JF Ptak Science Books Post 2656
There are many instances of assembly-line manufacturing before Henry Ford, but none were nearly as complete and extensive and done on such a large scale as the principle and practice he established in 1913. The idea became generalized and (to a degree) fashionable, and the practice started being implemented in many other business wide and narrow. To a certain extent that applies to this parking garage proposal that appeared in Popular Mechanics in December 1921. the effect of this idea here is the introduction of the building-as-robot, though the idea in this form didn't yet exist, nor did the term "robot". In any event the building took care of the customer's car once the car had been driven in--attendants would drive the car to an access point for a conveyor and perhaps an elevator, and deliver the car to its designated slot, much in the same ways some libraries operate in storing some of their more obscure books.
I guess that "Taylorism" works its way in there, too. Frederick Winslow Taylor (born in 1856 but dead already at this point by six years) introduced a study of business in his Principles of Scientific Management, and that was a synthesis of humans with their environment and tasks to produce a more business-harmonious utilization by increasing the workers' productivity via time/use studies, making the worker more a part of the business machine, and in a sense a Borg-like part of a techno-human robotic industry. Among other things Taylor discovered to the hatred of hundreds of thousands of laborers that the short-handled shovel (villainized in the Song "Big Rock Candy Mountain") was the better tool to use in many shoveling tasks even though the thing itself is a back-breaker that no worker would choose to use. Anyway, int eh history of robots, both of these bits deserve some attention.
[Source, Popular Mechanics, December 1921, vol 36, p 751.]
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