Engineers and Government-Business Cooperation: Highway Standards and the Bureau of Public Roads, 1900–1940

Industrial standardization, when noted at all by historians, has usually been associated with the rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth century. In this article, however, Professor Seely contends that, in the highway industry, the introduction of uniform standards and specifications in the early twentieth century was spearheaded by federal engineers in the Bureau of Public Roads—the government's highway agency—through a variety of indirect and cooperative arrangements with state governments, trade associations, and professional organizations. Government leadership in the standardization of highway engineering practices and materials requirements, Seely concludes, suggests the significant role engineers played in the drive for uniformity. Linking nineteenth-century business-sponsored standardization efforts with the government-sponsored efforts of the twentieth century, engineers brought, despite a shift in institutional base, a singleness of purpose to the movement as a whole.