Sublime

Best-practice steam engine technology could have saved the equivalent of a quarter of labor costs at most plants. Inefficient furnaces were oxidizing away huge amounts of metal. The Germans were pulling ahead in the use of overhead belt conveyors. It was absurdly wasteful to support 119 rail-shape standards. Better management of furnace linings,

continuous processing, the mechanization of unreliable hand processes, and John Hall’s style of reconceiving a process down through the finest-grained of production details. British visitors to American steel plants were astonished—not just at their scale and speed but by the “very conspicuous absence of labourers.”

The consolidation and scaling up of Holley-style continuous-process manufacturing businesses in the 1870s and 1880s—besides iron and steel, in oil, chemicals, flour, meat—eliminated many traditional craft categories. Labor historians sometimes speak of the “de-skilling” of manufacturing, which is not entirely accurate. It took considerable judgment