13 Bao, Guobao: "Shoudu dianchang zhi zhengli ji kuochong [The retrofitting and expansion of the Capital Power Station]", in: Gongcheng 4:2 (1929), p. 269–271.

The replacement of obsolete generators was preferred over repair, as it delivered the desired results quickly. Bao Guobao, who assumed responsibility for the nationalisation of China's electrical industries as director of the electrical power division in the National Construction Commission, installed two small diesel generators with a generating capacity of 137 kW as a stop-gap measure. He had three reasons for doing so. One, diesel generators could be activated upon installation and offered instantaneous relief for power shortages. Two, they did not require much water, which was important since the power station was a distance away from the river. Three, they could be used as back-up power after the installation of a boiler and turbines purchased from Worthington Pump & Machinery and the Brown-Boveri Group. He also outlined plans to demarcate the service areas of both power stations to better monitor transmission voltage. 14 He offered few details on maintenance tasks such as boiler repairs and wire pole replacement; it was not that they were unimportant but they did little to resolve fundamental problems in Nanjing's power infrastructure.

Bao drew on his experience of rehabilitating Nanjing's power network when he took charge of industrial regulation and argued that the most effective way to lower costs was the replacement of obsolete equipment. Bao illustrated his point with this example: A new 1,000 kW generator, which burned 4 pounds of coal for every kWh, cost 150,000 silver dollars. The annual cost saving in coal was 57,000 silver dollars, which meant that the power company could recover the cost of the generator with three years of fuel savings.15 For Bao, the equipment's age was not the determining factor of obsolescence. In deciding whether to replace their capital assets, power companies needed to carry out cost-benefit analyses based on comparisons with available technology.

Industrial regulation became a means to mend the "broken world" resulting from decades of mismanagement. Bao pointed out that most power companies experienced a line loss of more than 50%, which he attributed to mistakes in network design made by untrained craftsmen. Bao castigated power companies for neglecting routine inspection and condoning the theft of electrical power. He requested that private power companies submit the drawings of generators and grid layout during registration for approval. This would allow regulators to identify potential design flaws and overlapping service areas.16

14 Ibid.

15 Bao, Guobao: "Banli dianqi shiye zhe ying you zhi zhuyi [On the management of the electrical industries]", in: Dianye jikan 1:1 (1930), p. 1–5.

16 Ibid.

Private power plant operators shared Bao's concerns but saw the establishment of an electrical equipment industry as the fundamental solution to the inefficiencies of China's electrical industries. Sun Shihua, a co-founder of the Association of Private Chinese Electric Corporations, expressed his frustration with the haphazard acquisition process of Chinese power plants. Power companies lacked the capital to replace obsolete equipment. Sun noted that as a result, "old power plants were littered with abandoned machines and looked like cabinets of curiosities". Furthermore, the Chinese not only relied on imported electrical equipment but also depended on foreign suppliers for repair and maintenance.17 Returning to Liu Yingyuan's anecdote in the introduction, the Japanese-built power company in Manchukuo had to ship the generator back to Japan for repairs when it broke down.

Chinese power plant owners cited Japan's experience to show how electrical equipment manufacturing contributed to the accumulation of repair and maintenance expertise. Sun pointed to the rapid expansion of the Tokyo Electric Company, which started operations in 1887 with a 25 kW DC generator and increased its total installed capacity to 2.23 million kW in 1925. Sun attributed its exponential growth to the emergence of a vibrant electrical equipment industry during the First World War. He estimated that dozens of Japanese electrical equipment firms held \$400 million of capital and had an annual output worth \$200 million. The electrical equipment industry was a foundational enterprise that offered vocational training to thousands of workers and also provided many opportunities for technical transfer through joint ventures with foreign firms. Sun himself had completed an apprenticeship in a wire manufacturing plant at General Electric in 1915, where he had learned how to work with metal and insulating materials. When he returned to China to work for the Foochow Power Company, Sun organised training sessions for ten workers, which "equipped workers with the expertise to make and repair meters, fans, motors and transformers on their own". Small-scale efforts by a local power company had a limited impact.18 Until 1938, China's electrical industries primarily relied on imported equipment and lacked the technical expertise to conduct basic repairs.

17 Sun, Shihua: "Guoren ji yi chuangshe dianqi zhizao gongye [The people of our nation should quickly establish an electrical equipment manufacturing industry]", in: Dianye jikan 1:1 (1930), p. 7–11. Quotation from p. 8.

18 Ibid.

#### **LEARNING TO REPAIR AT WAR**

Sun's vision for a domestic electrical equipment industry came to fruition soon after the Japanese invasion. Plans to manufacture electrical components and military communication devices began as early as 1935. When the war against Japan broke out in July 1937, coastal cities fell under Japanese control, cutting off vital imports of raw materials and machinery. The National Resources Commission, an agency in charge of wartime industrialisation, coordinated the evacuation of China's industries inland. It had initially planned to situate the wartime industries in Xiangtan, in Hunan Province, in the Middle Yangtze region. The Japanese carried out a massacre in the Nationalist capital Nanjing in December 1937 and marched up the Yangtze River to capture the interim wartime capital in Wuhan in October 1938. The Resources Commission uprooted the industries and evacuated further inland. The engineer-bureaucrats dismantled boilers and turbines and had them transported on boats and mule carts through hundreds of miles of river valleys and mountain tracks into the mountainous southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou.19 Against all odds, the Resources Commission had established a power station, copper smelting plant and electrical equipment manufacturing industry by 1939 in Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming, which would become the backbone of the wartime industrial complex. In 1938, Bao fled from Nanjing to Sichuan, where he stayed until 1944, using salvaged and refurbished components to build two power stations in Sichuan under the looming threat of Japanese air raids.

As well as restoring power supply to sustain China's war machine, repair work provided an avenue for engineers and workers to learn how to manufacture electrical equipment without foreign assistance. The Resources Commission established manufacturing facilities for wires, radio tubes and field telephones through technology transfer agreements hastily completed before 1937. As the supply of raw materials slowed to a trickle, laboratories at the electrical equipment plant developed alternative materials to relieve the shortage of spare parts. Japanese control over French Indochina after September 1940 exacerbated the problem, as it was no longer possible to transport heavy machinery through the railways between the port city of Haiphong and Kunming.20 The Chinese now had to build generators on their own.

19 Tan, Ying Jia: Recharging China in War and Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2021, p. 80–82.

20 Ibid., p. 96.

The retrofitting of a damaged generator for the Longxi River Hydropower Plant just outside the wartime capital in 1942 reveals how wartime scarcity compelled the engineer-bureaucrats to build a self-reliant industry. Zhang Chenghu, the engineer who had completed the technology transfer agreement with a British wire manufacturer, detailed the refurbishment that was completed with domestically-made components and designs drafted by Chinese engineers:

"The Longxihe Hydroelectric Plant run by the National Resources Commission purchased a 2500 kW (600 rpm) generator. The steel sheet stator was deformed and the generator coils were completely destroyed. It appointed the Electrical Works to repair and modify it into a 1700 kW, 6900 V generator, to suit the needs of the Changshou Hydroelectric Facility. Our plant took charge of the redesign, manufactured the generator coils on our own, used mica insulating material and completed the project in a year. Apart from handing the production and installation of the steel stator to the Minsheng Machine Works in Chongqing, we designed and installed every other component. The generator has been in use for nearly a year, and we have not heard of any malfunction. It is truly an accomplishment for the domestic electrical industries to complete the retrofitting of high-voltage and highcapacity power generators."21

The completion of the Longxi River hydropower project was a milestone for China's electrical industry. Prior to this, China's electrical equipment industry had depended on imported raw materials and made products by copying foreign designs. Years of dismantling, reassembling and repairing electrical equipment on the run had equipped the engineers with much-needed expertise to handle various types of electrical components.22 After completing the Longxi River project, the Electrical Manufacturing Works conducted similar repairs for the damaged hydropower turbines at Yaolong Hydropower Station in Yunnan and Xiuwen Hydropower Station in Guizhou in 1943. It also applied the experience from refurbishing the hydropower generator for Longxi River to manufacture a 220 hp/750 rpm hydropower turbine for the Wanxian Hydropower Station in Sichuan in 1944.23

21 Zhang, Chenghu: "Guoying dianli jiqi shiye zhi chengzhang yu zhanwang [The growth and outlook for state-owned electrical machine industry]", in: Ziyuan weiyuanhui jikan 5:2 (1945), p. 214. Also cited in Tan, Recharging China, p. 101-102.

