an honest piece of work, a motor car that functioned, at an unbelievably low cost, though it did violence to three senses, sight, hearing, and smell; but people in those days were unable to forget long enough their wonder that the thing should be to mind the intrusion of more ugliness into a world that was losing peace and silence and the beauty that inheres in old things. And so the Ford car was put out, and chugged along faithfully on all our roads. The public laughed at it and christened it 'Lizzie,' but bought it and used it in increasing numbers, and Mr. Ford rested secure in his belief that he had solved one of the major problems of human existence and that there was nothing more to be done.

There is no doubt that Mr. Ford was sincere in what he said about art. He believed that the homeliness of his car was one of its virtues. He correctly read the minds of his fellow citizens, who suspected that mere prettiness camouflaged the fact that sterner virtues were lacking. The Ford car was homely, but it did its work. And standing firmly on this belief Henry Ford broke all records of production, distribution, and sales in a country where such things are a religion.

About this time Mr. Ford was waited upon by the research expert retained by a publication to study the changing habits of people and their effect on markets for goods. The inauguration of such bureaus of investigation marked the beginning of a new era in business

the application of scientific methods of research to manufacture and distribution. The purpose of this bureau was to render a constructive service to business as a preliminary to selling advertising space in the publications to which the expert owed allegiance. He had just completed an exhaustive survey of the trends in the motor-car market and had gone to Detroit to lay

his findings before Henry Ford. The survey comprised three important conclusions: the manufacture of motor cars would in the future be concentrated in the hands of fewer organizations; woman would be an increasingly important influence in the purchase of cars; beauty in line and color would be the determining factor in selling cars. Mr. Ford's comment was that none of this concerned the Ford Motor Company, and he continued serenely on his way, producing his marvelously efficient car in increasing numbers and selling his product without difficulty.

Meanwhile the making of motor cars passed into its second phase and came under the sway of the cult of beauty. Mechanical improvement had reached its perihelion; the lower-priced cars were becoming dangerously efficient, and it was necessary to do something to justify the price asked for the more costly ones. The big cars were made more sightly. And then we had large gorgeously appareled cars at high prices, and small ugly useful cars at low prices. The car with the long wheel base and the stream line became the symbol of wealth. The stubby car which continued to retain the graceless lines with which it was born was the symbol of homely worth and modest circumstance. Under its humble exterior there beat an honest motor. Then Walter Chrysler showed that it was possible to make a small car beautiful, and motor manufacturers realized that people did not demand big cars, but merely cars in which they could take pride, and the growing congestion of our streets made occasion for a shorter wheel base. Manufacturers began experimenting with small cars of better appearance.

Inspired by this tendency, the Chevrolet Company added design and color to mechanical efficiency, and then for the first time in the history of the

motor car the output of the Ford Company was exceeded by a rival manufacturer. The Chevrolet Company produces more cars than Mr. Ford, and beauty has become a commercial talking point.

For some months the newspapers have been asking what Mr. Ford is going to do. The probability is, though this prophecy may be either confirmed or controverted by the facts before this paper appears in print, that Henry Ford is asking himself the question: Just what has beauty to do with the sale of a motor car?

For the business of making and selling things must add a new facet to its polyhedron. By the irony of circumstances the type which the manufacturer must now emulate is old Leonardo da Vinci himself, who combined to a rare degree the practical and the imaginative qualities, and whose achievements ranged from the wheelbarrow and the double-spiral staircase at Blois to La Gioconda and the Last Supper.

II

Up to the beginning of the great industrial era of machine-made things, mass production, nation-wide distribution and advertising, most of the implements and furniture with which we performed the act of living were made by hand, and things made by hand unconsciously acquire a certain element of beauty.

Consider how satisfying are the shapes of some of these old things - a coach, for instance, or a spinet; a sickle or a ladle. The humblest utensils of our grandfathers are preserved in museums to-day, partly, of course, for the historic associations, but mainly because they have a certain charm. And gradually all that charm vanished. The hand worker who controlled every step of the thing he was making was

replaced by a machine minder who had nothing to do with the design. The directing minds, absorbed in the new wonder of so many things made so easily, ignored the fact that it was just as easy for a machine to stamp or print a good pattern as a bad one, and by some perversity nearly always chose the bad one, and aggravated that fact by producing the bad design in incredible quantities. The public, tickled to get so many things so cheaply, accepted them without question, and thus we had a depressing period when, in New York City, brownstone houses were built literally by the mile, and country houses were of two stories, mansard roof, and cupola, with cast-iron dogs and deer on the lawns, and furnished with horsehair sofas, flowered Brussels carpets, gilt-embossed wall paper, and ormolu clocks under glass bells on the mantelpieces above imitation fireplaces.

