Sometimes, oral history makes up for a shortfall in the archival record, or adds depth and greater context to existing archival records. RCA had many short-lived projects in the 1960s and 1970s which aren’t as well documented as some of their other developments.

Kevin Bunch is a writer and communications specialist for the International Joint Commission and an independent researcher of video game history, centered his research at Hagley on RCA in the 1970s. In 1977 RCA released their own home video game console, the RCA Studio II. The device, which played games in black and white, had five built-in games and 11 cartridges released over the course of its short life- it was discontinued in 1978. Bunch interviewed several members of the Studio II development team, as well as developers who worked on RCAs other endeavors including some 1960s arcade machines, and a short-lived virtual reality project in the 1990s. Bunch’s interviews included one with Joyce Weisbecker, an independent game developer and the daughter of Joseph Weisbecker who developed the 1802 chip which powered the Studio II console. Bunch is currently working on a book about the history of RCA and videogames and the interviews he conducted for this project will become a part of Hagley’s digital archives on publication.

In support of his research Bunch received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library.

Historians of technology once famously asked, “does technology drive history?” Their answer was, “it depends.” The phenomena of history do not float atop of the changes within material practices and technology, but neither do they stand apart from them; the two are intimately entwined in the contingent, intermittent unfolding of history. The challenge for the historian is to open the black box of technology, and to make its social setting and connection explicit to allow for a better understanding of its role in continuity and change over time.

Alexander Liebman, geographer and PhD candidate at Rutgers University, asks how this complicated set of interrelated factors have ramified upon the ground in agricultural spaces as twentieth-century engineers, planners, and others applied the technologies of computation and automation to farming. Among the major figures in this story was Arthur Hall, an engineer at Bell Laboratories and innovator in computerized agriculture. His patented 1970s-era “autofarm” aimed to save the small family farm by promoting the farmer from laborer to manager, and equipping him or her with a system of computerized, automated tools to grow, harvest, and process crops from a central indoor terminal. While Hall’s particular system did not change the world of agriculture, his ideas were part of a wider turn toward computer technologies as a solution to problems in American farming. In that regard, the “autofarm” is still with us, and is a touchstone in the history that has led to self-driving tractors and drone fleets of twenty-first-century American farms.

In support of his research Liebman received funding form the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information, visit us online at hagley.org.

Long before automobiles roll off the assembly line, their many components are manufactured by a sprawling constellation of smaller businesses that supply the makers of finished automobiles. This automobile supply chain began in the 1920s within the Detroit metropolitan area, and by the 1960s had swollen to embrace an area roughly 600 miles in radius with its core remaining in southeast Michigan. The story of how the automobile supply chain developed during the first half of the twentieth century, and why it took the specific spatial and economic form that it did, are the subjects of a dissertation project by Kevin Moskowitz, PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington.

To uncover his story, Moskowitz dug into the archives of the American Iron & Steel Institute and the National Bronze & Aluminum Company at the Hagley Library. The latter firm supplied cast cylinder heads and other engine components to Detroit automakers from its location in Cleveland. The company boomed when orders were large, but struggled during the automotive industry’s periodic downturns. While WWII gave the firm a boost, rampant racism, white supremacy, and nativism lead to attacks against the company, its integrated workforce, and its German-American management. The ups and downs of this firm, while unusually well-documented, offer insight into the wider world of the twentieth-century automobile supply chain.

In support of his work Kevin Moskowitz received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information, visit hagley.org.

Scholars have written histories of public relations. Scholars have written histories of labor. Scholars had yet to bring the two histories into conversation with one another, that is until Patricia Curtin, professor at the University of Oregon, started her latest book project. Dr. Curtin’s research illustrates the many connections between public relations and American labor in the early twentieth century.

Whereas capital had its public relations gurus, such as Ivy Lee, so too did the labor movement, with Mother Jones and the IWW leading the way. The struggle for control over firms, economic resources, and business management pivoted, at least in part, on public opinion. Neither capital nor labor could afford to lose the opportunity to cultivate public support, and both sides went at it with gusto. Over the long term, capital had the upper hand. But successful and popular unionization efforts in the twenty-first century, such as that organized by Starbucks workers, may indicate a turning tide in the story.

In support of her work, professor Curtin received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information, visit us online at hagley.org.

DuPont was in the fashion business. The industrial giant cultivated markets for its novel synthetic textiles, such as Rayon, by interfacing with the wider world of fashion. This process brought one Alexis Ureyvitch Sommaripa, later known as “The Mad Russian,” to prominence. This elegant, cultured man was born in the Russian Empire in Odessa, Ukraine, fled the revolution as a teenager, and migrated to the United States with the goal to become “a rich American.” From there, his path led him through Harvard, Alabama, Lowell, Buffalo, to New York City. Along the way, he shaped the ways in which DuPont did business, and how American women preferred to dress.

Professor Regina Blaszczyk, business historian at the University of Leeds, tells the story of Sommaripa as part of her book project, The Synthetics Revolution. Sommaripa developed statistical methods to describe the textile and fashion markets, used this information to influence production techniques, and eventually headed the DuPont Fabric Development Service. The FDS was a corporate organ designed to triangulate between DuPont, textile makers, and American consumers. During the 1930s, its influence and its significance of synthetic materials to the fashion industry grew, until by 1940 the “average American woman” wanted not silk, but a Rayon dress.

In support of her research, professor Blaszczyk received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society. For more Hagley History Hangouts and for more information on the Hagley Museum & Library visit us online at hagley.org.