22 Yun, Zhen: "Wunian lai Zhongguo dianji zhizao zhi jinbu [Improvements in electrical equipment manufacturing]", in: Diangong 1 (1943), p. 8–12.

23 Ibid, p. 11.

The electrical industry that came of age during the War of Resistance against Japan was soon caught in the crossfire of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Instead of building on their earlier achievements, engineers and workers spent most of their efforts protecting the electrical infrastructure from enemy destruction. The Communists glorified the repair work completed by rank-and-file workers. Stories of heroic repair not only proved that the workers supported the revolutionary cause of the Communists; they also showed the Communists to be competent urban administrators.

Maintenance, or the lack thereof, was a central theme of the anecdote in the opening paragraphs about Liu Yingyuan's "heroic" repairs during the Nationalist assault on Harbin in the fall of 1946. The coal-fired power plant in Harbin had fallen into disuse, so Harbin came to depend on the Fengman Hydropower Station about 252 km south of the city after 1943. In their attempt to dislodge the Communists from Harbin, Nationalist forces cut off electricity from the Fengman plant and plunged the city into darkness. The Communist newspaper *People's Daily* reported that the workers responded by working day and night to repair the disused generators and restored power one autumn evening.24 Liu Yingyuan received the "Hero of Labour" award for leading the repair efforts.

The article about Harbin Power Plant also tells an incredulous tale of Zhang Kexing, another "labour hero" who climbed into the boiler and braved the scorching heat to replace a 200-pound moulding brick. Zhang came to Harbin at age 17 and worked at the power station for 28 years, eventually being promoted to chief of the boiler repair section. Workers recounted Zhang's superhuman feat:

"During the era of the bogus Manchukuo regime, we would have to wait for three days for the boiler to cool down before working, which would lead to a three-day power outage ... Now the workers are taking charge of the factory. None of us are willing to idle the machines that make military supplies for our soldiers on the front line. Old Hero Zhang thought of a way to quickly fix the problem. He ordered workers to remove the burning coals for the boiler and lay out thick straw mats on the furnace. The workers wrapped themselves in thick clothing and burlap sacks before crawling into the furnace, while others sprayed water to cool them down from behind. Zhang and a few workers installed a 200-pound moulding brick under these conditions."25

24 Guanying, "Haerbin fadianchang".

25 Ibid.

Stories of heroic repairs publicised through Communist propaganda laid the groundwork for workers to seize control of the means of production. Mobilisation for war forced workers to conduct swift repairs, as was the case during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance. The spirit of self-reliance was also carried over from the earlier period. The Civil War effected a cultural change among the electrical workers. The stories of Liu and Zhang highlighted the flaws of electrical power systems and practices inherited from the Japanese. These heroic figures marked a clean break from the past, as they rallied other workers to take the lead and adopt new maintenance and repair procedures. Electrical workers came to be seen as comrades-in-arms of the People's Liberation Army. The battlehardened engineers also threw in their lot with the Communists in the Civil War. After the founding of the People's Republic, maintenance and repair continued to be couched in militaristic language – a legacy of at least twelve years of ceaseless warfare.

#### **REPAIRING THE NATION**

The Civil War did not end with the proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 1949. New China was quickly drawn into the Korean War in October 1950. As the electrical industry remained on a war footing, the Communists mobilised engineers and workers to guard against sabotage. The mobilisation of the masses broke down the top-down command structure of the electrical industries that had long been dominated by the educated engineering elite. The Communists created an institutional framework that welcomed input on the improvement of maintenance and repair practices from both engineers and workers. The electrical industries experienced their "let a hundred flowers bloom" moment in the 1950s, when engineers and workers proposed a vast array of ideas to improve the reliability of the power system. As we will see, workers focused on tinkering with the workflow to optimise output with limited resources. Engineers attempted to formalise maintenance procedures. This multifaceted approach to maintenance and repair allowed the Chinese to unleash the full potential of their existing capacity.

Workers and engineers offered differing maintenance and repair solutions to improve overall efficiency and reliability. Bao Guobao, the engineer who had developed the power infrastructure for the Nationalist government before and during the war, defected to the Communists in 1949 and was appointed as the director of the Electrical Power Division under the PRC's Ministry of Fuel Resources.26 Liu Yingyuan, the worker hero who purportedly saved Northeast China from darkness, took over as director of the Shijingshan Power Plant that supplied most of Beijing's electricity. 27 While Bao worked at the ministerial level, Liu focused on the day-to-day operations of maintaining a stable power supply to the new capital. Bao, who had served as general manager of the state-owned North Hebei Electric Company between 1945 and 1949 under the Nationalist regime, knew the vulnerabilities of the North China power grid too well. Shijingshan Power Station had been built in the 1910s and changed hands between private Chinese businessmen, Japanese regional power companies and Nationalist engineer-bureaucrats over a period of nearly four decades. As every owner installed a new generator without getting rid of the old one, the crew had to maintain generators with five different voltage settings (110, 220, 380, 3,300 and 5,200 V). It was impossible to find spare parts for the largest generator, which was built by the Japanese by imitating Swiss designs.28 Between December 1948 and January 1949, Bao was trapped in Beiping during the siege on the city. The People's Liberation Army captured the power station moments before attacking the city. They intermittently cut off power to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and troops, which led to the "peaceful liberation" of Beijing.29 The trauma of war was also fresh in Liu Yingyuan's mind. In the Northeast China battlefield, Liu witnessed how the PLA pounded the enemy into submission by cutting off electricity to the city. He experienced first-hand how difficult it was to restore power to war-torn cities.

The electrical infrastructure of the new capital was no more reliable than that of the old Nationalist capital. Within the first eight months of 1950, Beijing reported 48 deaths from electrocution, while Tianjin reported 31. Residents making illegal hook-ups to the power line and thieves stealing power cables to sell them as scrap metal accounted for some of the deaths. The North China Power Bureau took responsibility for some of these accidents. It concluded that the deaths were all preventable. If the power bureau had been more diligent with its routine maintenance, accidental contact with high-voltage lines would have been

26 Aide-de-camp: Personnel report on Bao Guobao, circa 1950, Aide-de-camp papers,<PHONE_NUMBER>7A, Academia Historica, Xindian District of New Taipei City.

27 Anon., "Zhongguo gongren de guangrong", p. 9.

28 Xu, Ying: Dangdai Zhongguo shiye renwu zhi [Collective biography of industrialists in modern China], Shanghai: Wenhai chubanshe 1948, p. 191–202.

29 Id.: Beiping eryue weicheng ji [Two-month siege of Beiping], Beijing: Beijing chubanshe 1993.

averted.30 Between April and July 1950, Shijingshan Power Station reported 8 to 13 serious incidents, mostly resulting from generator malfunction. An inspection team rectified seven sets of problems, including poor connections within the rotor, improper insulation of ball-bearing tubes and accumulation of dirt in fan coils and switches, and reduced the number of serious incidents to two by August 1950.31

Incident reports from Shijingshan Power Plant suggest that these breakdowns resulted from the overuse of existing electrical equipment and the deferment of elective maintenance. As the Ministry of Fuel Resources pursued a policy of unleashing the full potential of existing equipment, power stations across the country operated at full capacity to increase output, which left little down time for inspection and routine maintenance. It was estimated that 28.5% of the existing generating capacity had been frozen as a result of years of disrepair, and that the power output could be increased by several hundred thousand kW simply by repairing broken equipment.32 Soviet advisers fuelled their expectations by endorsing this view. They even ridiculed their Chinese counterparts for curtailing power output out of fear of causing excessive wear and tear. China's electrical power sector did increase its output by 20% without installing new equipment,33 but this heightened the risk of catastrophic failure. The reduction of breakdowns reported in August 1950 proved to be illusory. Problems resurfaced at the Shijingshan Power Station within a few months. Technicians skipped a major repair in November 1950 because Shijingshan Power Plant had to make up the shortfall resulting from the overhaul of Tianjin Power Plant. The operators did not remove the stator for cleaning during the minor repair in January 1951. Three months later the stator burned out, as large amounts of dirt had clogged up the generators' vents, warping the wiring insulation.34

30 Anon.: "Anquan yongdian, bimian chudian shigu [Use electricity safely, avoid accidents]", in: Renmin dianye 2 (Oct. 1950), p. 90–97.

