Communication and the Control Revolution

James R. Beniger

Crowell’s invention, a mass media solution to a problem arising from the earliest stage of industrialization (in this case, grain milling), illustrates why communications technologies gained such economic and social prominence in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.  It also helps to explain why we find ourselves today in what has often been called a “communications age” or an “information society.” 

Crowell had built one of the world’s first automatic, all-roller, gradual reduction mills.  His was the very first, moreover, devoted exclusively to the production of oatmeal, an installation that literally received raw oats at one end and shipped cartons of packaged oatmeal out of the other.  Because most Americans still scorned oats as fodder for horses and associated oatmeal with invalids and Scottish immigrants, however, household consumption remained  so low that Crowell’s single plant might have produced twice the annual consumption for the entire United States.  How could he possibly generate demand sufficient to exploit the new high-volume, low-unit-cost industrial technology for profit?

All control involves just such reciprocal flows,  called communication  with feedback (that is, back to the sender).  Reciprocal flows for controlling consumption are known in economics and business as advertising and public relations (information sent out) and market research (information gathered, that is, “feedback” from consumers). 

In 1882, Crowell established the first of these two informational flows by pioneering a revolutionary new communications technology: national advertising of a brand name product directly  to  the  mass  household market.  By packaging oatmeal in convenient 24-ounce boxes, which he marketed under the now-familiar label of the black-coated Quaker (among the first trademarks registered in the United States), Crowell invented breakfast (as a culturally-marked meal), breakfast cereal (a product then entirely new to American tastes), and the breakfast food industry. 

During the next decade, Crowell invented many fundamental advertising techniques still used today, including scientific endorsements, testimonials, and box-top premiums.  In 1889, he introduced Aunt Jemima Ready-Mix, the first prepared mix and a major mass marketing innovation.  Two years later, he ran a fifteen-car train loaded with sample packages from his Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plant to Portland, Oregon.  This became the first national publicity  stunt to promote commercial products (the train included an exhibit on the virtues of eating a good breakfast).  Remaining packages went to Portland households, the first use of free samples distributed door-to-door. 

The second of the reciprocal flows for controlling consumption came after 1900 with the rapid development of market research technology: comparative testing of advertising copy (1906), systematic compilation of retail statistics (1910), questionnaire surveys of magazine readership (1911), the Audit Bureau of Circulation (1914), market research departments in corporations (1916), and house-to-house market surveys (1916).  By the end of World War I, most Americans began each day by eating products marketed specifically for breakfast and few still bought oatmeal in bulk, proof enough that national advertising directed at households could change basic human behavior.  Quaker Oats remains—even in the computer age—among the largest of U.S. corporations.

The relatively rapid pace of such innovation, compared to that of the three centuries after Gutenberg, is well illustrated by the development of mass printing itself.  Although steam power had been successfully applied to printing in Germany as early as 1810, even the largest-circulation newspapers came off handpresses—differing little from those used by Gutenberg—well into the 1820s.  By 1827, however, it was possible to print up to 2,500 pages in an hour.  After thirty years of innovations in high-speed cylindrical presses, The Hoe Web Printing Machine of 1875 could print 25,000 sheets per hour, a tenfold increase in speed over other power presses.  By 1893, octuple rotary power presses printed as many as 96,000 eight-page sections per hour—a 300-fold increase in speed in just 65 years. 

But why such recent and rapid development of communications capabilities across such a wide range of communications technologies?  Since prehistoric times, after all, communication has been crucial to every one of the several thousand human societies for which information survives (a historical record that itself constitutes an important  form of human communication).  Indeed, communication is for many biologists a defining characteristic of life itself,  while for most of those specialized in behavioral ecology, reciprocal communication of a cooperative nature constitutes the  diagnostic criterion of sociality as most generally defined.  Why, then, the sudden explosion in human communications in only the past 150 years, a development  that  significantly  lagged  behind the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrialization? 

Answers lie in the struggle to control the material economy, the concrete open processing system by which societies continuously extract, reorganize, and distribute environmental inputs to final consumption.  Until the Industrial Revolution, all of these functions were carried on at a human pace, with processing speeds enhanced only slightly by draft animals and wind and water power, and with system control increased correspondingly by modest bureaucratic structures.  So long as the energy used to process and move material flows did not greatly exceed that of human labor, individual workers in the system could provide the  information  processing required for its control. 

