53m; U.S.
Director: Donald Hyatt
Synopsis: A record of America changing from a rural to an industrialized society. Highlighting major events in national life through 1917.
Category Archives: Automation
Remember Owens-Illinois 1921-2007 (Time Goes By, 57th St. & Mac Corkle Ave. North, 1921-2007)
2007 35 mins. Joe Hodges
A second glass plant existed right across the street from LOF on MacCorkle Ave. SE in the Kanawha City section of Charleston. This plant became the largest producer of glass bottles in the world by the 1930s. In 1917, just one year after the LOF plant was founded, the Owens-Illinois Company began manufacturing fruit jars, jars for industrial products, and after Prohibition ended, beer bottles. This film tells the story of WV native son Michael Joseph Owens, the inventor of the bottle-making machine that revolutionized the glass industry worldwide. Photos of workers are shown, and videotape-showing reunions are included. The plant closed in 1963. Many workers at this plant would walk across the street and work at the LOF plant when things were slow.
Access: Joseph D. Hodges, 5426 Lancaster Ave. SE, Charleston, WV 25304, 925-1819, joe1819@suddenlink.net or David Radford, 2950 Pine St., Belle, WV, 595-1090. The WV State Archives has copies of both films LOF and OI films, made available to reseachers. Copies of both LOF and OI glass factory films should be available from WVLC and KCPL in summer 2009.
Roving Pickets (1992)
28m; U.S.
Synopsis: Looks at the consequences of automation in the coal mining industry in eastern Kentucky: severely reduced wages, chronic unemployment, families divided by out-migration and in 1961 and 62, the cancellation of union health insurance benefits the threatened closing of the UMWA hospitals. All this stimulated President Johnson’s interest in creating the “War on Poverty.”
People at Work: How Jobs Change (1976)
12m; U.S.
Director: Coronet Instructional Media
Synopsis: Changes in jobs and job skill requirements as mechanization pervades the workplace
The Phantom of the Operator (2004)
A film by Caroline Martel
Canada, 2004, 66 minutes, Color/BW, DVD, French, Subtitled
Order No. W05869
Order No. W05869
This wry and delightful found-footage film reveals a little-known chapter in labor history: the story of female telephone operators’ central place in the development of global communications. With an eye for the quirky and humorous, Caroline Martel assembles a dazzling array of clips – more than one hundred remarkable, rarely seen industrial, advertising and scientific management films produced in North America between 1903 and 1989 by Bell and Western Electric – and transforms them into a dreamlike montage documentary.
As the first agents of globalization, this invisible army of women offered a way for companies to feminize and glamorize what was a highly stressful, underpaid and difficult job. Not merely “Voices with a Smile,” telephone operators were shooting stars in a universe of infinite progress, test pilots for new management systems, and the face of shrewd public relations campaigns. As the work of operators has been eclipsed by the advent of automated systems, this artful piece of labor history also offers an insightful comment on women’s work, industrialization and communications technology. Refreshing and hilarious, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERATOR provides a wry yet ethereal portrait of human society in the technocratic age.
available from Women Make Movies
Philips-Radio (1931) (aka The Symphonie Industrielle)
Director: Joris Ivens
36m
Country: Netherlands
An industrial film which shows the operations inside the Philips Radio plant: In a mêlée of activity, glassblowers make delicate glass bulbs. Machinery assists the bulb manufacture. A virtuoso glassblower begins a more complex tube used in radio broadcasting; it is then turned, fired, and sculpted. Conveyors carry partially completed units. Workers perform their various specific assembly-line tasks. Cases are manufactured and machined, wire harnesses are assembled, loudspeakers are produced. As radios near completion, they are run through a series of tests. Engineers and draughtsmen define future developments. In a closing stop-motion sequence, in a style reminiscent of Norman McLaren, a group of loudspeakers performs a playful dance. The film overall is a poetic depiction of an industrial process.Written by David Carless (IMDB)
See It Now: Automation (June 9, 1957)
82m
Broadcast Date: June 9, 1957
Network: CBS
Synopsis (WorldCat): Filmed exploration of how automation was changing the way America worked and how computers and automatic machines were revolutionizing industry, including the replacement of workers by machines. Includes interviews with Walter Reuther, then president of the UAW and vice-president of the AFL-CIO, Thomas J. Watson Jr., then head of IBM, and others. An in-depth exploration of the beginning of the age beyond the Industrical Revolution. [With Edward Murrow]
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