A/V Geeks Hunt Library

foreign all right welcome everyone um to av geeks at the hunt library not at the hunt library um virtually today on zoom i'm virginia ferris from the special collections research center at nc state universities and this is our 14th semester of this series partnering ncsu folks with raleigh's av geeks to discuss vintage educational and classroom films skip alzheimer's the founder of av geeks and is also an nc state alum he has been for the last few decades collecting films made throughout the last century mostly 16 millimeter educational training and other sorts of how-to movies and he does an incredible job sharing them around the world he currently houses over 36 000 such films at the av geeks archive here in raleigh and shares them as stock footage for films and exhibits as research material and during public events such as this today's theme is bicycles and capitalism and we're thrilled to have our guest ross bassett dr bassett is a professor of history at nc state and the director of the benjamin franklin scholars program a dual degree program between chass and the college of engineering at nc state which allows engineering students to simultaneously pursue a degree in both the humanities or social sciences along with their engineering studies he has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from university of pennsylvania and a phd in history from princeton university he's written books on the history of digital electronics and indian engineers who studied at mit he's also an avid biker who rode from cumberland maryland to dayton ohio this summer and hopes to develop a course on biking at nc state and in special collections i've had the pleasure to work with dr bassett on a number of courses that he's taught including the history of capitalism this semester and others and of course on the automobile and mobility in the us several years ago where he shared his interest in cycling so we're thrilled to have him with us today to discuss several films on bicycles and capitalism and just a reminder that over 200 of av geeks compilations are available for checkout from the libraries you can also visit avgeeks.com or search for av geeks in youtube or at archive.org so i'll hand things over to scout to kick us off all right thank you so much virginia uh and let me add ross to the spotlight and remove this is what we do nowadays um [Music] so uh thanks ross for uh joining us and thanks for coming up with the theme although i i'm sure that you didn't know that uh you the options you gave were going to intersect in such a weird way no yeah and thanks for finding these film skip i think that they were really great i enjoyed them and i think they'll be great films for our audience nice all right so we're going to start off with um uh let's see the new bicycle and so these are films that were made for kids uh in the 70s uh and they as i was talking to you before we got started you know we talk about um what are models of capitalism that we talk about in the united states and i always feel like you know talking about ford talking about gm talking about auto manufacturers is always the way that they talk about like this is the model of capitalism the united states how it worked um but i figured that because these were for kids they scaled it down to something the kids could grasp which is bicycles kids you know it deals with transportation but also the idea that kids want bicycles they save up for bicycles they get bicycles as gifts um you know and so instead of ford gm it's schwinn that's kind of teaching us these things so this first film was made in 1973 it was called uh the new bicycle uh and it kind of we follow our hero and he finds out about how bicycles are made but also how they're distributed and kind of ask some interesting questions um about where they come from and why certain people don't make them um and so it's kind of an interesting way to kind of talk about um uh you know capitalism but also you know about bikes and how they're made so uh here is the new bicycle [Music] you know what my dad works in the steel mill where they make speed of the bike so [Music] hey oh hi jim what's the risk that it's a little odd okay see you i didn't tomorrow it what's the matter you get fired i think you've ever break why not this week checking my overtime we're gonna buy dennis a bicycle for his birthday i'll see you around here on birthday those rims are double wall coil steel that's heavy gauge all right i bet it came from our factory sounds like you know your business your son will enjoy this bike for years how come it's so expensive it's fair traded you couldn't get this cheaper anywhere i'll tell you what i'll throw in a horn and a light it's a present for the boy's birthday well what do you say okay we'll take it i'll give you a deposit he wants an orange one this birthday is three weeks away now if we order today can we have it in time no problem the factory processes their orders so [Music] my [Music] um [Music] hi dennis at the division macquarie collecting let's see 75 cents right right hey where's that new bike you told me about the store didn't have the right color but they've ordered it for me when i was your age ordering from the factory meant a long long wait nowadays factories can just about make anything at no time at all my dad said there are at least a hundred different steps just to make my bike [Music] foreign [Music] do you know that the things they need for my bike come from all over the country many parts are imported from other countries too people from all over the world are helping to make my bike [Music] [Music] hmm um [Music] hi dennis that's neat when it comes to making things you can do anything want to bet you can tell everything you made well i might be able to sell some of the things i make but i couldn't compete with those big factories that could make it faster and better hand me a job are we that's just a hobby with me i like to make things for the house indians made things their family needed too and treated for what they couldn't make right that's right maybe mr banish could use a bookcase and you could trade this for my new bike maybe it's not a very practical way of doing business besides i don't want to make another bookcase and mr benich wants money he can buy the furniture he needs dan if you had the time could you make me a bike absolutely not it's too complicated besides i don't have to my job pays enough to buy us everything we need hi rich hey reggie thank you give me the same thing hey you going to get that bike in time for your birthday sure it was shipped already i betcha it'll beat the store any day now you wouldn't be interested in trading your old bikery great wagon i sure could use a wagon would it be all right why not fine when i get my new bike we'll swap even steven [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] mr roberts please mr roberts mr finish at the bike store your son's bike came in today fine it'll be ready see you then goodbye just in time for your birthday henry the orange bicycle [Music] bring the bike back in 30 days for a free service check thank you for spanish it's a fine birthday present drive carefully take care of it let's go happy birthday [Music] um [Music] so um really fascinating uh so ross um what resonated with you about that that film yeah well an awful lot let me just tell you that i'm a someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s and so as a boy i had a newspaper route and i bought a te i i was given a 10-speed bike as a gift so i can identify with uh with dennis and his joy at getting that new bike one other thing i guess one kind of big thing about both of these films that i resonated with me as a historian that as we generally in america you know we parse our history by decades you could say you know the 50s being sort of family centered the 60s the student rebellions and tom wolf called the 70s the me generation um the french have this periodization that they have this idea they call it the tron gloria's the 30 great years after 1945 and so between 1945 and 1975 there's an emphasis on how great the economy was and economic growth and i think what i see in in this film is sort of the very sort of high point of that idea of economic growth and you could say the new deal order where we had factories producing things in the united states we could factory workers could get uh get good pay and factory workers could be members of the middle class one other thing uh skip when you mentioned this analogy to the automobile industry one of the things that i thought of and thought of myself so at the beginning we see that dennis has this um stingray model bicycle it's a banana seat bike with high handlebars and it's a perfectly good bike but now he wants a 10-speed buck and so the analogy you could say is that alfred sloan of general motors introduced the idea of planned obsolescence introduced continual new model changes to make uh customers continually discontent with their what they had and always wanting something new and so dennis is sort of learning to be that customer by you know even though his spike seems perfectly fine um the terrain seems flat as far as i can tell but maybe he's gotten a little bit more money now that he has a paper route and so he wants uh this this new bike and so he goes and he seems to you know want the the high model high-priced model so that was one thing that again really struck me based on your point about um the analogy with with the car uh the car industry and it could be a prestige as well um you know his friends all have 10 speeds he's got to keep up with the joneses exactly so so he he'll he's learning to be you know the perfect consumer for uh america that he'll always want to you know buy more that he won't be satisfied he'll be ready to get rid of his bike even though it's perfectly serviceable what one other thing i guess that was interesting to me was uh the father and his job and from what i could tell i think that i i believe that this story was said in california and i think that the father worked at kaiser steel had a plant and it was called fontana and kaiser was known for having extraordinarily good uh relations between labor and management they had a a sharing plan where the idea that labor would somehow be able to uh share the fruits of of of the profits that that the company had made um and there's a brief um snippet when uh the father is walking out where there's a sign that says there's a union management productivity committee so the idea that um again workers uh union and management are working together and you could say that this is sort of the epitome of the new deal order where again you can be a blue collar worker as he is but really have a good you know middle solid middle class life and be able to buy really nice things um for