In general, in the development of a new artefact, inventors face technical trade-offs and bottlenecks which have to be overridden. Therefore, time-saving and LS heuristics have been considered by economic historians as potential focusing devices (Rosenberg 1976) guiding the search process, however of a very particular type. Speeding up the production process clearly maps into the need of reducing human active participation to the process itself. ( 2020) estimate that only one-third of the increase in labor productivity (measured as time spent in a given operation) in the late nineteen century was due to ‘inanimate power’, while the rest unexplained component remains attributed to other factors, among which division of labor plays a prominent role.
As corroborating evidence, using a detailed and quite granular report, the Hand and Machine Labor Study commissioned by the Department of Labor in 1899 to detect the impact of mechanization on labor productivity, Atack et al. On top of that, Freeman ( 2019) conceptualizes the First Industrial Revolution as a paradigmatic shift emerging from the combination of time-saving heuristics on the one hand, and the new clear demarcation between working- and life-time for wage laborers on the other hand, an attitude absent in pre-industrial societies (Thompson 1963), allowing workers discipline and ensuring their participation to productive activities, e.g. by turning Monday into a working, rather than a drinking, day.
#HISTORY OF AUTOMATION IN MANUFACTURING FULL#
The role played by time-saving heuristics in shaping the direction of mechanization has been emphasized by von Tunzelmann ( 1995) with reference to the cotton industry in the British Industrial Revolution: the massive increase in labor productivity resulted from the use of innovation and discovery through which a spinner was able to produce in a day as much yarn as previously required by a full year of work, without mechanization. In the tradition of the economics of innovation, the First Industrial Revolution had been a combination of time-saving heuristics, enabled by the mechanization process, and the division of labor inside factories, together with the emergence of innovative artefacts.
#HISTORY OF AUTOMATION IN MANUFACTURING DRIVERS#
Reducing time of operations during Taylorism, increasing saturation of takt-times during Toyotism, and speeding up processes and executions of functions remotely tracking operators’ intervention nowadays, are core drivers of mechanization and automation. The existence of labor-saving (hereafter, LS) heuristics driving the rate and direction of technological change is a documented pattern, since the inception of the First Industrial Revolution.