Before 1930: Increasingly Vivid Narratives of Machines
Replacing People
The story of an automated future was growing more and more vivid, but the
stories still seemed mostly remote. The word robot did not become common in
newspapers and books until the 1930s, though there were some dramatic
exceptions, such as a traffic light, described in the Los Angeles Times in July
1929, that replaced policemen who had been directing traffic at an intersection in
Medford, Massachusetts:
The robot, which is made up in the usual form of red, yellow and green-light
traffic tower, is operated automatically by the automobiles themselves as they
pass over sensitive plates set in the street surface. No car is required to wait
when there is no opposing traffic. When the car reaches an intersection and
the way is clear the control from the plate in the pavement will give it a green
light. If a car is waiting to cross an intersection and the opposing traffic is
heavy the light permitting the car to cross will automatically set in its favor
whenever there is a gap and will immediately return in favor of the heavy
traffic once the car is clear. The robot handles multiple numbers of machines
on the same principle, the streets containing the greatest amount of traffic
being emptied or partially emptied first, thus using a smooth even flow of
traffic through all parts of the complicated square here.17
Reading this paragraph today, almost a century later, we may wonder why we
still find ourselves occasionally waiting in our cars at a red light when there is no
opposing traffic. There must have been problems with this particular robot,
problems that still do not have an inexpensive and practical solution. But this
1929 story was beginning to have an impact.
A decade earlier, a new phrase had appeared in the English language to
describe the effects of labor-saving inventions. The phrase was technological
unemployment. This phrase appeared first in 1917, but it started its epidemic
upswing in 1928. The count for technological unemployment skyrockets in the
1930s in Google Ngrams into an epidemic curve much like the Ebola epidemic
curve in Figure 3.1. The technological unemployment curve peaked in 1933, the
worst year of the Great Depression. A parallel epidemic occurred with the term
power age, which is now mostly gone. The power age referred to the perception

that activities once done by muscle are now done by powerful machines. During
the 1870s depression, about half the US labor force worked in agriculture, and
the labor-saving machinery of that decade tended to be agricultural equipment,
pulled by horses. By 1880, only a fifth of the US labor force worked in
agriculture, and the narratives focused instead on new fuel-powered and
electronic machines, threatening the jobs to which agricultural people fled from
the farms. (Less than 2% of the US workforce is in agriculture today.)
Technological unemployment became a new and persistent worry.
It is curious that the narrative epidemic of technological unemployment began
in 1928, a time of prosperity well before the Great Depression. Still, 1928 was a
time of heightened concern about unemployment, which was blamed entirely on
technological unemployment and not connected in public talk to any weakness
in the US economy. Philip Snowden, former and future chancellor of the
Exchequer in the United Kingdom, wrote in the New York Times in 1928 that the
United States, then the leader in developing labor-saving devices, had a unique
problem of technological unemployment:
But if other countries are compelled to follow America in specialization and
in the displacement of human labor, the problem of unemployment in these
countries will assume the feature of the existing unemployment problem in
America.
This, indeed, is the great problem which every industrial nation must face,
namely, to avoid the present hardship which mechanical and scientific
advance inflicts upon a mass of the wage-earning class. In other words, the
problem is to free the human being from slavery to the iron man.18
By the 1920s, there was much talk about “efficiency experts” whose “time
and motion studies” treated workers as if they were machines. The experts’ goals
were to eliminate any unnecessary motions, thereby saving time and labor cost.
Like other narratives that took form in the late 1920s and went viral in the Great
Depression of the 1930s, efficiency was associated with technological
unemployment.
How did the epidemic of technological unemployment fears start? In March
1928, US senator Robert Wagner stated his belief that unemployment was much
higher than recognized, and he asked the Department of Labor to do a study of
unemployment. Later that month, the department delivered the study that