31 Shijingshan Power Station: "Jiancha xiaozu chubu chengji shouhuo baogao [Preliminary results of the inspection group]", in: Renmin dianye 2 (Oct. 1950), p. 17–20.

32 Zhongyang ranliao gongyebu [Ministry of Fuel Resources]: Dianye jihua jiangxi ban jiangyi*,* Beijing: Ranliao gongyebu chubanshe 1952, p. 343.

33 Anon.: "San nian li Sulian zhuanjia gei women de bangzhu he jinhou women ruhe geng hao de xiang Sulian xuexi [Assistance rendered by the Soviet Union in the past three years and how we should learn from the Soviets from now on]", in: Renmin dianye 22 (Dec. 1952), p. 2–3.

34 Anon.: "Duiyu Shijingshan fadianchang yici fasheng zhongyao shigu de jiancha zongjie, [Conclusion of inspections following multiple serious accidents at Shijingshan Power Station]", in: Renmin dianye (May 1951), p. 9–16.

As a factory director who started out as a worker, Liu maximised power output by adjusting the workflow to improve the combustion rate of coal. When Liu won the model labourer award in September 1950, he was praised for "exterminating a huge enemy" by reducing the amount of pulverised coal that was escaping from the chimneys of Shijingshan Power Plant. Not only were workers contracting lung disease after inhaling coal dust; five to six tons of coal were escaping from the chimneys every day. The biographical essay claimed that many experts, including Soviet advisers, had attempted to solve the problem, but only Liu had set his mind to it.35 Liu resorted to offering of 20,000 *jin* of millet to any worker who fixed the problem. The workers implemented a joint suggestion from two workers and the Soviet advisers to patch up a ventilation gap in the coal pulveriser, but that only solved half of the problem. Two other workers modified the design of the coal conveyor to stabilise the feed and improve the burn rate. These modifications saved 2,000 tons of coal each year, which reduced the cost of power generation.

Workflow adjustments allowed Liu to identify safety lapses. On 5 June 1950 two workers overfilled the steam generators and caused water to seep into the turbine. Liu made an example of the negligent workers and highlighted the importance of "exterminating" accidents. He demoted the workers at fault and rewarded those who detected problems. His biographical sketch does not indicate whether he took any measures to rectify systematic mechanical faults causing generator breakdowns.

While workers tinkered with the workflow, engineers focused on identifying weak links accumulated as a result of the rapid succession of regime changes. A Japanese-made generator installed during the war accounted for most of the breakdowns. It was jointly manufactured by Hitachi and Mitsubishi in the 1940s based on imitations of AEG's products, but the windings for the rotors were made with thinner material and inadequately stretched, so they broke easily, taking out the stator's winding and silicon steel plates at the same time. 36 Generator malfunction was not the most common problem. According to the Ministry of Fuel Resources, 32.6% of all breakdowns across the nation in the first quarter of 1951 were caused by faulty transformers, 70% of these because of damage to the windings. Referencing Soviet performance benchmarks, the engineers noted that transformers operating at a normal temperature of 85° C had an expected shelf

35 Anon., "Zhongguo gongren de guangrong", p. 8.

36 Zhongyang ranliao gongyebu [Ministry of Fuel Resources]: Sulian dianye zhuanjia baogao dierji [Soviet electrical experts' report], Beijing: Ranliao gongyebu chubanshe 1951, p. 178–182.

life of 20 to 25 years, but as the insulation wore off, the operating temperature increased to 150° C, causing the transformer to burn out within a few years.37 Transformers with worn-out insulation were largely built during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance, when both Japan and China faced material shortages.

The engineers lamented that workers carried out maintenance tasks without understanding fundamental principles and ended up damaging the equipment they wanted to maintain. In his speech during the safety inspection meeting in September 1950, Bao related an anecdote of a foreign technician who overfilled the oil in the steel bearings, causing the power station's water pump to break down. He filled the steel bearings with the best oil, but the oil deteriorated quickly and had to be replaced every two weeks. Upon further inspection, the engineers realised that the oil protected the bearings from corrosion but did not serve as a lubricant. Overfilling the bearings with oil increased friction, which led to excessive wear and tear.38 The mechanic at fault was purportedly a foreigner who had worked in the plant before 1949. The story reflected the realities of the electrical industries during the early Communist takeover. Bao's remarks were aimed at the ad-hoc inspection committees that covered up underlying problems rather than fully resolving them.

The engineers felt compelled to formalise maintenance protocols and eliminate systematic errors that caused catastrophic failure. As early as January 1951, Bao Guobao appointed an eight-person taskforce to compile a "Manual for Inspection and Repair of Electrical Equipment". Two of its members, Wang Pingyang and Yu En-ying, were among the first batch of engineers sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority for advanced training during World War Two. Wang specialised in high-voltage transmission lines and participated in the construction of the 154 kV power line from the Apalachia Dam. Yu En-ying began his training in the design department but later branched out to focus on the "commercial and management side" of electrical power distribution.39 During their

37 Ibid, p. 180.

38 Bao, Guobao: "Anquan jiancha zhong ji ge ying zhuyi de wenti – jiu yue ershi ri zai anquan jiancha gongzuo huibao shang de jianghua [A few problems to take note of during safety inspections – speech at the safety inspection meeting on September 1950]", in: Renmin dianye 3 (Oct. 1950), p. 14–15.

39 Cheng, Yu-feng/Cheng, Yu-huang (eds.): Ziyuan weiyuanhui jishu renyuan fu mei shixi shiliao [Archives on the National Resources Commission Technicians' Training in the United States], Taipei: Academia Historica 1990, p. 122. The chapter in the "Maintenance Manual" on protecting the electrical grid from lightning strikes is largely based on the notes of Sun Yun-suan, a TVA trainee who was sent to Taiwan and

advanced training at the TVA, Wang and Yu submitted monthly training reports to their supervisors at the National Resources Commission. These reports provided the raw material for the technical manual. Draft chapters were circulated in the bi-weekly *Renmin dianye* (People's Electrical Industries) journal. Engineers and technicians across the country were encouraged to share their experience and offer suggestions for revision. The engineers employed techniques of mass mobilisation to transform the compilation of the technical manual into a collective enterprise.

The engineers recognised maintenance lapses with generators and transformers as the most pressing problems and published these draft chapters first. The first chapter went straight to the underlying cause of generator burnouts and then spelled out instructions for the routine cleaning of the rotor and the stator. The manual specified that "The dust on the coils had to be blown with compressed air from 1.7 to 2.5 kg/cm3 , or removed with a vacuum cleaner then wiped off with a cotton cloth. The grease on the coil may be removed with carbon tetrachloride, but not too much, as the substance does not evaporate easily and can damage the insulation after getting absorbed into it". 40 Overall, the manual adopted a comprehensive approach towards maintenance and repair. Every section adhered to a fixed format with an inspection checklist, maintenance procedures, diagnostic methods for common problems and a troubleshooting guide. There were also pictorial guides that showed readers diagrams of commonlyused tools and detailed every single step of the maintenance procedures. The publication of the technical manual also coincided with establishment of an incident reporting system by the Ministry of Fuel Resources. The magnitude of potential hazards became clear after the second National Electrical Power Conference in 1951. In his April 1951 report, Bao's deputy director Zhang Bin noted that seven regional power networks had identified a total of 95,500 problems but were only able to rectify 8.32% of them.41

The published sources offer no information on the effectiveness of the formalisation of maintenance practices. Power stations across China, including those in North China, continued to report high incidences of serious accidents. In

later rose through the ranks to become Taiwan's premier, published in this edited volume (p. 640–647).