your family one other thing though as they as he was leaving the factory one of the things that sort of hinted at problems to come there was a sign buy american steel and that sort of was a hint that there is foreign competition out there that while american steel companies are are doing well uh you know there is this this competition and there is this this threat which would really come to the fore in uh in the late 1970s and the 1980s one uh just another point that was interesting to me so um when the father comes to the store with uh with his son the father asks you know why does this bike cost so much and the owner says these bikes are fair traded and this is a reference to uh fair trade laws by which uh the manufacturer could require all its distributors to sell a product for the same price and so there's no negotiations possible and there's no sort of shopping around he's not looking somewhere else to see if he can get a better deal that's all there is and so you know the bike um the bike manufacturer the bike dealers throws in a horn and a um a light but he doesn't cut the price at all and the um the father doesn't expect that and so that actually ended congress outlawed that sort of fair trade practice in 1975 so at that point it is possible now to have competition it is possible uh to shop around and this idea of fair trade was seen as a way of protecting small businesses to protect them from larger companies which could be more predatory and pricing and so on the one hand customers after the end of this fair trading might get a better deal on the other hand these small businesses are now at risk that apple is able to uh enforce a um like a suggested retail price and consistent across all of their vendors uh-huh yeah um it's it's kind of interesting to like it seems like some of those uh those rules that were put in place are slowly kind of rolling back a little bit yeah yeah exactly um and i guess the other thing is like how different is it buying a bike nowadays like when you bought your most recent bike how did you buy it yeah so i actually there's a bike dealer on hillsborough street it's called cycle logic i don't know if any of you know of it um the this shop has been in business since the 1970s the owner is a nc state graduate in aeronautical engineering and i guess in that way i'm a bit old school because i have this relationship with them that i go to them all the time to do all my work and i know them by name and i don't really think about the price so much i don't think you know could i get it somewhere else and one of the issues they've actually had is that they used to be a dealer for um raleigh uh bicycles and raleigh began selling through amazon and i guess that just sort of destroyed their um their bit their business through raleigh because everyone could get it cheaper at amazon and so they went to a different um bike manufacturer cannondale but so there is that tension um you know i think bikes are complicated enough that you want to have a little bit of hand-holding and a little bit of service available to you that you'd you're not it's not something that you can just completely have amazon throw at your doorstep and be completely happy that it's all going to work out and so there is still this need for a bicycle dealer today what one one other sort of thing that was a bit amusing to me uh it said um the bike shop had a signed sale on imported bikes and today you know all bikes would be imported you could say so that it's not really a category so much i mean there are some manufacturers maybe trek who make uh their bikes in the united states but you know many many of the components come from um from uh from overseas today interesting yeah the um and that's what i like about watching these films is that okay they have an intended uh message that you're trying to get a co across but you get to see with hindsight what is different like what how is the retail experience different how is the manufacturing process different you know ordering something and saying that oh well computers we we do it with computers and so you'll get it in so many weeks or months or whatever um you know that is is interesting to see how that has changed um and what's very much the same uh as far as and this is why i like collecting these films and showing them is because we get that that sense of how things have changed over a period of time and you know the impact of all of that yeah what one other aspect of things that have changed is in as it showed us the distribution system one aspect you know today we're used to um containers and containers um container ships uh carrying things but that hadn't really developed so much and you see what was called the piggyback system where um tractor trailers were put in their entirety on a um the flat car of a train and shipped across the country so that was sort of a precursor of the of the container system and then it seemed like the uh the distribution system involved several stops that it went from the factory maybe to a distributor and then from the distributor to the actual bike dealer um yeah and you know here now talking about supply chain is something that is really wasn't talked about a lot five years ago and suddenly now it's talked about a lot um and i guess people are learning how reliant all aspects of manufacturing and all aspects of retail are on all of this um any any ideas or observations about that