By far the greatest impact of industrialization, from this perspective, was to speed up society’s entire material processing system, thereby precipitating a crisis of control, a period in which innovations in information-processing and communications technologies lagged behind those of energy and its application to manufacturing and transportation.  In the United States, this control crisis began with problems of safety on the railroads in the early 1840s, moved to related distributional networks (commission trading and wholesaling) in the 1850s, hit material production (rail mills and other metal-making and metalworking industries) in the late 1860s, and finally reached marketing and the control of consumption (in continuous-processing operations like the oat mill of Henry Crowell) by the early 1880s. 

As the control crisis spread through the material economy, it inspired a continuing stream of innovations—like those of Crowell—intended to regain control of the material economy.  These included not only a spate of major new communications technologies, as we have seen, but countless other innovations that enhanced the processing of information more generally.  In only the sixty-year period of American history from the 1840s through the 1890s, these innovations included: 

For control of distribution, through-freight forwarding and commodity exchanges (1840s); the postage stamp, through bill of lading, and registered mail (1850s); futures contracts, paper money, fixed prices, and postal money orders (1860s); mail-order and chain stores (1870s); uniform standard time, special delivery, and car accountant offices (1880s); and travelers’ checks and rural free delivery (1890s). 

For control of production, wire gauges and similar standardization (1840s); commissioned industrial consultants (1850s); continuous-processing technology (1860s); shop-order accounting and factory architecture designed to speed processing (1870s); rate-fixing departments, cost control, and employee time recording (1880s); and the time study and staff time-keepers for routing (1890s). 

For control of consumption, the advertising agency and press association (1840s); iterated advertising copy (1850s); display type and newspaper circulation books (1860s); trademark law and full-page and human-interest advertising (1870s); newspaper syndicates, the linotype, advertising journals, and national publicity stunts (1880s); and standardized  billboards,  print patents, full-time copywriters, and corporate publicity bureaus (1890s).

For the more generalized control of the entire material economy, large-scale formal organization (1840s); hierarchical process control systems and formal line-and-staff control (1850s);  modern bureaucracies  with  multiple  departments  (1860s);  the standardized   typewriter   (1870s); accounting firms, bonding companies, and punch-card tabulators (1880s); and the addressograph, four-function calculators, and centralized, departmental corporate organization (1890s). 

These complex and interrelated sequences of rapid change in the technological and economic arrangements by which information is collected, stored, processed, and communicated has come to be known as the Control Revolution.  Its ultimate cause was the Industrial Revolution, which dramatically speeded up the material processing systems of developing societies, as we have seen, thereby precipitating a spreading crisis of control. 

Just as the Industrial Revolution marked a historical discontinuity in the ability to harness energy, the Control Revolution marked a similarly dramatic leap—by means of countless innovations in information and communications technologies—in the ability to harness information for control.  In the magnitude and pervasiveness of its impact on all levels of society, intellectual and cultural no less than material, the Control Revolution has been as important to the history of the twentieth century as the Industrial Revolution was to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Many communications technologies not today associated with advertising were used at the height of the Control Revolution as means to influence mass consumption.  Popular novels like those of Charles Dickens, for example, often contained special advertising sections.  When Alex-ander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, he saw it as a means to pipe public speeches, music, news, and advertising into private homes, and such systems flourished in several countries (Budapest’s had six thousand subscribers by 1900 and continued through World War I). 

The phonograph, patented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877 and greatly improved by Hans Berliner’s “gramo-phone” in the 1890s, became one means by which advertisers reached U.S. households.  “Nobody would refuse,” the United States Gramaphone Company claimed, “to listen to a fine song or concert piece or an oration—even if it is interrupted by a modest remark, ‘Tartar’s Baking Powder is Best.’”  With Edison’s development of the “motion picture” after 1891, advertisers had yet another mass medium, first in the kinetoscope (1893) and cinematograph (1895), and then in films projected in “movie houses” after the turn of the century. 

Motion pictures suggested the ultimate end to control of consumption: that advertisers be able to enter every home through images as well as words (a function ultimately filled by broadcast television, cable, and video).  The first steps came in the 1880s with the daily mass-circulation newspaper and in the 1890s with the mass-circulation magazine, both well illustrated with half-tone photographs by the turn of the century.  With the systematization of rural free delivery by the U.S. Post Office in 1898, big city newspapers increasingly integrated entire regions with daily mass communication (much as local television does today).  More than a billion periodicals traveled rural mail routes in 1911, nearly two billion by 1929.