40 Anon.: "Dianqi shebei jianxiu bixie [Draft of Handbook for the Maintenance of Electrical Facilities]", in: Renmin dianye 7 (Jun. 1951), p. 3–39. Quotation from p. 5.

41 Zhang, Bin: "Guanyu anquan gongdian he jishu bao'an gongzuo de jidian wenti [A few problems regarding the safe provision of electrical power and technical security]", in: Renmin dianye 7 (Jun. 1951), p. 1–8.

the nine months of 1953, Qingdao Power Station in Shandong reported 20 outages, with 18 of them happening in the month of July. Lightning struck the transmission cables during the rainy season in summer. Since lightning arresters were in short supply, the power bureau did not install them on some of the transmission towers and was therefore unable to "avoid a power outage whenever there was a thunderstorm".42 Incident reports recognised the need for regular maintenance but acknowledged that there were lapses in quality control, so much so that it was "better to leave things unrepaired".43 The special issue on the "increase production, practise economy" campaign offered some clues about the electrical power industry exceeding quotas despite the high frequency of power outages. Of the seven reports, four of them detailed how power plant workers increased output by reducing fuel wastage during transportation and combustion. The only report that attributed increased output to stringent maintenance came from the Beijing Power Bureau. 120 power line workers from East China went to Beijing to certify the overhaul of Beijing's power network ahead of National Day in 1953. The remaining two articles were about power conservation efforts by the cotton mills in Shanghai and paper manufacturing in Shandong. Put simply, workflow improvements implemented by rank-and-file workers offered quick fixes that translated to observable results. Workers, not engineers, took credit for productivity gains.

#### **CONCLUSIONS**

Material scarcity during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance (1937–1945) led to an involuntary transition from replacement to repair in China. The wartime economic blockade disrupted the supply of electrical parts to the country's fledgling electrical industry. The state-run power companies under the Nationalist regime in Southwest China were particularly hard hit. Their engineers and technicians accumulated considerable experience in repairing battle damage, as they dismantled electrical equipment from coastal cities and transported it over land, rehabilitating the power infrastructure of wartime Chongqing and Kunming after damaging air raids. Those who performed heroic repairs for the Nationalist regime during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance defected to the Communists after

43 Ibid.

42 Zhong, Shufeng/Yu, Longhai: "Qingdao dianye ju guanli boru, shigu buduan fasheng [Weaknesses in technical management in the Qingdao Power Bureau; Accidents keep happening]", in: Renmin dianye 13 (Oct. 1953), p. 28.

1949. Their expertise in repair and maintenance allowed the Communists to take over the electrical infrastructure with minimal disruption.

The workers' approach of tinkering with the workflow became more visible than the systems analyses performed by engineers, since it fit into the Communist Party's overall strategy of improving productivity through mass mobilisation. Elaborating on Lenin's formula "Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country", Zhang Bin, head of the Electric Bureau in the Ministry of Fuel Resources, noted that "The transition towards communism requires the electrification of the whole country, as it requires the entire national economy to move towards large-scale production". 44 Workflow adjustments aimed at improving the electrical industry's fuel efficiency involved the participation of many more workers than specialised maintenance tasks. Repair and maintenance became a means of imposing discipline on the vast industrial workforce.

During the first five-year plan (1953–1957), the electrical industry increased electricity supply not primarily through the addition of new generating capacity but by spreading power demand evenly throughout the day with the readjustment of production schedules. As a result, the maintenance of a safe and efficient power system became the collective responsibility of all workers. The expertise developed through decades of tinkering and repair under conditions of material scarcity would culminate in the November 1958 mass electrification campaign, during which the Ministry of Electrical Industries called on the entire population to build improvised power plants to relieve chronic power shortages following the launch of the Great Leap Forward.

44 Zhang, Bin: "Dianli gongye zai fazhan guomin jingji zhong de zuoyong [The role of electrification in the development of the national economy]", in: Renmin dianye 15 (Aug. 1955), p. 4.

## **Changing Perceptions of Repair and Maintenance:**

Reflections from the Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry in the UK

*Thomas Lean*

In 2014 I filmed an oral history interview in a coal-fired power station in central England. Built in the 1960s, the station was still operational and its original turbo generators still provided close to their design output nearly half a century from their installation (though aptly, one of them was offline for repairs that day). Standing in the control room I was struck by the juxtaposition of old and new required to keep this cathedral of power running. Along one side of the room were modern computerised control desks, desktop PCs and large flat display screens monitoring every aspect of the plant's operation. On the other side was a wall of switches, dials and glowing light bulb indicators, housed in grey metal cabinets proudly carrying the logo of an electronics company that had been defunct since 1968.1

1 I am deeply grateful to all those who were interviewed for An Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry (henceforth OHESI); for the generous philanthropy of the project funders, Hodson and Ludmila Thornber, for enabling the project to happen; for the advice of the project advisory committee, Sir John Baker, David Jefferies, Stephen Littlechild and Leslie Hannah; for comments on drafts by Sally Horrocks, Heike Weber and Stefan Krebs; and for the support of all the archive staff at National Life Stories who care for the OHESI archive, including Rob Perks, Mary Stewart, Elspeth Millar, Emily Hewitt, Haley Moyse, Eleanor Lowe, Camile Johnson, Charlie Morgan and Cai Parry-Jones. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Histories of Technology's Persistence: Repair, Reuse and Disposal workshop in 2018 and I am grateful for the suggestions of other delegates.

As this anecdote suggests, electricity supply industries (ESI) are rich systems in which to observe the persistence of technology. The longevity of ESI engineering is a testament not only to the robust quality of original design but also to the care it receives over decades of operation. Yet infrastructure is largely invisible except when it fails, and the activities of the many people who are responsible for its ongoing care over decades often go unnoticed. Graham and Thrift argue that "the processes of maintenance and repair that keep modern societies going … have been neglected by nearly all commentators as somehow beneath their notice".2 Accordingly, whilst there has been some attention to how the electrical system was operated during times of trouble, particularly in Frank Ledger and Howard Sallis' *Crisis Management in the Power Industry*, 3 the repair and maintenance of the ESI has not been given a great deal of attention in its history in Britain. For example, the subject is mentioned only briefly in Leslie Hannah's classic history of the post-war industry until the early 1980s, and even less in Dieter Helm's account of the more recent development of the sector.4 The focus in these and other works has tended to be on business history, technical development, economics, organisation, politics and the growth of the industry.

Historians of technology have long stressed the importance of adopting a systematic approach to understanding the development of electricity industries.5 A similar perspective is required to understand their maintenance and repair. The integrated nature of electricity networks means that unchecked local faults can lead to widespread cascading failures. Maintenance work has to be carefully programmed to allow items of equipment to be switched out and isolated, both for the safety of workers but also to protect the integrity of the system as a whole. The British electricity network is a 24/7 operation and, as electricity cannot be stored, supply and demand on electricity networks need to be kept con-

2 Graham, Stephen/Thrift, Nigel: "Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance", in: Theory, Culture & Society 24, 3 (2007), p. 1–25, here p. 1.

3 Ledger, Frank/Sallis, Howard: Crisis Management in the Power Industry, London: Routledge 1995. The major focus here is on political crisis, notably the miners' strikes of the 1970s and 1980s. Both authors served in the ESI and Frank Ledger was amongst those interviewed for OHESI.

4 Hannah, Leslie: Engineers, Managers and Politicians, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982; Helm, Dieter: Energy, the State, and the Market, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003.