yeah i mean it is it's interesting that they made that a focus the supply chain and it's you know something that we really tend to ignore except you know now when it's not working so so smoothly and we see uh see things that are not um not available at this at the store but it's interesting that the film makers the educators thought that it was important to for consumer for you know the uh school students to understand how this what the supply chain was and and how it worked at that time but again it's something that to most of us at most times is largely forgotten right right um so this next film that we have was made in 1971 it's black and white it was originally color but the colors faded um and i couldn't get them back so i just made it black and white but it's uh it's peak 70s uh i was saying that we've decided that 1972 is the best year for educational films so this was just the year before um and this is made by coronet which is a big educational film company that was based in chicago and this is introducing kids to the concept of different types of jobs so there's another film that's called people who work in offices and this one is people who work in factories and we're going to see different types of factories but we're going to concentrate on a bicycle manufacturing factory so and i apologize for the audio not being on the first part of the there is a bunch of annoying things with zoom and i was able to mess it up so i've got it good now so all right here we go here's uh people who work in factories dairy where they make ice cream just about everything we use is made in some kind of factory [Music] you've probably seen many kinds [Music] they do indeed things like planes and shoes and television sets all kinds of things did you know that they also make things like cloth and clothing in a factory right [Music] foods are prepared in a factory too a bakery is a sort of factory [Music] and so is a dairy where they make ice cream just about everything we use is made in some kind of factory [Music] you've probably seen many kinds of factories in different places each makes a different kind of goods what's it like being a factory worker well suppose we follow the people going into this factory and see what are they doing punching in on a time clock it makes a record of the hours they work like when our teacher takes attendance something like that do many people work here over a hundred what do they make here well let's watch and see factory workers begin usually with some sort of material like this strip of steel that they can shape into what they're making large machines are used by workers to change the shape of materials hi it's a pipe factory no pipe is just the beginning watch what these workers do with the pipe they're bending it yes can you tell what they're bending it into i'm not sure maybe you'll be able to tell later after we've seen other parts workers make in this factory this worker is cutting parts out of sheet metal with a very powerful machine wires attached to the man's glove stop the machine from coming down when his hands are in the way so he doesn't get hurt that's right safety is very important in a factory can you tell what's hard he's making they look like wheels does everyone in the factory work in a machine well they don't all work at running machines some get machines ready so that others can use them all factory work isn't done by machine though many jobs can be done better many women work in factories this woman is fitting spokes into the hubs of wheels this woman attaches the spokes to the rims of wheels each worker does a different part of the job it's called division of labor the more they do the more they get paid hey are those bike wheels they sure look like bike wheels don't they they sure do except they don't have any tires on them what's he doing he's adjusting the spokes so the wheels run true it takes a lot of skill what are all those sparks from welding what's welding well welding is a way of joining pieces of metal together lots of things made in factories look like they're all one piece but they're really made of separate pieces joined together with a welding machine the machine makes the metal hot so hot the metal melts this welds the pieces into one part are we going to see all the parts put together yes but now it's lunchtime where are we now we're still in the factory many factories have places to eat in the same building where people work of course workers pay for the food themselves with money they make working in the factory right looks like they're enjoying their lunch and relaxing too now they have to go back to work that's right [Music] now all the parts we saw being made earlier are brought to one place lots of factory workers have the job of moving things from one part of a factory to another these are parts of bicycles aren't they they certainly are i knew it are they gonna put them together now they certainly are on an assembly line each worker has a different part to assemble just as each of the other workers we saw had a different part to make each person helps in a different way division of labor once again [Music] [Music] so [Music] you [Music] so many bikes yes people and machines producing many things of one kind mass production that's what it's called where are the bikes going now for final checking most factories have people who check the things when they're finished to be sure that they're