Download Paint My World Part 9 And 10
Lester Chiaramonte
Time, after all, is money, and the quicker you can paint (and dry) a car, the sooner you can get it into the hands of customers and the sooner it is out of the way of the other cars steaming down the assembly line. And painting a car takes time: considerably more time, as it happens, than actually making a car.
Up until 1914 it took Ford about 12 hours to assemble all the relevant parts into a finished car. But painting a car was time-consuming, especially back in the first decades of the 20th century. Each coat of paint on the Model Ts had to be brushed or dipped on and allowed to dry before the next layer went on. While the duration of assembly was initially measured in hours, the duration of painting was measured in days or even weeks. Cars would stack up, thousands of them, in warehouses as the chemicals in the paints slowly cured and turned solid.
Very little attention is paid to car paint, for understandable reasons. When you think of cars you think of the engine with all its moving parts. You think of the body and the camshaft and the wheels, all of which are part of the finely tuned mechanism endowing it with movement. The paint seems almost like an afterthought.
Except that it is anything but. Paint turns out to be an incredibly important element of car manufacture, partly for the reasons Ford ran into: for many years it was the lengthiest of all the processes in a car plant. These days, where we use enormous ovens to cure and dry car coatings, it is comfortably the most energy intensive and carbon intensive parts of making a car.
Before Ford and the Model T, cars came in all sorts of fantabulous colours. They were painted in the same kinds of bright coatings as horse-drawn carriages, but one problem was that these paints would fade rapidly, meaning you would have to get them repainted regularly. Another was that the painting would take weeks. So painting was one of the critical nuts for Ford to crack if he was going to churn out the quantity of cars he intended to.
And he spent much of his career attempting to crack that nut. He commissioned chemists to work at the paint formulas, he researched ways of drying the cars in gigantic ovens and, as we all know, he narrowed down the number of available colours to one.
But despite all his efforts, despite countless innovations in paint technique, despite reducing the painting and drying time from weeks to days, Ford struggled to solve the paint problem. It was still the single biggest hindrance to mass production well into the 1920s. That brings us to the invention of something called pyroxylin, or as it was later trademarked, Duco.
Duco was a substance made from nitrocellulose by the chemists at DuPont. Nitrocellulose had been one of the critical ingredients in the development of explosives and, of course, celluloid movie picture film, but arguably its most revolutionary application was in car paint. For Duco had superpowers.
Yet over time advances in paint chemistry allowed car manufacturers to drastically reduce the time it takes for paints to dry. The composition of those paints changed drastically too: from ingredients derived from wood and plants to molecules extracted from oil and gas. Car paints went from being made of vegetables to made of petrochemicals, and along the way they became significantly more hard-wearing and effective. Today pretty much all car paints are derived from oil and gas. And over time the length of time it has taken to paint and dry the cars has fallen.
None of this is apparent from the chart above. But even as the time taken to paint a car has decreased (hence increasing the potential efficiency of carmaking), the quality of the car coating has increased. Not only are we getting faster at making things, the end products are invariably far better too. One of the reasons why I so enjoyed the process of researching and writing Material World is that while macroeconomics (my usual territory) tends to treat productivity as an abstract force, actually when you get down into the nuts and bolts of how the world works - of how we turn simple substances into incredible machines and products - you see productivity everywhere. You see the world becoming a better, more efficient place. So it is with car paint.
What you will find when you read Material World is that humankind is still making extraordinary technological leaps, but many of them are happening below the radar. There are plenty of challenges facing the world, not least climate change, but as each year goes by there is tangible evidence of progress, if only you look hard enough.
Even the world of car paint is not standing still. These days nearly all manufacturers do things pretty similarly. They all use electrodeposition and most of them use robots to do most of the car spraying. They are gradually beginning to explore replacing their gas ovens with electric ones to reduce the carbon emissions at plants.
What follows is, on the surface at least, a story about paint, which will sound terrifically boring but, without wishing to give the game away, this isn\u2019t really just about paint.
In fact, it\u2019s about everything. Look at the world from the vantage point of car paint and you begin to see various strands of the 20th century storyline unfurling: the early days of mass production and the modern factory, the ascent of mass consumption, the rise and fall of economic growth, all the way through to today\u2019s \u201Cproductivity puzzle\u201D economists are trying to get their heads around.
Honestly: car paint is such a fascinating topic that I\u2019m surprised so little has been written about it. Then again, something similar goes for a lot of the obscure stories from the Material World, the book I\u2019ll be publishing later this year. What follows is a side story I couldn't quite fit into the book, but if it whets your appetite, please pre-order a copy - doing so, even some months in advance, makes an enormous difference. In the meantime\u2026 here\u2019s a story about car paint.
And it is partly because car coatings also serve an absolutely essential role, protecting the metal in a car from corrosion and slow motion disintegration. It is thanks to modern car coating techniques that you are so much less likely to see rust under the hoods or door arches of cars produced in the past couple of decades. How? We\u2019ll get to that in a moment, but for the time being, back to the era of Henry Ford.
It was certainly simpler to paint all the cars the same colour, and the black paint, made mostly of a varnish derived from vegetable sources, seemed to be harder wearing than other colours. Part of the secret to this was that the paint also contained a kind of asphalt. But the asphalt was so dark it was nearly impossible to turn it any colour other than black. So, black it was - partly because keeping it to one colour was simpler and quicker, partly because it was nigh on impossible to make an asphalt-based paint look anything other than black. Though while we\u2019re on the topic it\u2019s worth noting that actually there wasn\u2019t a single black paint but 30 different types of black paint: some which could be baked in an oven, others that would have to dry in the air, some for the metal parts, some for the heel boards, the toe board, the seat bottoms and so on.
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