5 Hughes, Thomas P.: "The evolution of large technological systems", in: Bijker, Wiebe E./Hughes, Thomas P./Pinch, Trevor (eds.): The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press 1987, p. 51–82.

stantly in balance by the coordinated actions of individuals across the industry. Overall, this system presents an excellent example of the sort of "broken world" discussed by Steven Jackson, a piece of infrastructure only kept going by the constant attention of maintenance and repair workers whose efforts are generally hidden except when parts of the system fail.6

In this paper I use oral history interviews to explore the history of repair and maintenance from the perspective of electricity supply industry workers. The interviews were collected between 2013 and 2017 as part of *An Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry in the UK* (OHESI), led by National Life Stories (NLS) at the British Library*.* 7 Established in 1987, National Life Stories' mission is "to record first-hand experiences of as wide a cross-section of society as possible, to preserve the recordings, to make them publicly available and encourage their use".8 This has been principally achieved through a series of oral history projects that have focused on recording and archiving the life stories of people who worked in particular industries or sectors of society.

NLS interviews are typically semi-structured, relying on a biographical outline, open-ended questions and a conversational interview style, and recorded over several sessions. Eight- to fifteen-hour interviews are quite normal, giving interviewees the chance to reflect at length on their lives within a wider social history framework and to recall daily life and developments in the areas they worked in. OHESI collected over 500 hours of recordings with more than 60 people connected to the electricity industry. Most of them were professional en-

6 Jackson, Steven J.: "Rethinking Repair", in: Gillespie, Tarleton/Boczkowski, Pablo J./ Foot, Kirsten A. (eds.): Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2014, p. 221–239.

7 Further details on project background are available in the project scoping study: Horrocks, Sally/Lean, Thomas: An Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry. Scoping Study for Proposed National Life Stories Project. National Life Stories, 2011, https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/subjects%20images/oral%20history/oral%20hi story%20and%20nls%20documents/nls\_electricityindustryscopingstudy.pdf (accessed 29.10.2018). Further details on project implementation, including interviewee selection, are available in the end of project report: Lean, Thomas: An Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry. Final Report. National Life Stories, 2017, https://www. bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/Oral%20History-Electrical%20Supply%2023102017.pdf (accessed 29.10.2018).

8 "British Library Projects: National Life Stories", https://www.bl.uk/projects/nationallife-stories (accessed 17.06.2019).

gineers with long careers in the sector, but the collection also included accounts from some industrial staff, managers and others connected to the industry. 9

Repair and maintenance were not the specific focus of the interviews, but the issues came up in conversation with several interviewees as they described the work that they had once done and commented on how the industry had changed over their careers. As such, the corpus cannot be read as a continuous dataset but more as a collection of snapshots from across the industry's past; a series of vignettes and reflections on repair and maintenance from a wide range of people. This includes people who worked both in power stations and on the transmission and distribution system. Naturally, the viewpoints in the interviews are subjective, but as oral historians have long argued, this very subjective quality can allow oral history interviews to reveal salient truths. Oral sources, as Alessandro Portelli points out, have a "different credibility". They can show us not just what people did but how they understood the meaning of these activities both then and as they retell them now.10 OHESI interviews contain three principal sorts of information about repair and maintenance: stories and anecdotes about experiences of repair and maintenance jobs, descriptions of the work activities involved, and reflections on the meanings of these activities and how these meanings could change over time. I illustrate this essay largely with the third category, interviewees' subjective views, but present them in analysis and context based on other information that emerged in interviews.

My particular focus in this essay is on how maintenance and repair were changed by the privatisation of the British electricity industry, i. e. how practices of repair as well as the perception and meaning of repair changed. Through most of the careers of those interviewed, the ESI was owned and operated by the state, after nationalisation by Clement Attlee's left-wing Labour Government in 1948. For most of the era of nationalisation, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) ran the power stations and nationwide high-voltage transmission system through which electricity was dispatched to a dozen Area Electricity Boards in different regions of the country, which in turn distributed it through low-voltage networks to customers.11 After the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher's right-

9 All interviews cited in this essay were conducted by Thomas Lean for OHESI, and are generally available online at http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Industry-water-steel-andenergy (accessed 12.03.2019).

10 Portelli, Alessandro: "What Makes Oral History Different?", in: Perks, Robert/ Thompson, Alistair (eds.): The Oral History Reader (2nd edition), London: Routledge 2003, p. 67.

11 The industry was organised differently in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the functions of the CEGB and Area Boards in England and Wales were more vertically

wing Conservative Government, bent on free-market reforms, the ESI was privatised over the 1980s and 1990s. The CEGB was split up into competing generating companies and an independent National Grid company was established, and the Area Boards became regional electricity companies. The whole industry became increasingly fragmented as more companies became involved in the years that followed. Interviewees often present privatisation as something of a millenarian event, heralding a period of great cultural change in the industry. As the head of one privatised power company recalled of the change, "I used to say to the people at Powergen [one of the new post-privatisation generating companies]: 'If you don't know what to do … think of what you would do in the CEGB and then do the opposite.' … I intended them to say: 'Well if we did it in the CEGB like that, but now we're a totally different culture … then how do we do it now?'"12 As I discuss, there are many aspects to this cultural shift, but it can be very briefly summarised as a move away from a centrally planned and engineering-focused service industry to a competitive energy market of agile businesses that were more driven by financial profit and loss.

The privatisation and liberalisation of infrastructure systems and public services is a subject that has elicited considerable comment, much of it critical. Graham and Thrift, for example, suggest that the application of neoliberal ideologies to electrical systems has been a, "complete rebuttal of the subtle cultures of repair which actually allow complex technosocial systems like electricity to work",13 contributing to their degradation and increasing unreliability. I do not make any value judgment here as to whether maintenance and repair arrangements were better or worse either side of privatisation. As I note later, figures from the industry regulator seem to suggest modest improvements in system reliability after privatisation. However, excusing the occasional exceptional event, the lights stayed on fairly reliably before privatisation too. Yet to listen to the impressions of those who worked in the industry through this period, it is evident that, to them, something changed in how this was achieved as the culture of the industry shifted. Various studies have highlighted how repair and maintenance activities are seen differently by the particular cultures they are part of, such as those espousing ideas of self-sufficiency, creativity or environmentalism. My aim in this essay is to explore how the different cultures of the nationalised and

integrated into single organisations. While OHESI interviews suggest some variations in culture between regions, there seems to be a common commitment to public service and engineering.

12 Interview with Edmund Wallis, OHESI, C1495/26, 2014–15.

13 Graham/Thrift, "Out of Order", p. 14.

privatised industries contributed to a change in how repair and maintenance were approached and conceptualised, though the end result, the lights staying on, has remained constant.

## **THE NATIONALISED ESI: ENGINEERS AND PUBLIC SERVICE**

It is generally accepted that the nationalised ESI was a largely engineering-led organisation. Dieter Helm, for example, notes the "cult of the engineer" as being a major theme of the nationalised ESI, which concentrated on "ever bigger and more technical investments … free from the constraints of competitive markets".14 As I discuss in detail elsewhere, respect for the "heroism of practical knowledge" was deeply engrained in the culture of the nationalised ESI.15 Most of its senior managers were originally trained as engineers, generally after following an apprenticeship with periods of hands-on work that encouraged an appreciation of engineering and craft skill. As one senior manager recalled of his apprenticeship alongside craftsmen in the 1950s: "I remember being amazed at the sheer skill of people … who could make their tools sing and that was not with any book learning".16 Industrial workers, including the skilled craftsmen who actually did most of the maintenance work under the direction of engineers, were often trained by the industry itself through its training schools and thorough apprenticeships. "You felt as though you were getting quality training and you were working for a quality outfit", recalled one foreman of his apprenticeship. This contributed to an organisational culture where engineering, high standards and practical ability were much respected.17

The ESI also imbued its staff with a sense of public service and the importance to society of maintaining electricity supplies.18 As one interviewee put it: "You've got to do the best you can to keep the lights on and serve the public".19 In an ethnographic study of workplace maintenance staff, Christopher Henke argues that repair of faults is essential for maintaining the normal order of

14 Helm, Energy, State and Market, p. 16.

15 Lean, Thomas: "The Life Electric: Oral History and Composure in the Electricity Supply Industry", in: Oral History 46 (2018), p. 56–58.

