wagons, had different sized wheels.

So, if your wagon needed a new wheel, you’d take it to the wheel-maker and he’d measure all your other wheels and make you a new one. With standardisation, you had a man doing nothing but making identical wheels. When you needed a wheel, you’d just go along and buy one.

So the American revolution reversed the whole process. The country made up of unskilled immigrants became innovative and powerful. The country made up of skilled workers became complacent and traditional. Because America was forced to invent itself.

So getting a jump on the competition became mandatory. For survival, they learned to constantly reinvent themselves. To never rest on their laurels. To accept that they always had to be looking for an advantage.

In the UK we were more skilled, so we learned to carry on doing what we were good at. Craftsmanship.

Maybe there’s a parallel with current advertising there. The proportions of good to bad are roughly the same in both places. But the best of American is fresh and raw, powerful and crude, innovative and polarising.

British is slicker, better crafted and executed, but lacking life. Nothing too challenging, nothing outrageous, nothing to upset the status quo.

Something we can all nod along to, made with great skill. Maybe an analogy would be Bauhaus furniture versus Chippendale furniture.

Bauhaus was controversial, original thinking, adequately executed. Chippendale was predictable, traditional thinking, beautifully crafted.

Maybe my brother-in-law was right in the bar all that time ago. When all those Englishmen went to America something else went too.