Corporate futurists made a living with their imaginations. These professional prognosticators spent their time looking at the world around them, observing its apparent changes and trends, and reporting to business and political leaders proscribed methods for interpreting and preparing for the future. Dr. Gavin Benke, senior lecturer at Boston University, dug into multiple Hagley Library collections, including those of the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and Conference Board, to explore the careers and influence of twentieth-century corporate futurists.

Beginning in the 1960s, corporate futurists extrapolated from social trends to predict a future business environment where people would demand a higher level of service from corporations, and turn to corporations for leadership, structure, and meaning in the post-national world economy then developing. Whereas during the 1970s this vision found eager listeners in major American corporations, trade associations, and perhaps especially among politicians, its practical impacts were limited. By the 1980s, what influence corporate futurists possessed had ebbed away following the triumphant union of neoliberal economic and neoconservative politics, which they had markedly failed to predict. Nevertheless, the corporate futurists provide a unique window into the historically situated worlds of business and planning.

In support of his work Dr. Benke received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information on the Hagley Museum & Library visit us online at hagley.org.

The Empire of Bethlehem Steel stretched from a small eastern-Pennsylvania city across the United States and down to Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil. It encompassed dozens of plants, concerns, and subsidiary firms, and touched the lives of millions of people across multiple continents. During a century (1880s-1980s) of involvement in Latin America, Bethlehem Steel Company imported cheap materials (iron, manganese) while exporting technical, corporate, and social practices developed in the United States.

Telling this story is Dr. Cory Fischer Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at Lafayette College, whose research into the Bethlehem Steel Company uncovers the global connections that underpinned company success over the twentieth century. Company interests in the mineral economy of Latin America persisted from wholly-owned iron mines in Cuba Chile, through their loss during the period of “resource nationalism” in the region, to minority-stake ownership of manganese mines in Mexico and Brazil. Using the Bethlehem Steel collections held by the Hagley Library, Fischer Hoffman reveals that the company as a chief architect and major beneficiary of globalization.

For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information on the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library, join us online at hagley.org.

From humble beginnings wholesaling at a small tobacconist-hairdresser shop in 1915, the London Rubber Company rapidly became the UK's biggest postwar producer and exporter of disposable rubber condoms. A first-mover and innovator, the company's continuous product development and strong brands (including Durex) allowed it to dominate supply to the retail trade and family planning clinics, leading it to intercede in the burgeoning women's market.

When oral contraceptives came along, however, the company was caught in a bind between defending condoms against the pill and claiming a segment of the new birth control market for itself. In this first major study on the company, Jessica Borge shows how, despite the "unmentionable" status of condoms that inhibited advertising in the early twentieth century, aggressive business practices were successfully deployed to protect the monopoly and squash competition. Through close, evidence-based examination of LRC's first fifty years, encompassing its most challenging decades, the 1950s and 1960s, as well as an overview of later years including the AIDS crisis, Borge argues that the story of the modern disposable condom in Britain is really the story of the London Rubber Company, the circumstances that befell it, the struggles that beset it, the causes that opposed it, and the opportunities it created for itself.

LRC's historic intervention in and contribution to female contraceptive practices sits uneasily with existing narratives centered on women's control of reproduction, but the time has come, Borge argues, for the condom to find its way back to the center of these debates. Protective Practices thereby re-examines a key transitional moment in social and cultural history through the lens of this unusual case study.

Dr. Jessica Borge is a research associate , at Archives and Research Collections, King's College, London and a researcher in the private sector.

During the 1920s, major American corporations established in-house labor unions to address worker agitation. Labor historian Alex John Fleet, PhD candidate at Wayne State University, explores the phenomenon in his dissertation research. Seeking to uncover how company unions intersected with changing labor-management relations, and broader changes in the workplace social environment, Fleet explored the archives of several large firms of the era, notably Goodyear rubber held in Ohio, and Bethlehem Steel held at the Hagley Library. Both companies established in-house labor unions, and organized means for worker representatives to air and possibly seek redress of grievances.

Company unions were not all made the same. Goodyear based its “industrial assembly” on the United States Congress, and endowed it with the capacity to discuss wages and other matters critical to worker satisfaction. Nevertheless, assembly representatives received additional pay from the company, locking them into a conflict of interests between representing labor and representing management. Bethlehem Steel’s company union was more limited, acting as a space for the discussion of a limited range of matters absent enforcement mechanism. While some of these company unions allowed workers to bargain for better wages and conditions, they all allowed employers to stave off organizing attempts by independent labor unions. The era of company unions ended with 1930s New Deal-era reforms, although some company unions lived on under the guise of independent entities.

In support of his research, Alex Fleet received a grant from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more information, and more Hagley History Hangouts, visit hagley.org.

Which is better for business, keeping workers happy, or keeping workers in line? The movement for corporate social responsibility (CSR) argued that management and workers shared a partnership that could multiply productivity and profits if properly nurtured. While labor unrest had roiled the business world for a generation, many leading American firms reacted by maintaining paramilitary private police forces. Not only was this expensive, but it was also ineffective and often counterproductive to managerial goals. During the early twentieth century a new set of ideas about how to manage workers for company benefit emerged with an opposite set of techniques.

Dr. Jeffrey Muldoon examines this turn toward CSR, or “welfare capitalism,” as enacted by the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company firm, among the leading lights of the movement in the United States. By diving especially into the John J. Raskob papers, Muldoon uncovered the many social and financial methods deployed by DuPont management to create a more satisfied, stable, and productive workforce. These included social events and organizations, a company baseball team, financial aid for housing and medical emergencies, and workplace safety activities. These practices benefitted the workers, who were encouraged to identify with the company, and the company bottom line where increased productivity translated to higher profits.

In support of his research, Dr. Muldoon received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information on grant and fellowship opportunities, visit hagley.org.