16 Interview with Granville Camsey, OHESI, C1495/09, 2013–14.

17 Interview with David Williamson, OHESI, C1495/43, 2015–16.

18 Lean, "The Life Electric", p. 61–62.

19 Interview with Frank Ledger, OHESI, C1495/01, 2012–2013.

the workplace.20 Similarly, "keeping the lights on" helped to preserve the normal order of society, but if supplies were threatened by faults then repair staff had a duty to restore normality as swiftly as possible. "There was an ethos there that you looked after people …", recalled one distribution engineer, "[y]our job was, if they're off supply, to get them back as quickly as possible".21

These two aspects of ESI culture are both evident in stories of repairing faults or keeping the system going under pressure. These sometimes take on the character of "war stories", struggles to keep the engineering of the system going and serve the public despite challenges such as failing technology or horrendous weather. Julian Orr notes in an ethnography of photocopy technicians that such stories are useful in transferring knowledge and building a sense of professional identity.22 This latter function seems particularly important in the oral history interviews, contributing to building an identity of self-sacrificing public servant and able engineer.23 Electricity was a 24-hour industry and repair staff could be called on at any hour. Distribution engineers, for instance, served shifts at home on standby, awaiting the night-time telephone call that would summon them to attend to a fault. As one senior manager recalled of his time as a distribution engineer early in his career:

"I think the most exciting part of some of it really is, and I think partly it's still the same today although it's much more controlled, is you get rung up about 2 o'clock in the morning on the telephone, you get told that customers [are] off supply, people ringing up all over the place. And *you* have to go out, and *you* have to find the problem, and *you* have to solve it, and *you* have to repair it. Nobody else. That I guess was the challenge."24

There could also be an element of public appreciation too, expressed by interviewees in anecdotes about customers being grateful for their electricity supply being returned. Another retired distribution engineer, recalling various ways that faults and their repair had inconvenienced the public, reflected that people were generally, though not totally, understanding of the efforts made to get their supply back on: "Some people were less pleasant and there were one or two who

20 Henke, Christopher: "The Mechanics of Workplace Order: Toward a Sociology of Repair", in: Berkeley Journal of Sociology 44 (1999/2000), p. 55–81, here p. 44.

21 Interview with Michael Butterfield, OHESI, C1495/39, 2015.

22 Orr, Julian: Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 1997, ch. 8.

23 See Lean, "The Life Electric", p. 56–62.

24 Interview with Bryan Townsend, OHESI, C1495/05, 2013.

were aggressive, but on the whole people were remarkably supportive for what you were trying to do".25 On the other hand, if the system failed for too long, public displeasure could be quite unpleasant. In the early 1970s, for instance, when power cuts became a daily feature of life as striking miners cut off coal supplies to power stations, interviewees recall arguments with their neighbours over why their electricity was off and hiding electricity board insignia on their uniforms whilst out in public. It has been argued that the work of maintainers only becomes visible when systems fail. While a handful of interviewees express a certain sadness that the public were generally ignorant of the daily efforts that went into keeping the system going, this lack of awareness is perhaps a tribute to how well it was maintained and operated on the whole: an invisible system was a working system.

## **THE PRIVATISATION OF THE ESI: CREATING A BUSINESS-LED INDUSTRY**

Before nationalisation in 1948, the British ESI was a patchwork of over 300 different municipal and private undertakings.  Nationalisation facilitated a dramatic development of the ESI's capacity and technology and by the 1980s it had evolved into a generally reliable and robust system. The capability of the system as a whole to meet exceptional strain was demonstrated during the 1984–1985 miners' strike, the most bitter industrial dispute in recent British history. Striking miners brought the industry to its knees in the early 1970s, but a decade later the lights stayed on as the ESI withstood "the greatest challenge … of the industry's history".26 However, while the ESI was unquestionably meeting its mission to keep the lights on, nationalised industries as a whole were under criticism for their perceived inefficiencies. Privatisation was a major policy plank of the Conservative Government over the 1980s, partly for ideological reasons, but it was also presented as a way of reforming nationalised industries. The memoirs of political figures driving privatisation, for example, go into some detail about the problems of the nationalised ESI, which they identify as muddled central planning, inefficiency and high costs.27 This reminds us

25 Interview with Alison Simpson, OHESI, C1495/55, 2016.

26 Ledger and Sallis, Crisis Management, p. 293.

27 See, for example, the perspectives of two energy ministers in the 1980s: Lawson, Nigel: The View from No. 11, London: Transworld 1992, chs. 12, 15 and 16; Parkinson,

that determining whether a technical system is broken depends not only on whether its technology fulfils its function, but also whether it is perceived as working by the standards of its political-economic context.

Many senior industry figures describe privatisation not as a political issue but as a radical way of reforming problems they perceived in the state-run ESI, such as over-staffing, inefficiency, government interference and muddled or "gold-plated" technical development.28 As one Area Electricity Board chairman put it: "I think the industry had stagnated, it had ossified … monolithic, too big, too ungainly … it was just ready for a massive change".29 In the memories of industry figures in favour of it, privatisation appears almost as a way of repairing the industry's problems and improving efficiency. On the other hand, there were those who saw little wrong with the existing arrangements. As a senior manager from the CEGB recalled: "I couldn't really believe anybody could do the job better than we were doing".30

Perhaps the biggest difference in post-privatisation companies has been the decline in influence of engineers. Dieter Helm comments that "whereas engineers led the nationalised industries, their role was greatly reduced in the 1980s and 1990s".31 Privatisation saw a decline in the status of engineering in the ESI, as management positions, formerly dominated by trained electrical engineers, became more open to figures with expertise in accountancy, human resources and other general management experience. Clearly engineering was still vital, but as financial targets assumed far greater significance than before, the industry embarked on a wave of cost-cutting measures that would have a number of effects on maintenance and repair. Examples noted by interviewees include the reduction of extensive power station stockpiles of spare parts, the closure of maintenance depots, with staff expected to travel further to fix problems, and new information and communication technology being used to increase maintenance staff utilisation rates.

Whilst most interviewees regard the public service mission of the industry as continuing after privatisation, a few also note a change in emphasis as financial issues and targets became more explicitly significant. As one recently retired dis-

30 Interview with Frank Ledger.

31 Helm, Energy, State and Market, p. 16.

Cecil: Right at the Centre, London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Limited 1992, ch. 13.

28 Lean, "The Life Electric", p. 62–65.

29 Interview with Bryan Townsend.

tribution engineer who worked on the system before and after privatisation remarked:

"I think that was the attitude for a long time: that we were a public service … I suspect that people now have as much satisfaction, but certainly I think that concept of 'we're doing what we're doing for the public' as a nationalised industry had, I'm not sure. The emphasis of management changed from 'we're doing what we're doing for the public' to 'we're making profits for the company'. And while people still do and get satisfaction from restoring customers on and dealing with customers there's always that thing: and yes we have to make money. And sort of: we want to get customers on fast, because it's good to get customers on fast, but because if we don't get them on fast we won't meet our targets or … we'll end up having to pay them whatever the money, the financial cost, is."32

The shift in philosophy evident in the quote above is a clear example of how regulation and the need of the regulator to measure progress came to change how staff carried out their jobs, and how this approach could clash with the values the industry had previously instilled. The industry regulator monitored and imposed targets for reliability, repair and customer service, and required financial compensation to customers if their supplies were off for too long. Public service was now something with targets and financial implications for failure, and there was perhaps a subtle shift in industry emphasis from "public service" to "customer service".

