| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kathleen Franz. Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. 224. $35.00.
Kathleen Franz's book is a well-written, valuable contribution to the state of the art of mobility history, even as it opens up a whole new subfield. It is also a valuable addition to consumption studies within and without the history of technology. Following a constructivist and feminist tradition, her analysis of the "reinvention" of the automobile by American consumers-turned-inventors is both inspiring and firmly grounded in primary and secondary sources.	1
Initially, automotive technology (most of all the iconic Model T) provided a window of opportunity for tinkerers, especially within the realm of comfort. The emergence of automobile camping shortly before World War I and its massive breakthrough during the prosperous 1920s confronted millions of Americans with the car's unreliability and unsuitability for family holidays in the open air. Using literary fiction as one of her sources, Franz is able to document a growing self-confidence among women about the technicalities of the novel machine. Against this background, Franz's narrative can be read as a gradual marginalization of the user, first of women and then of male tinkerers. Analyzing 100 patents and 200 letters to Henry Ford, she places the tinkering mania in a context of an American, democratic belief in (largely masculine) "ingenuity." This framework is then used to perform a case study of the efforts by Earl Tupper (of later Tupperware fame) to market a "collapsible top for rumble seats," mounted at the back of the car body to accommodate an extra passenger. But Tupper was too late: by the 1930s automobile manufacturers managed to push the users out of their realm of "scientific" expertise, mostly by changing the multipart body into a unitary, "tinker-resistant," and streamlined design. Manufacturers initiated a strategy of "customer education," based on rudimentary consumer research and applied, for everyone to see, during the annual motor shows of the 1930s and especially during the two World Fairs in Chicago and New York. Opposite to and far away from an automobile industry promoting itself as the savior of the American "way of life" out of the economic recession, an increasingly deskilled consumer was created, whose role in the co-construction process became circumscribed to the passive act of buying.	. . .

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