Communication and the Control RevolutionAuthor(s): James R. BenigerSource: Magazine of History, Vol. 6, No. 4, Communication in History: The Key toUnderstanding (Spring, 1992), pp. 10-13Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25154079Accessed: 29/12/2009 11:47

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Communication and the

Control Revolution

James R. Beniger

In

1882, Henry Crowell invented

breakfast. He did not, of course, pio neer the practice?which dates from an

cient times?of eating upon rising each

morning. Nor did he coin the word "break

fast," which was common in print by the

late fifteenth century. But Crowell was

first to define and market specialized prod ucts (beginning with cereal or "breakfast

food") appropriate for the morning meal, to promote the health benefits of eating

breakfast to a mass audience, and thus to

begin making American breakfast

the institution we know today. Crowell's invention, a mass

media solution to a problem arising

from the earliest stage of industrial

ization (in this case, grain milling), illustrates why communications tech

nologies gained such economic and

social prominence in the last de

cades of the nineteenth and the first

decades of the twentieth centuries. It

also helps to explain why we find

ourselves today in what has often

been called a "communications age"

or an "information society."

Crowell had built one of the world's

first automatic, all-roller, gradual reduction

mills. His was the very first, moreover,

devoted exclusively to the production of

oatmeal, an installation that literally re

ceived raw oats at one end and shipped cartons of packaged oatmeal out of the

other. Because most Americans still scorned

oats as fodder for horses and associated

oatmeal with invalids and Scottish immi

grants, however, household consumption

remained so low that Crowell's single plant might have produced twice the an

nual consumption for the entire United States. How could he possibly generate demand sufficient to exploit the new high volume, low-unit-cost industrial technol

ogy for profit?

Communication and Control

Crowell's problem was?in two dis

tinct senses?a problem of control. Be

cause he had managed to control production

The Control Revolution has

been as important to the his

tory of the 20th century as the

Industrial Revolution was to

the 18th and 19th centuries.

at an unprecedented volume (by adopting the automatic mill), he became one of the

world's first businessmen to confront the

need to control consumption at a corre

spondingly high level. To control demand

for his oatmeal, Crowell had to rely on

two distinct forms of communication: that

of sending out information and persua

sive messages about his product, and that

of receiving information about its con

sumption and its consumers, both actual

and potential. All control involves just such recipro

cal flows, called communication with

feedback (that is, back to the sender). Re

ciprocal flows for controlling consump tion are known in economics and business as advertising and public relations (infor

mation sent out) and market research (in formation gathered, that is, "feedback" from consumers).

In 1882, Crowell established the first of these two informational flows by pio

neering a revolutionary new com

munications technology: national

advertising of a brand name product

directly to the mass household market. By packaging oatmeal in

convenient 24-ounce boxes, which

he marketed under the now-familiar

label of the black-coated Quaker

(among the first trademarks regis tered in the United States), Crowell

invented breakfast (as a culturally marked meal), breakfast cereal (a

product then entirely new to Ameri can tastes), and the breakfast food

industry.

During the next decade, Crowell in

vented many fundamental advertising tech

niques still used today, including scientific

endorsements, testimonials, and box-top

premiums. In 1889, he introduced Aunt

Jemima Ready-Mix, the first prepared mix

and a major mass marketing innovation.

Two years later, he ran a fifteen-car train

loaded with sample packages from his

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plant to Portland,

Oregon. This became the first national

10 OAH Magazine of History

publicity stunt to promote commercial

products (the train included an exhibit on

the virtues of eating a good breakfast).

Remaining packages went to Portland

households, the first use of free samples distributed door-to-door.

The second of the reciprocal flows for

controlling consumption came after 1900

with the rapid development of market re

search technology: comparative testing of

advertising copy (1906), systematic com

pilation of retail statistics (1910), ques tionnaire surveys of magazine readership (1911), the Audit Bureau of Circulation

(1914), market research departments in

corporations (1916), and house-to-house

market surveys (1916). By the end of

World War I, most Americans began each

day by eating products marketed specifi

cally for breakfast and few still bought oatmeal in bulk, proof enough that national

advertising directed at households could

change basic human behavior. Quaker Oats remains?even in the computer age?

among the largest of U.S. corporations.