The need to save money also led to changes in the people who were actually doing maintenance and repair work. The nationalised industry, while making some use of contractors, relied heavily on its own large force of directly employed maintenance staff, who it had often raised from its own apprenticeship schemes. In 1983, for example, the ESI as a whole employed some 83,026 industrial workers directly, not to mention some 25,675 engineers, out of a total workforce of some 158,025.33 This technical staff of over 108,000 included operations and design staff, but it seems a safe assumption that the majority were probably working in repair and maintenance. Post-privatisation staff numbers steeply declined as part of an effort to cut costs. Whilst it is hard to find exact numbers, as of 2011 the whole sector was reckoned to employ just 87,000 peop-

32 Interview with Alison Simpson.

33 The Electricity Council, Industrial Relations Department (ed.): Digest of the Electricity Supply Industry's Manpower Statistics 1983, London 1983.

le.34 Clearly there are fewer maintainers than before. Post privatisation, electricity supply companies also increasingly contracted out maintenance and repair work they would once have largely done using in-house staff to external companies to reduce direct staff costs.35 The result was a more flexible main-tenance workforce, but also a smaller and cheaper one.

In the interests of flexibility and efficiency in the time after privatisation, maintenance staff were also called upon to broaden their skills and knowledge. One post-privatisation electricity company chairman recalled the introduction of "multi-disciplinary, well-trained staff, they would get paid more money as a result of being able to go in and do the one job, and they would be fitters and jointers all wrapped up into one."36 Specialist maintenance departments for electrical, instrument and mechanical aspects were merged together, with fewer staff overall. Industrial workers were up-skilled to take responsibilities previously held by more highly trained – and highly paid – engineers. Large reductions in staffing and the amalgamation of different sorts of work were partly facilitated by a decline in the power of trade unions. In the nationalised ESI, unions were strong; many managers recall being frustrated by unions' opposition to new ways of working and saw privatisation as a means of changing this. As the electricity company chairman quoted above recalled of the 1990s, it was "quite obvious that we could actually improve the efficiency of our overall labour forces … because of the unionisation that had not been something that we'd really tackled with as much energy or as vigorously as we would do if we were independent companies".37

## **DECLINE OR DIFFERENCE: POST-PRIVATISATION CHANGE**

The nationalised ESI had not been uninventive in developing new maintenance and repair technologies, but given its large workforce it did not have the same motivations to introduce labour-saving innovations as private companies did. With a greater imperative to cut costs and a smaller and more flexible workforce,

34 Anon.: "UK energy sector: facts and figures", in: Daily Telegraph, 13 Jul. 2011, https: //www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/8633356/UK-energy-sector-factsand-figures.html (accessed 05.04.2019).

35 This is a commonly mentioned point in several interviews from OHESI.

36 Interview with David Jefferies, OHESI, C1495/23, 2014–15.

37 Ibid.

private companies had more need and freedom to introduce new technology and methods to speed up maintenance work, and sometimes to allow them to be done by workers without extensive skills training. One interviewee who had worked as a cable jointer in the 1980s before privatisation spoke early in his interview about the complex work of connecting cables together "in a hole in the ground on a rubber mat wearing a pair of Wellingtons [rubber boots]":

"You'd got two ladles … you'd configure the cable in such a way so you could pour molten metal over the bound conductors and catch the residue in the larger of the two ladles. Often this would be done in a confined space … always uncomfortable, unpleasant. There'd be molten metal involved. There'd be the fumes from the flux and all the dirt, it might also be raining … the hole might be filling up with water … and then you would wrap a rag around the plasticised metal and just wipe it … until you'd got a nice smooth surface and that would eventually set hard and become a joint … then you would get rolls of … impregnated paper oil tape and wrap them continuously … tie that off with a piece of oil-impregnated string … whilst you were pouring this molten metal over the exposed conductor all the metal and the ladles were live at 240 volts."38

As this description suggests, there was often a considerable level of craft skill required to do repair and maintenance work in the ESI, not to mention some hardship too. Later the same interviewee explained how new methods of joining high voltage cables together, using snap-together parts and heat-shrunk materials, meant that such work could be done far more quickly and with a lower level of craft expertise:

"Many years previously it was a very, very highly skilled job and only a very small number of staff were capable of that level of craftsmanship, but as technology moved on, and as I got into the section I was looking after, it quickly became apparent that … the technological side of it, the physical side of jointing, it had been dumbed down quite a bit, you know there wasn't the same level of physical skills involved."39

The contrast between these two quotes and the evident appreciation of practical skill and sadness at its demise that they convey provide a glimpse into how staff perceived the changing culture of the industry. Much of the drive to cut costs after privatisation came from the industry regulator, established after privatesation, whose remit included imposing targets for expenditure and customer service on

38 Interview with David Williamson.

39 Ibid.

the privatised companies. The imposition of regulatory targets and constraints on spending was intended to promote business efficiency and value for money. Levels of capital investment, including maintenance and equipment renewals, were thus influenced by the regulator. "Mainly it's the engineering that drives it", reflected one regional electricity company technical director, but decisions to renew equipment in the private sector were based on a mix of financial and engineering issues, more explicitly than in the past:

"If you've told the regulator you're going to spend a certain amount of money, the regulator is not an engineering organisation, it's an economic organisation so they tend to go by the money... and if you stick to the original plan you'd underspend, because of the difficulty of doing things, then spending money on some of the easier things that you might have done next year, but doing it this year, to hit your spend target, that's a financialdriven investment plan … you're moving something from next year to this year, if you've got a 50 year life what difference does it make? But you can't do that every year, you've absolutely got to unwind that, otherwise you build up a legacy of problems. So year on year, you're always happy to move things around, but you've got to be very careful you don't keep putting some of the hard stuff off forever. Otherwise it never gets done."40

Perhaps the clearest example of how the private sector has invested less in the industry than the state may have done can be seen in power stations. Other than a short rush to build new, highly efficient, gas-fired power stations in the 1990s, the privatised industry has preferred to "sweat the assets", to get as much use as possible out of its existing technology rather than investing in new technology. Although many coal-fired stations were closed in rationalisation measures in the 1990s, some have been kept in operation far beyond their expected service lives. Indeed, the oldest stations in Britain in 2019 were commissioned in 1968, and are now a decade beyond the 40-year service lives expected when designed.

From the perspective of those actually doing the maintenance work there seems to have been a decline in standards of care compared to the engineeringled nationalised industry. They remark, for instance, on how private companies seem to have cut back on how much maintenance was done, as one power station control room operator recalled:

"The periods between maintenance became longer … they lengthened the period of time on routine plant maintenance so they would run longer 'cos it didn't cost as much, took the chance on it breaking down. And in some instances some of the plant was, because it

40 Interview with Mike Kay, OHESI, C1495/44, 2015–16.

was longer between maintenance, it became more leaky, but they still felt it was cost effective to put up with that … so the place did deteriorate somewhat."41

A distribution foreman recalled further stories of cost-cutting from out on the networks:

"Look at the condition of the substations, most of them look semi-derelict, they're overgrown, the paint's peeling off … you can imagine the state of some of the switch gear … We always used to maintain substations on a six-year period, and then we came across new terminology … 'We're going to sweat the assets': We were going to make them last a lot longer before we did anything to them … One particular company … they had to develop all kinds of weird, elaborate techniques of operating the switchgear by lanyards with pulleys … tugging on a rope to operate a switch because that substation hadn't been maintained …"42

As I have noted, the engineering and workmanship standards of the nationalised industry were high. The apparent decline in this standard after privatisation was something that some maintenance staff, brought up in a culture of high standards, found distasteful, as the above examples suggest. However, other interviewees, particularly engineers turned managers, suggest that the engineering standards of the nationalised industry were perhaps higher than they really needed to be. As one distribution company technical director noted: "Although we were always cost conscious [in the state-run industry], I think we were very capable of doing lots of activities that didn't add much value … It's certainly true that in the past we used to over-maintain things".43

Judging from the interviewees' accounts, the privatised industry seems to have performed less maintenance than the nationalised industry. However, we cannot simply characterise this as neglect. Rather there seems to be a different approach to this sort of work; it was not about applying uniformly high standards and maintaining by rote, but rather taking an approach influenced by risk management, cost-benefit analysis and greater use of information:

