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The Puzzle of Standard Sizes

"Standard sizes" are familiar, ubiquitous, taken for granted in modern consumption. Consider bed frames and mattresses. Shoppers today know without thinking that both bed frames and mattresses are offered in the same small number of standard sizes and that, say, an American queen-sized mattress will fit an American queen-sized bed frame.1 Consumers need only decide which standard size is right for them. Likewise with electrical plugs and outlets: American consumers share the tacit knowledge that the plug on an electrical device bought in the U.S. will fit into the electrical outlets of an American home (though not necessarily into outlets in another country). And they can comfortably assume what was not always the case: a randomly purchased roll of toilet paper will fit (in width at least) their toilet paper holder. Many everyday goods from batteries to printer paper are commonly available in a limited number of standard sizes, lending an extraordinary homogeneity to modern consumption. Behind the scenes, rarely visible to the ultimate consumer, lie even more standard sizes - in factory fittings, building materials, plumbing fixtures, and the like.

What makes standard sizes "standard" is that dozens, if not hundreds, of different firms manufacture everyday products in the same, limited set of sizes and shapes. In other words, they are standardized across firms. This means that competing firms carry the same sizes and shapes "in stock," readily available, while other sizes or shapes must be special-ordered and cost more, if they are available at all.2 Leaving out of consideration those consumers who preferred or needed something other than the standard sizes, mass producers, distributors, and retailers, in effect, as a notable expert put it, "standardized the customer."3

How did it come to be that competing mattress manufacturers - some 400 establishments in the U.S. as of 20194 - all offer consumers the same small number of "standard" mattress sizes? Once a collective agreement on standard sizes has been achieved, of course, firms have strong incentives to focus their production on those standard sizes so that customers can easily find a mattress to fit their bed frame and bed sheets to fit their mattress. But how and when did industry-wide standard sizes come to be established in the first place?

Collective agreements on a national scale do not arise spontaneously or naturally; they must be forged.5 An individual manufacturer, to be sure, had to limit its production to a few sizes or styles in order to produce those few sizes or styles in large volume. (Thus, the U.S. War Department's first step in developing the keystone of mass production, interchangeable-parts manufacturing technology, after the War of 1812 was to decide which single musket to produce.6) If a firm enjoyed a position of overwhelming market dominance, its standard sizes or styles, decided upon unilaterally, might become de facto nationwide standards. But, in general, an individual manufacturer's "standard" products were unlikely to be identical to those of their competitors. Indeed, they were quite likely to be different, if differentiating products in size or style was a way of avoiding price competition with one's competitors. In the 1920s, standard sizes, the National Industrial Conference Board observed, were "confined almost entirely within the limits of the individual establishment.. [I]n the absence of combination, the tendency to standardization does not reach beyond the bounds of the several producing organizations."7 A bed manufacturer concurred: "Individual bed manufacturers did not lack standards for themselves. That wasn't the trouble at all. But they were all individual standards, perfectly useless so far as other bed manufacturers were concerned."8 Reducing product variety across firms, in other words, required "combination," a collective agreement among many competing firms. It did not happen naturally. Quite to the contrary, collective action posed formidable challenges in fragmented industries, marked by many buyers and many sellers, all the more so if their suppliers and customers also had to be brought on board.9 How, then, did direct competitors - companies all producing or selling the same line of goods - set aside often intense competitive pressure (not to mention legal constraints) and forge collective agreements on standard sizes?

The mystery deepens when one considers the speed with which standard sizes emerged in the 1920s. In 1919-21, surveys showed, some 900 American manufacturers made bedsteads, springs, and mattresses in 78 different sizes,10 a diversity that seems unimaginable today. In 1922 an industry-wide agreement reduced those 78 sizes to 4 standard widths and 1 standard length.11 Within a decade, some 90 percent of the nation's output of beds, mattresses, and springs conformed to the new standard sizes.12 In the meantime, this "simplification" of household mattress and bed sizes, as it was called, spurred nationwide agreements to simplify hospital beds (from 33 lengths, 34 widths, and 44 heights to 1, 3, and 1, respectively) and blanket sizes (from 78 to 12).13 By the end of the decade, standard sizes had been established for more than 100 commodities - from sterling silver flatware, writing paper, jelly jars, shovels, grocery bags, and milk bottles to bank checks, warehouse forms, restaurant checks, and a variety of tools and building materials.14

How did this nationwide transformation - the simplification of everyday goods that we now take for granted - come about so swiftly and thoroughly? As a starting point in working out this puzzle, it would be helpful to know more about the diffusion of mass-production techniques among smaller manufacturers after the turn of the twentieth century. But, despite reams of research on the history of mass production and distribution, it remains a mystery, for historians have neglected to ask how those techniques, after Henry Ford's remarkable achievements with the Model T in the 1910s,15 were taken to the next level, diffusing throughout the American economy over the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Historians' inattention to the diffusion process stems from the narrative framework that has guided scholarship in American business history for decades. This framework is anchored in a dichotomy between small-scale producers of luxury products and large-scale manufacturers producing low-priced goods in "landmark factories," to borrow Joshua Freeman's term.16 In her now-classic study of the Great Merger Movement, Naomi Lamoreaux put the dichotomy succinctly: "In the United States during the late nineteenth century, most firms adopted one of two basic strategies. Either they manufactured small quantities of carefully differentiated, high-quality products, or they mass-produced a cheap homogeneous output."17 There is no room in this interpretive framework to ask how mass-production techniques might have diffused among middling manufacturers.

Structured by this framework, business historians confined their attention to one or the other side of the dichotomy. Under the sway of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s influential studies of mass production and distribution, they initially focused on "big business" - on leading manufacturers and retailers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chandlerian narrative centered on the growth of large integrated firms and salaried managers exploiting growing national markets.18 Then, in the 1980s, scholars turned to the other end of the spectrum, to small business and specialty production in the age of mass production - what Philip Scranton termed the "other side" of Chandler's story.19 Scranton's pathbreaking empirical studies explored specialty or batch production, which entailed small runs of a diversity of products made by networks or clusters of specialty firms. Such firms, he showed, constituted a vibrant element of the American manufacturing landscape through the turn of the twentieth century.20 In Endless Novelty, moreover, he blurred the line between large-scale, mass-producing firms and small-scale, specialty firms by showing that specialty production was associated not only with small firms but also with "giant enterprises making the 'big stuff' of America's infrastructure (locomotives, heavy machinery)."21 Scranton rightly dates the decline of specialty production in the U.S. to the 1920s and attributes it both to government policies that valorized price competition over product diversity and to changing distribution practices,22 an interpretation consistent with the fuller story told here. But neither Scranton nor other scholars who pushed back against an excessive focus on big business have explored the diffusion of mass-production techniques among middling manufacturers,23 a process that would have required them to standardize - "simplify" - their own product lines and might conceivably have laid a foundation for nationwide standard sizes.

As the twenty-first century opened, business historians could be forgiven for thinking that little remained to be discovered about the history of mass production and distribution....