Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

  • Giles Slade
Harvard University Press: 2006. 336 pp. $27.95/£18.95/€25.80 0674022033 | ISBN: 0-674-02203-3

The subtitle of Giles Slade's Made to Break suggests that the book is an update of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (Longmans, 1957), which I remember reading as a student in the 1960s. At the time I was surprisedand shocked to discover that US industrywas deliberately producing products with a short lifespan. Planned obsolescence it was called, but little did I realize that this was tobe the secret weapon that won the Cold War for the United States. That little-known story is one of the intriguing Made to Break's hidden gems.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union was falling behind the United States in the manufacture of microchips and computers, yet it needed them if it was to exploit and export its vast reserves of oil and gas to earn desperately needed foreign currency. A US embargo was denying them the necessary technology, so Soviet agents resorted to covert methods to obtain it, while the CIA did all it could to thwart them. Then Gus Weiss, an economist and government security adviser, made an ingenious suggestion: allow the Soviet agents to succeed, but make sure they bought specially doctored microchips that looked like the real thing but had inbuilt obsolescence.

This inbuilt obsolescence included sudden catastrophic malfunctioning, such as suddenly instructing a pump to work at a pressure far higher than a pipeline could withstand. The result was a series of spectacular explosions, some so large that they were observed by satellites. One failure burst an oil pipeline, creating a lake more than 10 kilometres long and2 metres deep before it was brought under control. This industrial sabotage ensured that the Soviet Union lost the cold war says Slade, and he makes it almost believable.

The phrase 'planned obsolescence' was first used by Bernard London in 1932. He proposed it as a possible solution to the Depression, which was being made worse because people had stopped buying. Planned obsolescence looked like the solution to economic stagnation in a world with abundant natural resources and unemployed labour. London's suggestion was at variance with the idea of the father of mass production, Henry Ford, who assumed that people would obviously want cars to last — and a 15 million Model Ts had shown that the idea had its appeal.

Booted out: technological progress has largely replaced planned obsolence as a spur to consumerism. Credit: P. MASON/CORBIS

In fact many affluent people wanted an excuse to buy a new car, and by realizing this and pandering to it, General Motors (GM) was to become the world's largest company. In the late 1920s they began to boost sales by launching a new model every year, even if it was merely a style change. It worked — but it went too far. By the late 1950s, GM cars had become chrome-finned monstrosities and the US public went to the other extreme, beginning to buy small cars, such as the Volkswagen Beetle, that were built to last. Planned obsolescence had become self-defeating.

Made to Break is not just about planned obsolescence; indeed, it is more about the unplanned obsolescence that technological development brings. Slade tells the tale of the early days of FM radio and how the emerging television industry commandeered its broadcast frequencies, making all FM radios of the 1940s obsolescent. He also has a chapter on the introduction of nylon, but he misses a chance to explain how the hosiery industry, faced with apparently everlasting stockings and tights, introduced obsolescence by making the thread so fine it broke easily. Today we have technological obsolescence on a large scale — witness the dumping of PCs in favour of laptops — and the book ends with a chapter on mobile phones, where technological obsolescence is such that some users upgrade every year.

Made to Break is both entertaining and thought-provoking, but finally somewhat unsatisfying in that it does not say whether planned obsolescence is still with us. I suspect it disappeared 20 years ago because it was no longer needed. Perhaps it will re-emerge this century if the new method that keeps us spending — unlimited credit — fails. For a decade now that is what has kept the wheels of industry turning, at least in China.