The Control Revolution

Henry Crowell's innovations in mass

marketing illustrate just a few of the revo

lutionary developments in communications over the past 170 years. In the four hundred

years after Johannes Gutenberg and others

developed movable-type printing in fif

teenth century Germany, communications

had changed relatively little. Suddenly, in

sharp contrast, the nineteenth century

brought innovation so rapid that a single lifetime might have spanned the introduc tion of most of the basic communications

technologies still in use today: lithographic reproduction (1820s), photography, teleg

raphy, and power printing (1830s), tele

graphic newspapers and high-speed rotary

printing (1840s), cheaper wood pulp pub lications (1850s), the typewriter and trans

atlantic cable (1860s), the telephone, illus

trated daily newspapers, and mass mailing (1870s), halftone photoreproduction (1880s), motion pictures, wireless telegra

phy, and magnetic tape recording (1890s), and finally, broadcasting (early 1900s).

The relatively rapid pace of such inno

vation, compared to that of the three cen

turies after Gutenberg, is well illustrated

by the development of mass printing itself.

Although steam power had been success

fully applied to printing in Germany as

early as 1810, even the largest-circulation newspapers came off handpresses?dif

fering little from those used by Gutenberg? well into the 1820s. By 1827, however, it was possible to print up to 2,500 pages in an hour. After thirty years of innovations

in high-speed cylindrical presses, The Hoe

Web Printing Machine of 1875 could print 25,000 sheets per hour, a tenfold increase

in speed over other power presses. By

1893, octuple rotary power presses printed as many as 96,000 eight-page sections per hour?a 300-fold increase in speed in just 65 years.

But why such recent and rapid devel

opment of communications capabilities across such a wide range of communica

tions technologies? Since prehistoric times, after all, communication has been crucial to every one of the several thousand human

societies for which information survives (a historical record that itself constitutes an

important form of human communica

tion). Indeed, communication is for many

biologists a defining characteristic of life

itself, while for most of those specialized in behavioral ecology, reciprocal commu

nication of a cooperative nature constitutes the diagnostic criterion of sociality as

most generally defined. Why, then, the sudden explosion in human communica

tions in only the past 150 years, a develop ment that significantly lagged behind the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrialization?

Answers lie in the struggle to control the material economy, the concrete open

processing system by which societies con

tinuously extract, reorganize, and distribute

environmental inputs to final consumption. Until the Industrial Revolution, all of these functions were carried on at a human pace,

with processing speeds enhanced only slightly by draft animals and wind and water

power, and with system control increased

correspondingly by modest bureaucratic structures. So long as the energy used to

process and move material flows did not

greatly exceed that of human labor, indi

vidual workers in the system could provide the information processing required for

its control.

By far the greatest impact of industri

alization, from this perspective, was to

speed up society's entire material process

ing system, thereby precipitating a crisis of

control, a period in which innovations in

information-processing and communica

tions technologies lagged behind those of

energy and its application to manufactur

ing and transportation. In the United States, this control crisis began with problems of

safety on the railroads in the early 1840s, moved to related distributional networks

(commission trading and wholesaling) in

the 1850s, hit material production (rail mills and other metal-making and metal

working industries) in the late 1860s, and

finally reached marketing and the control of consumption (in continuous-processing

operations like the oat mill of Henry Crowell) by the early 1880s.

As the control crisis spread through the

material economy, it inspired a continuing stream of innovations?like those of

Crowell?intended to regain control of the

material economy. These included not

only a spate of major new communications

technologies, as we have seen, but count

less other innovations that enhanced the

processing of information more generally. In only the sixty-year period of American

history from the 1840s through the 1890s, these innovations included:

For control of distribution, through freight forwarding and commodity ex

changes (1840s); the postage stamp, through bill of lading, and registered mail (1850s); futures contracts, paper money, fixed prices,

and postal money orders (1860s); mail order and chain stores (1870s); uniform standard time, special delivery, and car

accountant offices (1880s); and travelers' checks and rural free delivery (1890s).

For control of production, wire gauges and similar standardization (1840s); com

missioned industrial consultants (1850s);

continuous-processing technology (1860s); shop-order accounting and factory archi

tecture designed to speed processing (1870s); rate-fixing departments, cost con

trol, and employee time recording (1880s);

Spring 1992 77

and the time study and staff time-keepers for routing (1890s).

