SOME years ago Thomas A. Edison went to Europe. In the course of his wanderings he came to that exquisite Gothic jewel, the Chapel of Saint Hubert, which hangs so entrancingly on the castle wall of Amboise, and which everyone knows is the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. Here Mr. Edison gave out an interview to the gaping newspaper correspondents to the effect that Leonardo was the outstanding mechanical genius of his time, inventing many useful devices and anticipating others. He did not mention that Leonardo was also an artist on the side, either because he did not know or because he did not consider it important. The newspapers commented on the omission, and Collier's Weekly sent Julian Street to interview Mr. Edison's chum, Henry Ford, because what these two men say on any subject makes newspaper copy. The substance of Henry Ford's remarks was that he would not give five cents for all the art the world had produced. And the New Republic capped this naïve observation with the comment that one needed but a glance at the Ford car to believe it.

Henry Ford is cited here merely as an illustration. His frank and blunt statement expressed the opinion held

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by most manufacturers at the beginning of the era of mass production and industrial efficiency, though few were so honest. Art was something for museums. They endowed museums out of the money they made, and some of them even accumulated private collections. Those with a weakness for beauty were tempted to conceal it, lest they be suspected of unfitness to have a place in the practical, hard-headed, efficient world.

Back in the mauve decade, or the gay nineties, new inventions and discoveries were transforming our industrial system, but when a manufacturer produced a machine that worked he stopped. It never occurred to him to go on and make his device pleasant to look at as well as efficient. It must have been the persistent influence of the Puritan tradition that made manufacturers so suspicious of beauty and gave them such pathetic faith in mere ugliness. Beauty somehow seemed antagonistic to integrity. They managed in those days to reverse William Morris's dictum. They seldom found it necessary to make a thing beautiful in order to make it useful.

It was in those days that Henry Ford began making his famous car. It was

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 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