Talk:Cyrus McCormick Jr.

{{WikiProject Wisconsin|importance=low}}

{{WikiProject Wisconsin|importance=low}}

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== Untitled ==

Hi! I don't have time to make a proper contribution to this article, but I ran across this brief mention in my research that might be useful to someone looking to expand this article in the future.

Hi! I don't have time to make a proper contribution to this article, but I ran across this brief mention in my research that might be useful to someone looking to expand this article in the future.

"At Cyrus McCormick's reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this step was taken to modernize the planet and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the addition of the new machines as way to 'weed out the bad element among the men,' namely, the skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago. [in-text citation, see below] The new machines, manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use, the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose- the destruction of the union." - Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed., MacKenzie and Wacjman (eds.), Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999, pp. 28-39.

"At Cyrus McCormick's reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this step was taken to modernize the planet and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the addition of the new machines as way to 'weed out the bad element among the men,' namely, the skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago. [in-text citation, see below] The new machines, manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use, the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose- the destruction of the union." - Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed., MacKenzie and Wacjman (eds.), Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999, pp. 28-39.