working right before they're sent to the people who buy them [Music] how do they get to the stores well first they're put in boxes lots of factory workers have the job of packing things [Music] [Music] oh [Music] this is [Music] now they're loaded into trucks and railroad cars to be delivered to cities and towns all over the country [Music] enough bikes are made in this factory to fill many railroad cars and trucks this is how the bikes get to stores [Music] [Music] now the day's over now the day's over they can go home now yes they can go home now or maybe go shopping or maybe go shopping because they have money because they have money they do have money that's what they get for working in a factory people like these work in other factories don't they well workers in other factories make different things but their jobs are the same in certain ways you mean division of labor yes in mass production assembly lines things like that yes that's what i need [Music] i skipped i have two mutes [Laughter] there's there's so many opportunities for me to mess up sound today it's phenomenal all right so ross what did you think of this film yeah i really um enjoyed it it was intriguing to to watch so again i have this personal interest that i had a schwinn bike that schwinn um one of their advertisements was that they were seen as the cadillac of bicycles which maybe is you know appropriate in the idea that it's high-end but also maybe sometimes you know the american some somewhat stodgy bicycle that might later on be overtaken by you know more by four-in-one bikes that were more uh more impressive a couple of things that um you know stood out to me so this was a factory schwinn had a factory in chicago illinois i'm so pretty sure that this this was what it was it was really striking to me the diversity of the workforce just young and old male and female african american and and white that was really striking for for 1971 and and maybe um typical um of again that kind of urban factory i think in some sense we've gone in the sense that in the sense that we even still have factories i think most a lot of factories have moved out of those sorts of urban environments i guess these urban environments were often very heavily unionized um and very fertile ground for for unions it's also interesting that unions are never mentioned in either of these uh these videos that they uh they don't talk about it but um unions were part of of these of these factories um so we have some questions um that people have been asking did you have any other observations you wanted to to make about the film before we we delve into some of the questions yeah well um let's take the questions that's fine okay uh the first one is uh can you comment on the the more they do the more they get paid tradition and how it relates to a situation at a place like an amazon work a warehouse today yeah yeah so that's a great question yeah and the the the narrator sort of implied yeah the more they do the more they get paid so that peace work was very common in the late 1800s and the early 20th century that you would be paid based on the number of units of some sort of commodity that you would make one aspect of the assembly line was that it um kind of obviated that that piece rate because how much you produced was determined by the speed of the assembly line itself and not necess you were forced to keep up with this assembly line so henry ford for example famously um offered his workers five dollars a day again it wasn't based on how much uh the idea was if they were working and uh that they had to keep up with the assembly line so like amazon is i i don't can't say that i know in great detail about amazon but i mean as i understand it they have a an hourly rate but also monitor people's individual productivity so um you could see maybe in some sense uh return to that and i guess the ability to have much greater surveillance of your of your workforce uh you know amazon would have in uh individuals productivity interesting um and i remember that uh i think food lion got in trouble at some point by dictating uh to the workers saying that well if you're gonna clean all the floors in uh in our store it takes an hour and if it takes you more than an hour to do it you have to clock out and finish it yeah i think i recall walmart doing things like that as well yeah um we have another question um this is maybe for the bicycle side of you it's great that we can we can we could have questions coming from both sides uh are there you mentioned that track uh manufactured bicycles in the united states but they used parts from other places do you know of any uh manufacturer that makes everything in the united states i don't think so i mean i don't know like the very highest of high end but i think you know especially a number of the components breaks and the derailleurs are you know the japanese uh firms shimano have almost a monopoly of that i i i don't know like i don't follow or have much insight into the racing bikes but i can't i i would believe that they would also use um foreign components so i don't think that there be such a thing as a completely made a completely 100 percent made bike in the united states it seems like there's um there is this kind of emergence of the this new tech boutique type of thing where you know different niche things are like all handcrafted but also 3d printed and you know you know they have their