Works of well-known artists were among the first images used in American advertising, especially following importation of the color rotogravure press from England after 1904.  As late as 1894, only thirty percent of advertisements contained illustrations; the proportion increased steadily to nearly ninety percent by 1919.  This graphics revolution was fueled by continuing innovation: the web-fed four-color rotary press (1892), the automatic plate-casting and finishing machine (1900), which greatly increased the speed of stereotype printing, and the use of airplanes to cover stories (1920), more portable photography using flashbulbs (1930), radio facsimile transmission of syndicate news photographs direct to newsrooms (1935), microfilming of daily issues (1936), and daily transmission of entire newspapers via radio facsimile (1938).  These innovations enabled publishers to develop new graphics content: the comic book (1904), originally compilations of colored cartoons previously published in newspapers, and the crossword puzzle (1913), special rotogravure section (1914), illustrated daily tabloid (1919), and composite photographic layout or “composograph” (1925). 

More extensive application of tele-phony to mass communication was stifled by the rapid development of broadcast media beginning with Guglielmo Marconi’s demonstration of long-wave telegraphy in 1895.  Transatlantic wireless communication followed in 1901, public radio broadcasting in 1906, and commercial radio in 1922;  even  television broadcasting,  a medium not popular until after World War II, began in the 1920s.  At first advertisers were wary of broadcasting because its audiences could not be easily identified through market feedback.  With the development of survey-based methods of market research on broadcast audiences, however, radio accounted for seven percent of all advertising (roughly today’s level) by 1935. 

The advertising agency in its modern form, with expanded roles for the account executive and specialists in writing, art, and design, began to emerge in the early 1900s.  By 1919 at least one agency boasted an art department of ten people.  Annual advertising expenditures, which had quadrupled to $200 million between 1867 (the earliest year available) and 1880, quadrupled again to $821 million by 1904.  In 1917, when more than ninety-five percent of U.S. advertising was handled by agencies, annual expenditures stood at $1.6 billion.  Testimony of advertising’s new status came when President Woodrow Wilson created the Creel Committee (named for journalist George Creel) to disseminate information and attempt to shape public opinion—using motion pictures, posters, and 75,000 public speakers—during World War I.

Market research, first formalized as “commercial research” in 1911, also developed rapidly after World War I, adapting smoothly to the shift in advertising from print to broadcasting.  A 1928 bibliography listed nearly three thousand attitudinal and opinion surveys in the United States alone.  By 1935 separate professions of market and survey research had differentiated around a specialized arsenal of new feedback technologies: concealed codes to test mail order advertising (1912), house-to-house interviewing (1916), saturation surveys of cities (1920), the concept of “measurability of markets” (1921), dry waste surveys (1926), a census of distribution (1929), sampling theory for large-scale surveys (c. 1930), field manuals (1931), retail sales indices (1933), national opinion surveys (1935), and audimeter monitoring of broadcast audiences (1935). 

Thus did communication with feedback—advertising combined with market research—for the control of consumption, as pioneered by Henry Crowell and his associates after 1882, come to dominate the material economy of advanced industrial nations.  In 1800 less than one percent of the U.S. labor force worked primarily with information.  The sector grew from 4.8 to 24.5 percent between 1870 and 1930, the heart of the Control Revolution, and today approaches fifty percent.  Similar figures have been reported for Japan, Western Europe, and Canada. 

Work in information processing and communication continues to involve control of production and distribution as well as consumption, as it did from the beginning of the Control Revolution.  However, advertising, public relations, and market and survey research play increasingly prominent roles, especially with extensions of the late nineteenth century graphics revolution to cable, computer graphics, video, and virtual reality technologies.  Because the same need for control that drove Henry Crowell to pioneer mass marketing has helped to produce our current “communications age” or “information society,” we might say that today we use microchips, microwave communication, and computers for much the same reasons that—thanks to Crowell—we still feel compelled to eat a good breakfast. 

Beniger, James R.  The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Boorstin, Daniel J.  The Americans: The Democratic Experience.  New York: Random House, 1973.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr.  The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.  Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.

Pope, Daniel.  The Making of Modern Advertising.  New York: Basic Books, 1983.

James R. Beniger is Associate Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California.