From the advent of subdivisions and malls, uniformity has been a code that has been repeated and energized. It might hearken to the Model-T built on the assembly line productions.
Ransom Olds was one of the first mass-producers of automobiles and inspired an entire generation to explore the possibilities of the emerging auto industry. Olds was born in Geneva, Ohio in 1864 and raised in Lansing, Michigan.
Henry Ford conceived a series of cars between the founding of the company in 1903 and the introduction of the Model T. Ford named his first car the Model A and proceeded through the alphabet up through the Model T. Twenty models in all, not all of which went into production. The production model immediately before the Model T was the Model S, an upgraded version of the company’s largest success to that point, the Model N. The follow-up to the Model T was another Ford Model A, rather than the “Model U”. The company publicity said this was because the new car was such a departure from the old that Ford wanted to start all over again with the letter A.
Uniformity comes at a cost to balance its many virtues.
The Model T was Ford’s first automobile mass-produced on moving assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class. Henry Ford said of the vehicle:
I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.
The virtues of uniformity are its psychological attributes; namely, constancy, consistency, conformity, steadiness, invariability, invariableness, stability, regularity, evenness, lack of variation, lack of change, equality, equability. And uniformity (with its inherent feature of commonality) removes any room for superiority.
Posh tea Lapsang souchong, Darjeeling, so-called green tea. It’s all bog water for snooty old maids in Wedgwood knickers who think milk and sugar are common and call the proper stuff “builder’s”. In The Democratic People’s Republic of England it’s builder’s only and everything else is verboten. You were only pretending to like it, anyway.
Being the simple person that I am, I confess having an inordinate attraction to uniformity. I find it removes so many unnecessary and frankly insupportable complications. Variety and diversity are in my opinion often mere accessories to the simple model. It may also be an admission of my limited intellectual capacity (or perspicacity) that I prefer consistency; but I view this seeming discredit as nothing but acknowledgement of potency. How’s that for reversal!
One may even argue, “What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh!” The issuance of our private domains, though singular, are nonetheless limited. For me it has always been about knowing and responding to the limits. It is thus that I have tracked not only my genuine preferences but also my discernible ability to seek, discover and augment what it within those limitations.
I do not see qualification as affecting quality; rather, improving it. But I emphasize the necessity to listen heartily to one’s instinct. These so-called trifling acquaintances are anything but! For it is therein that lies the path to achievement and possible success. You will, dear Reader, grant me that to pursue things we neither wish to do nor wish to have is fruitless by any calculation (and is likely to shrink the performance whatever the outcome).
Nor is the individual attention to be discounted merely for its amiability or persuasiveness. Every act is binary. There are always two different ways to do something; and, I am convinced the human actor has always the best option in mind (barring of course hugely esoteric matters of contribution to the debate). In the result the decision to follow the route of uniformity (and its associated simplicity) is seldom unlucky. We deal with the capital we have. And uniformity affords a degree of self-evident conviction about its prosperity.
Editorial note: I cannot avoid noting the current absence of the Oldsmobile automobile. Once considered the landscape for innovation, I believe it has evaporated from sight.
During its time as a division of General Motors, Oldsmobile slotted into the middle of GM’s five passenger car divisions (above Chevrolet and Pontiac, but below Buick and Cadillac). It was also noted for several groundbreaking technologies and designs.
Oldsmobile’s sales peaked at over one million annually from 1983 to 1986, but by the 1990s the division faced growing competition from premium import brands, and sales steadily declined. When it shut down in 2004, Oldsmobile was the oldest surviving American automobile brand, and one of the oldest in the world, after Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, and Opel.
