Back in the 1980s, I worked for a Fortune 500 company that manufactured railcars, among other things.  In those days, the plants were actually in the U.S.  That is, until the bean counters got together and discovered that profit margins were better if the company could forego manufacturing all together.

It was a sad day for me when the plants shut down, to say nothing of the workers, of course.  As the person in charge of advertising, I occasionally got to go on photo shoots and field trips.  There is nothing more exciting than to see huge, newly minted railcars rolling out of a plant.  Unless it’s watching red-hot steel being forged in a mini-mill.  Steel mills are the reason the word “awesome” was invented.

Manufacturing, especially the kind that produced products that might inspire a Carl Sandburg poem, has a certain romance to it.  So I admit that my reasons for supporting manufacturing in the U.S. were not exactly well founded.  Nevertheless, I am delighted to see in a recent Wired magazine article that manufacturing, although changed, is back.

In fact, according to Wired, manufacturing is being re-invented.  The process is not so tightly held by the big behemoths.  The supply chain is opening up to the little guys.  Industrial design is being crowd-sourced.  It’s the democratization of industry.

The Internet has already democratized journalism and communications.  Now any schmoe can post a blog or publish a video on You Tube.  Apparently something similar is happening to manufacturing, although a robust rebuttal to the Wired article can be found on Gizmodo.com.

Still, it would be nice if we made more concrete things that are actually useful, right here in the good old U.S.  There’s something very satisfying about producing tangible goods.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Manufacturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.