For control of consumption, the adver

tising agency and press association (1840s); iterated advertising copy (1850s); display

type and newspaper circulation books

(1860s); trademark law and full-page and

human-interest advertising (1870s); news

paper syndicates, the linotype, advertising

journals, and national public

ity stunts (1880s); and stan

dardized billboards, print

patents, full-time copywrit ers, and corporate publicity bureaus (1890s).

For the more general

ized control of the entire

material economy, large

scale formal organization (1840s); hierarchical process control systems and formal

line-and-staff control

(1850s); modern bureaucra

cies with multiple depart ments (1860s); the standard

ized typewriter (1870s);

accounting firms, bonding

companies, and punch-card

tabulators (1880s); and the

addressograph, four-function

calculators, and centralized,

departmental corporate or

ganization (1890s). These complex and in

terrelated sequences of rapid

change in the technological and economic arrangements

by which information is col

lected, stored, processed, and

communicated has come to

be known as the Control

Revolution. Its ultimate cause was the Industrial

Revolution, which dramati

cally speeded up the material

processing systems of developing societ

ies, as we have seen, thereby precipitating a spreading crisis of control.

Just as the Industrial Revolution marked a historical discontinuity in the ability to

harness energy, the Control Revolution

marked a similarly dramatic leap?by means

of countless innovations in information and

communications technologies?in the abil

ity to harness information for control. In the

magnitude and pervasiveness of its impact on all levels of society, intellectual and

cultural no less than material, the Control

Revolution has been as important to the

history of the twentieth century as the Indus

trial Revolution was to the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.

_ UPl/Bettmann

The national advertising campaign for Henry Crowell' s Quaker Oats was the first

to directly target the mass household market.

Communication in

Control of Consumption Innovations for control of consump

tion, like those of Henry Crowell, played an

increasingly prominent role in mass com

munication in the twentieth century. As

with Crowell's innovations, these involved not only the communication technologies

of advertising and public relations, but also

the feedback technologies of market re

search?and increasingly the infrastructure

of mass communication itself.

Many communications technologies not today associated with advertising were

used at the height of the Control Revolu

tion as means to influence mass consump

tion. Popular novels like those of Charles

Dickens, for example, often

contained special advertis

ing sections. When Alex

ander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, he saw

it as a means to pipe public

speeches, music, news, and

advertising into private homes, and such systems flourished in several coun

tries (Budapest' s had six thou

sand subscribers by 1900 and

continued through World

War I). The phonograph, pat

ented by Thomas Alva Edison

in 1877 and greatly improved

by Hans Berliner's "gramo

phone" in the 1890s, became one means by which advertis ers reached U.S. households.

"Nobody would refuse," the

United States Gramaphone

Company claimed, "to listen to a fine song or concert piece or an oration?even if it is

interrupted by a modest re

mark, 'Tartar's Baking Pow

der is Best.'" With Edison's

development of the "motion

picture" after 1891, advertis ers had yet another mass me

dium, first in the kinetoscope (1893) and cinematograph (1895), and then in films pro

jected in "movie houses" af ter the turn of the century.

Motion pictures suggested the ulti

mate end to control of consumption: that

advertisers be able to enter every home

through images as well as words (a func

tion ultimately filled by broadcast televi

sion, cable, and video). The first steps came in the 1880s with the daily mass

12 OAH Magazine of History

circulation newspaper and in the 1890s

with the mass-circulation magazine, both

well illustrated with half-tone photographs

by the turn of the century. With the system atization of rural free delivery by the U.S.

Post Office in 1898, big city newspapers

increasingly integrated entire regions with

daily mass communication (much as local

television does today). More than a billion

periodicals traveled rural mail routes in

1911, nearly two billion by 1929.

Works of well-known artists were

among the first images used in American

advertising, especially following importa tion of the color rotogravure press from

England after 1904. As late as 1894, only

thirty percent of advertisements contained

illustrations; the proportion increased

steadily to nearly ninety percent by 1919.

