False Images: The Invention of Industrial Design

One day, when he returned from vacation, his engineers showed him an updated version of the model T. His reaction was unambiguous: he trampled down the roof and kicked in the windshield. One of his employees said that ”for Ford, the Model T was good, and we were to put away false images.” The power of “false images” was however soon after to be recognized by Ford´s son Edsel, but also by his fiercest competitor, Alfred Pritchard Sloan, and his chief designer Harvey Earl.
Edsel Ford, unlike his father, who said that he "did not care five cents for all the art the world had ever produced", was very interested in modern art and commissioned Diego Rivera, husband of Frieda Kahlo, to paint murals for the Rouge Plant. Rivera´s motifs for the murals compared races with elements for industrial production and showed an almost religious reverence for industry as the genesis of the modern world.

Alfred P. Sloan headed General Motors from 1923 to 1956. He postulated three phases in the automotive industry: The first phase, up to 1908, in which a small elite could afford hand-made horseless carriages; The second, after 1908, with Henry Ford’s division of labour for a mass market, and the third, which Sloan saw as the GM phase: the "mass class" market.
In 1927, Henry Ford´s Model T was hopelessly outdated and went out of production, while Edsel Ford presented the new Ford model A. Sloan was a step further and announced the establishment of a new corporate department, the “Art and Color” section, which would “supervise and coordinate the application of art and color to GM products”; “Design” still lacked its name, but the new department was a cornerstone of implementing Sloan´s idea of products for the mass class market.

Harley Earl, who previously designed individual car bodies for Hollywood celebrities, was appointed to be the head of the new department. Earl, a charismatic figure, used modelling clay instead of hammered metal for his body designs, and designed cars with new proportions and integrated forms. The Art and Color Section´s first design, the Buick Silver Anniversary car, was a disaster: The public called it the “pregnant Buick”, sales dropped by 37 per cent, and Earl blamed the engineers, who, as he said, distorted his design without his knowledge.

That did not disturb Sloan's vision. Sloan decided that in the future, consumers should be prepared ”by measured steps" for "more radical changes in styling”, and Earl´s department was relocated in the corporate hierarchy so that Harvey Earl became more infuential than any engineer in the company. Until 1959, when Earl, the inventor of the tailfins, retired, he had shaped not only the faces of generations of American cars, but also the new age of design and marketing.

But design had more approaches to present. In the late 1920´s, at the time When Harvey Earl began his job at GM, Richard Buckminster Fuller planned his “Dymaxion” house, of which he built only one prototype in 1946. Conceived to be mass-produced, shipped worldwide in its own tube and priced like an automobile, the dymaxion house was earthquake and storm-proof and engineered to generate its own power. Fuller, the inventor of the Geodesic dome and the Dymaxion Map, later also designed the Dymaxion car, a concept for maximum speed and efficiency with a minimum of material. Fuller´s Dymaxion (Dynamic maximum tension) car never saw industrial production, while Harvey Earl´s designs, led by “dynamic obsolescence”, would by 1965 become the reason for Ralph Nader´s famous book “Unsafe at any speed”.

The expression of speed was of paramount importance also for Earl´s contemporary, Raymond Loewy. Just as Earl´s cars, also the streamlined designs of Raymond Loewy are not designed to be aerodynamically optimised: They look as if they were, they project an image of aerodynamics, but they are not aerodynamic in a scientific sense, although aerodynamics was already existing. Gustave Eiffel for instance, the engineer of the Eiffel Tower, was experimenting with wind tunnels already before the turn of the century. It was less about the function and more about the look - the "dynamic look" was applied to convey the image of “speedy” and “modern”, even to a pencil sharpener.

The original version for Loewy´s pencil sharpener design was patented in 1934 with the following text: “Be it known that I, RAYMOND LOEWY, a citizen of the Republic of France, residing at New York, in the State of New York, have invented a certain new, original, and ornamental Design for Pencil Sharpener.”

Loewy not only streamlined cars and ships, he streamlined the image of himself and the profession of “industrial designer”, a job he invented, perhaps together with Walter Dorwin Teague. Design for industry did not exist before a couple of European immigrants with a background in applied arts met the bosses of the assembly line in the US in the 1920s.


Raymond Loewy designed his designer office – a control turret for the commander-of-production and a chic ivory tower for the creative manager - to be exhibited in the Contemporary American Industrial Art show in the Metropolitan Museum in 1934. As much as Fuller's vision seems more appropriate today, without the vision of people such as Alfred P. Sloan and the charisma of Harvey Earl and Raymond Loewy, design would not have become the very essence of things shaping the 20th century.