own little foundries and all that stuff like it seems like there's this and of course the bikes you know or whatever they're making would be super expensive because it's all you know artisan yeah and i think i mean there are you can get bikes that way where the you know where the frame and a lot of the components are made in the united states i think where you know mass again mass production still sort of holds sway is in the derailleur the mechanism that shifts gears and the braking and so that's been um resistant to artisanal sort of efforts i guess and and here's a question that maybe you'll know i'm not sure um somebody asked uh are apprenticeships still used in hand in heavy manufacturing jobs or is there like an apprentice and even like with the unions i think unions had something where they would have apprenticed and then they would ascend yeah i'm i'm not so sure about that you know the one thing i will say is i think for example in germany that's still a fairly common uh a common ladder that you can you know go through apprenticeship and i think i i know i follow things in france and so in france there's been some discussion about whether this german model is something that should be followed i don't i don't think as far as i know and i mean it could be you know maybe in specific skilled areas like you know maybe carpentering or something like that it could be but i'm not exactly sure of that interesting uh any other observations or or things in looking at both of the films as far as you know how it sits in in what you teach and what you like to talk about it was interesting to me the cafeteria it seemed like as i understand it as a this factory was also the headquarters of schwinn and so there were executives there in in the cafeteria that it seemed you know the executives were eating in the same you know cafeterias as the workers so that was interesting so this was maybe again the high point of manufacturing in america that just some a little bit more on schwinn that in i believe in 1980 uh workers joined a um united auto workers union and there was a 13 week strike at this factory and then ultimately schwinn closed it down and moved production to um mississippi and then ultimately moved it um overseas and so again this is a story of a of a particular moment in time when america both of these are films or stories at a particular moment in time when americans still made a lot of things and they weren't you know made overseas and even you know basic things uh could be made in the united states and we could pay workers good good wages to do that and so um when they moved to mississippi was it because that was a right to work state where they didn't have to deal with unions yeah i think that exactly and they could pay uh pay less exactly interesting yeah yeah and the other aspect of this i think schwinn kind of famously made an agreement with a uh chinese company and they basically um they had them make their bicycles for them it but then this company began making bicycles on their own and sort of schwinn went bankrupt in 1992 and has kind of been re-made in several incarnations but is not you know a force in bicycles anymore interesting interesting i guess there's another one to look at as far as like harley davidson the motorcycle like here's a you know an american brand that then was sold to like amf and then amf they just kind of spoiled the brand and then it came back and is now this big force to reckon with as far as i don't know where they're manufactured if they're manufacturing the united states but it seemed like you know here's this brand that just will never go away and it it went away and then it came back yeah yeah that's an interesting story yeah i think there may you always should be ready for surprises i guess you know things that are branded as a you know american whether um can end up being made overseas so uh i i i i believe they're made in the united states but i'm open to be surprised interesting well um thank you for joining us um this was really great um and like i said i i love it when things overlap where it's like you throw a couple of ideas to me and i'm like oh i think i got something for you yeah thanks skip for finding these films it was great it was a great treat to be able to watch them and thanks for resurrecting them yeah maybe we'll do this again next year i'll have you pick two other subjects and we'll see if we have an overlap okay yeah that would be great well um i'll jump in and just say thank you so much dr bassett this was really wonderful and thank you skip and everyone watching just remember to visit avgeeks.com for more information and check out compilations from av geeks when the library's physical collections when you can come check them out from the libraries um our next show will be on january 28th next year 2022 at uh 3 p.m again featuring me um with a combination of films from the special collections research center at nc state um as well as from skip's av geeks collection um on a mystery topic to be announced in the coming weeks um because you have so much material so much great material yeah there's a lot to choose from so it'll be great whatever it is um so june january 28th at 3 p.m tune in then and until then you can watch previous av geeks at the library shows through the library's website so thanks again skip and dr bassett and have a great weekend everyone thanks thanks again skip yeah thank you