This graphics revolution was fueled by

continuing innovation: the web-fed four

color rotary press (1892), the automatic

plate-casting and finishing machine (1900), which greatly increased the speed of ste

reotype printing, and the use of airplanes to

cover stories (1920), more portable pho

tography using flashbulbs (1930), radio

facsimile transmission of syndicate news

photographs direct to newsrooms (1935),

microfilming of daily issues (1936), and

daily transmission of entire newspapers via radio facsimile (1938). These innova

tions enabled publishers to develop new

graphics content: the comic book (1904),

originally compilations of colored cartoons

previously published in newspapers, and

the crossword puzzle (1913), special roto

gravure section (1914), illustrated daily tabloid (1919), and composite photographic layout or "composograph" (1925).

More extensive application of tele

phony to mass communication was stifled

by the rapid development of broadcast me

dia beginning with Guglielmo Marconi's

demonstration of long-wave telegraphy in

1895. Transatlantic wireless communica

tion followed in 1901, public radio broad

casting in 1906, and commercial radio in

1922; even television broadcasting, a me

dium not popular until after World War II,

began in the 1920s. At first advertisers were

wary of broadcasting because its audiences could not be easily identified through mar

ket feedback. With the development of

survey-based methods of market research

on broadcast audiences, however, radio

accounted for seven percent of all advertis

ing (roughly today's level) by 1935.

The advertising agency in its modern

form, with expanded roles for the account

executive and specialists in writing, art,

and design, began to emerge in the early 1900s. By 1919 at least one agency boasted

an art department of ten people. Annual

advertising expenditures, which had qua

drupled to $200 million between 1867 (the earliest year available) and 1880, qua

drupled again to $821 million by 1904. In

1917, when more than ninety-five percent

of U.S. advertising was handled by agen cies, annual expenditures stood at $1.6 billion. Testimony of advertising's new

status came when President Woodrow

Wilson created the Creel Committee

(named for journalist George Creel) to

disseminate information and attempt to

shape public opinion?using motion pic tures, posters, and 75,000 public speak

ers?during World War I.

Market research, first formalized as

"commercial research" in 1911, also de

veloped rapidly after World War I, adapt

ing smoothly to the shift in advertising from print to broadcasting. A 1928 bibli

ography listed nearly three thousand attitu dinal and opinion surveys in the United States alone. By 1935 separate professions of market and survey research had differ

entiated around a specialized arsenal of new feedback technologies: concealed codes to test mail order advertising (1912), house-to-house interviewing (1916), satu

ration surveys of cities (1920), the concept of "measurability of markets" (1921), dry waste surveys (1926), a census of distribu tion (1929), sampling theory for large scale surveys (c. 1930), field manuals

(1931), retail sales indices (1933), national

opinion surveys (1935), and audimeter

monitoring of broadcast audiences (1935). Thus did communication with feed

back?advertising combined with market research?for the control of consumption, as pioneered by Henry Crowell and his associates after 1882, come to dominate

the material economy of advanced indus

trial nations. In 1800 less than one percent of the U.S. labor force worked primarily with information. The sector grew from

4.8 to 24.5 percent between 1870 and 1930, the heart of the Control Revolution, and

today approaches fifty percent. Similar

figures have been reported for Japan, West ern Europe, and Canada.

Work in information processing and

communication continues to involve con

trol of production and distribution as well as consumption, as it did from the begin

ning of the Control Revolution. However,

advertising, public relations, and market

and survey research play increasingly

prominent roles, especially with exten

sions of the late nineteenth century graph ics revolution to cable, computer graphics, video, and virtual reality technologies. Because the same need for control that

drove Henry Crowell to pioneer mass mar

keting has helped to produce our current

"communications age" or "information

society," we might say that today we use

microchips, microwave communication,

and computers for much the same reasons

that?thanks to Crowell?we still feel com

pelled to eat a good breakfast.

Selected Bibliography Barnouw, Erik. A History of Broadcasting

in the United States, vol. 1, A Tower of Babel, to 1933. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1966.

Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution:

Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:

Random House, 1973.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in Ameri can Business. Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.

Pope, Daniel. The Making of Modern Adver

tising. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

James R. Beniger is Associate Professor of Communications and Sociology at the

Annenberg School for Communication,

University of Southern California.

Spring 1992 13