We passed from the hand to the machine, we enjoyed our era of the triumph of the machine, we acquired wealth, and with wealth education, travel, sophistication, a sense of beauty; and then we began to miss something in our cheap but ugly products. Efficiency was not enough. The machine did not satisfy the soul. Man could not live by bread alone. And thus it came about that beauty, or what one conceived as beauty, became a factor in the production and marketing of goods.

The first influence in this regeneration was perhaps the advertising artist. Advertising is a pioneering profession, earnestly concerned with keeping ahead, struggling always to find new mediums in which to express something that has not been expressed before. It seized before. It seized upon the power of the artist to say things which could not be said in words, and thus a large group of men trained in artistic standards was brought to work in close conjunction

with factories producing goods. The first step toward making the advertising attractive was to make the goods attractive. It was frequently necessary to introduce the article sold into the advertisement, or at least its package, and most products and packages were so ugly or so commonplace they spoiled the picture; and thus began that steady, unremitting pressure on the manufacturer to make his goods or his packages worthy of being placed in an artistic setting. Bales and boxes and cans and wrappers and labels and trade-marks were revised and redesigned, sometimes even to the extent of scrapping considerable goodwill that inhered in the old style, to keep up with a growing sense of taste in the consuming public. Such experiments were generally successful and encouraged others; the idea spread, and farseeing manufacturers carried it further.

The impact of beauty was manifest first in fashion goods and vanity products which owed their origin to French taste. They set up examples which the more astute manufacturers were quick to emulate. Future connoisseurs may collect the perfume bottles of the twentieth century as they now collect the snuffboxes of the eighteenth. A new art known as flaconnage de luxe has grown up around those delightful bits of glassware, mere containers of merchandise, but designed in sympathy with their contents. Gallé was the French pioneer in beautiful glasswork, but Lalique carried the art further, developing new effects by blowing the glass in metal moulds. To give rarity to certain designs, they were blown in clay moulds, which were afterward broken. The credit for utilizing the more artistic forms of glassmaking to enhance the beauty of the perfume package is due to François Coty, who originated many of his own designs, but is said to have received inspiration and

advice from Lalique. Among the glass blowers producing the artistic perfume bottles that decorate the windows of the drug stores are the Cristalleries of Baccarat, of Nancy, and Viard. In this country the most successful work is the Steuben glassware of the Corning people, rarely beautiful, especially the iridescent effects ranging from opaque blue to almost transparent, reminding the observer of Phoenician and Cyprian examples in the Metropolitan Museum. The Baltimore house of Swindell Brothers is producing some interesting scent bottles, and of our American perfumers Richard Hudnut has experimented successfully with strictly American designs. Indeed, the creation of an American school is part of the artistic plan of several trades, such as furniture, silk, leather, and glass manufacture, following the leadership of John Sloan in his endeavor to disassociate painting from the French tradition.

In applying art to machines we are on our own ground. Machines are native with us, and the effort to beautify them has created a new field of artistic endeavor, as witness the skyscraper, the motor car, the phonograph, and the radio.

Motor cars began to appear in color schemes suggested by the advertisements. The next step was to design motor cars in shapes suggested by artists, and soon manufacturers making cars in the upper price bracket had their own art directors and art departments, as complete and as influential on the product as the engineering department, steadily working to produce that conjunction of utility and beauty which was becoming necessary to make the car acceptable to the public.

Among our new playthings was the phonograph. For a long while it lingered in its ugly box with its blatant horn, and no one minded its hideousness in the strange new experience of

listening to it. It did not occur to us that it was not necessary to affront the eye to please the ear. But the spur of competition compelled the manufacturers to add every improvement they could think of, and when mechanical improvements were exhausted they turned to æsthetic ones, with the result that the great horn disappeared inside, the case took on some semblance of form, designers and cabinetmakers were consulted and period and other designs produced, so that now the phonograph may easily be an addition to the furnishing and decoration of a room. The transformation of the radio took less time. While it is still so new that broadcasting stations have not yet been assigned permanent waves, its makers are as much concerned with giving it an acceptable physical appearance as with lengthening its reach. That is because it arrived in an age in which both manufacturer and consumer are aware that there is such a thing as good taste. We demand beauty with our utility, beauty with our amusement, beauty in the things with which we live. And so the radio has been promptly put in the hands of the designers, to make it, if possible, a thing of beauty and a joy forever even when silent or especially when silent.

Thus it might be said that good taste passed from the advertisement to the package, and from the package to the product, keeping pace with the growing appreciation of taste on the part of the public due to increased culture and sophistication. Immediately these better-designed goods and packages demanded a better environment in which to be sold, and thus we have a revolution in the furnishing of shops and stores. The old-fashioned store was a stereotype-a long, narrow room with two windows and a door in front and in back, counters down the full length on both sides, with the goods

arranged on shelves behind the counters. No matter what kind of goods was sold, the layout did not vary. Now and then an enterprising merchant painted the front of his shop bright red or bright yellow, but this was due more to a desire for conspicuousness than to an artistic urge. To-day the store has given way to the shop, and in the smarter lines these shops are planned and decorated with all the skill and taste employed in designing a boudoir. The shop front, the tinting of the walls, the furniture, the arrangement of goods-everything has been transformed. The counter is gone; occasional tables take its place. Chairs are arranged for customers in such a way as to suggest the careless grace of a drawing-room. Everything is done to create a setting for the new style of goods. You see this in every industry. It might naturally be expected in the trades that cater to fashion, but even the Cunard Steamship Company has thought it worth while to build a temple dedicated to ocean travel in which to sell tickets for its steamship lines. When Eolian Hall was sold at auction the fact that it had just been awarded the Fifth Avenue Association's gold medal as the most attractive building erected in 1926 increased the price it fetched.

But conclusive proof of the extent to which belief in beauty has penetrated industry is the increasing number of factories of pleasing architecture and with landscaped grounds. The efficiency of beauty as a business force is agreeably confirmed by the belief of some executives that better work will be done in pleasant surroundings, and this belief is manifest not only in the factories but also in the offices, and it is a reasonable belief. George P. Rowell, the pioneer advertising agent, tells in his autobiography how he once lost a large account because he had been so

extravagant as to put beneath the black walnut table which served him as a desk a square of jute carpet. The disgusted advertiser said that he had no confidence in an advertising agent who put on so much style. To-day the office has undergone as great a transformation as the retail shop. Tinted walls, sash curtains, period furniture, stained glass, all the fittings which give character to a private house and which even a private house did not possess thirty years ago, are now almost the rule rather than the exception in offices. We are even coming to believe that the sick in hospitals get well quicker if the walls are painted the right color. In other words, we are just on the threshold of creating a new world on top of our modern industrial efficiency, a world in which it is possible through the much criticized machines to replace the beauty that the machines originally displaced.

III

The application of design and color to useful things has been carried to what might seem extravagant length, except that the results have been satisfactory. The furnace once existed in gloomy seclusion in a cellar filled with dust, ashes, and cobwebs, and was visited only when it needed attention. The modern heater is shaped and painted so that it becomes an object of furniture only a little less attractive than the porcelain stove of German fairy tale, and the cellar is rescued and becomes one of the living, or at least useful, rooms of the house. Even the radiator, that bête noire of interior decorators, is appearing in better designs, and the builders of new apart ment houses have found it profitable to include practicable wood-burning fireplaces.

The immaculate paleness of the hospital is disappearing from our kitchens,

pantries, and bathrooms. The kitchen cabinet, that amazingly efficient unit with every utensil and ingredient placed at arm's length and arranged in order of greatest use like the keys of a typewriter, is being made in colors to harmonize with the gay tile linoleums of the floors and the figured and decorative ginghams of the window curtains. The bathroom, so long the exponent or index number of our civilization, is being lined with colored tiles which are, after all, just as sanitary as the white ones and more restful to the eye, while the tubs and washbasins are exchanging their shapes of bare, cold, characterless efficiency for suggestions of Renaissance and other period designs to which color also adds its cheerful note. These rooms which were once the penetralia of our homes, necessary but ignored, are now show places.

A permanent exhibition of the Crane Company at Atlantic City testifies that open plumbing has become one of the fine arts, with its bathrooms in black and gold, with glass and porcelain wrought in cunning shapes, joining up with the arts of the potter and the glass blower. The evolution of the bathroom is typical. The change from the old tin boxed-in tubs and hand basins to efficiency and sanitation was a practical one. Open plumbing meant cleanliness, and in our pride at our new-found intelligence we rather overstressed the sanitary aspect and produced, as usual, something useful but ugly. Then, as manufacturers realized that there was a new selling argument in beauty and every article of manufacture was being studied from this point of view, it was realized that the necessary furnishings of bathrooms were unusually susceptible of decoration, without sacrificing cleanliness, our first objective. Other trades fell in line. It is possible to obtain towels and soap whose colors match the prevailing tint of the bath