"We had certain standards to keep up and from the electrical point of view we were discarding work, you know, instead of doing something once a year we'd make it once every two years type of thing. A lot hard decision-making was involved there, where you'd look

41 Interview with Kevan Gee, OHESI, C1495/36, 2015.

42 Interview with David Williamson.

43 Interview with Mike Kay.

at past history … If it failed, it depends on where it was, if it [was an] ancillary plant you can say if it fails it's not going to have too much detriment … if you had like a main breaker and that failed then the unit was off and it'd be costing megabucks per hour then you don't even risk it. And that's what they call risk management, a lot of it goes on now … When it was CEGB, CEGB had one standard and that was top notch, it was Rolls-Royce standard all the time, without a doubt. The time element didn't really matter. It was a case of once you took a piece of plant out and it was maintained then it wouldn't break down, that's the sort of level it was at. Whereas perhaps nowadays instead of something taking five hours, it might take two, because you've cut your work content down a bit to not do certain items, you've cut corners but there's a risk element of it, where you know what you're doing."44

Information technology also brought about changes. Maintenance and renewal in the nationalised industry seems to have been a largely planned and routine activity; things were maintained when they were due to be maintained. However, with new ways of understanding data about how assets had been used, diagnostic tools and remote monitoring, privatised companies have developed a greater understanding of the condition of their engineering assets and when they need maintenance or replacement than in the past. As one National Grid technical manager explained:

"We gradually moved away from nameplate lives to start to look at the environment the assets had worked in, the duty [they] had done … and started to do diagnostics associated with examining the piece of kit and deciding actually, you know, it may have been there 40 years but it looks pretty new, why replace it? … Starting to be forensic, more scientific about when stuff needed to be replaced has been a feature right through from 1990 … You are just more able to understand the condition the asset's in and to replace it at exactly the right moment, rather than thinking: 'Well, 40 years is up. It's time for a new one.'"45

Some have argued that worldwide the liberalisation of energy industries has led to a neglect of electricity networks, which has contributed to a decline in their standard of service.46 However, it is quite difficult to judge how the changes privatisation clearly brought to maintenance and repair have affected the reliability

44 Interview with Brian Moore, OHESI, C1495/35, 2015.

45 Interview with Nick Winser, OHESI, C1495/32, 2015–16.

46 See, for example, Timothy, Luke: "Power Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America", in: Graham, Stephen (ed.): Disrupted Cities. When Infrastructure Fails, Abingdon: Routledge 2009.

of electricity supply in Britain – not least because they do not seem to have made a great deal of discernible difference on the outside. To some extent, this may reflect a legacy of generous margins in equipment installed by the state industry, with its robust approach to engineering. Whether new equipment installed by the privatised industry proves as long-lasting and resilient remains to be seen. Presently there are concerns for the future of electricity generation, as older power stations are decommissioned and less consistent renewable energy sources replace them. However, other than occasional severe weather events and local issues, the reliability of the privatised electricity system as a whole does not yet seem to have been a major issue affecting electricity supply in Britain.

According to figures from the electricity regulator, from the point of view of the consumer, not much changed regarding reliability of supply in the first decade after privatisation. In 1998 the regulator found that "there have not been major changes in the security of supply for any company since Vesting".47 Indeed, overall the story has been one of gradual slight improvement in overall security of supply, albeit with problems in a few companies from time to time. Nationally, in 1990/1991, the first year of privatisation, there were 111 interruptions per 100 customers.48 By 1997/1998 this had fallen to 88 and the trend of gradual improvement largely continued afterwards.49 Yet as we have seen, this outward picture of stability conceals an enormous amount of change within the ESI itself and, in the memories of those who experienced this change, a different philosophy of maintenance. There is a lesson here perhaps not just for electricity supply industries but for infrastructure more generally: as a changing context of politics, technology and business affects the culture of the organisations responsible for caring for our infrastructure, many things have to change for them to remain outwardly the same.

47 Office of Electricity Regulation (ed.): Report on Distribution and Transmission System Performance 1997/98, Nov. 1998, p. 6. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/de fault/files/docs/1998/11/2556-dats97-98\_1.pdf (accessed 18.09.2019).

48 Office of Electricity Regulation (ed.): Review of Public Electricity Suppliers 1998- 2000, Distribution Price Control Review: Consultation Paper, May 1999, p. 63. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/78992/review-oes-1998-2000-dpcr.pdf (accessed 18.09.2019).

49 Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (ed.): Ensuring a Secure and Reliable Gas and Electricity Supply 2013, p. 2. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/59150/ ensuring-secure-and-reliable-gas-and-electricity-supply-pdf (accessed 18.09.2019).

#### **CONCLUSIONS**

Oral history offers a valuable route for revealing the hidden world of the repairers and maintainers of infrastructure. Yet whilst these stories of late-night callouts and descriptions of fixing things provide a glimpse of the activities that kept the lights on, the subjective assessments that accompany them are perhaps even more revealing. They suggest that maintenance and repair in the state-run industry, with its emphasis on high standards and craftsmanship, were influenced as much by the industry's "cult of the engineer" ethos as by other aspects of its activities. They hint too at the value of public service in the identity of the repairers and maintainers who kept the lights on for society. As I have shown through analysis of these testimonies, interviewees seem to have viewed privatisation as bringing about a different philosophy of repair and maintenance. While engineering and public service have remained features, interviewees seem to regard the privatised industry as having become much more led by business concerns, finance and targets than in the past. Uniformly high engineering standards have given way to more flexibility and efficiency and perhaps lower engineering standards. The lights have stayed on, but in these subjective assessments the issue is perhaps not whether technical problems have happened or not. Rather, interviewees' perceptions of these changed, lower or more flexible maintenance standards sometimes seem in conflict with the values the state-run ESI instilled in its workforce, its emphasis on "Rolls-Royce" engineering and public service. On a personal level, for some repairers and maintainers the values of the privatised industry seem to have conflicted with the personal identities that they had built up in the state-run ESI.50

Whilst the conclusions of this essay must be limited by the subjective nature of its source base, the changes it attributes to privatisation and the motivations behind this shift warrant further examination. In a technological sense, the nationalised ESI worked well; it kept the lights on. However, as Britain's national politics changed in the 1980s, it was not seen to be working well in a politicaleconomic sense. In this context, while much of the technology remained in place, the "repair" of the industry as a whole was affected by privatisation changing the organisational culture and the practices around that technology. This process suggests that histories of maintenance and repair need to think in broader terms of business organisation, politics and different perceptions, of

50 For a detailed discussion of how industry managers negotiated this change in industry identity, see Lean, "The Life Electric", p. 62–65.

whether or not systems are broken, rather than just whether the technology itself functions as it should.

## **Business as Usual:**

Telephone Repair and Maintenance at the Bell Telephone Company of Canada

#### *Jan Hadlaw*

This chapter examines histories of repair and maintenance in the early years of North American telephony, when the telephone industry was dominated by two monopolistic and closely associated telephone companies – the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the United States (henceforth AT&T) and the Bell Telephone Company of Canada (henceforth Bell Canada or Bell).1 It focuses in particular on the repair and maintenance practices of Bell Canada and its manufacturing arm, Northern Electric, between the 1880s and the 1930s.

Established in 1880 with capital and expertise supplied by AT&T, Bell Canada quickly acquired all but one of the telephone patents in Canada and a monopoly charter from the Canadian government. By 1887, the challenge of Canada's vast

1 AT&T was also commonly called "Bell" in the United States. For the purposes of clarity, I distinguish between the US telephone company and the Canadian telephone company by referring to them as AT&T and Bell or Bell Canada, respectively. In instances when I refer to these two companies together, I will use the term "Bell companies". The relationship between AT&T and Bell Canada was defined by a complex share-holding arrangement, in which AT&T's percentage declined from 48.8% in 1885 to 0% in 1975. Unlike other regional Bell operating companies, Bell Canada retained its ownership and had its own research and development labs and its own manufacturing branch, Northern Electric Company Limited. Bell Canada's relationship with Northern Electric paralleled AT&T's relationship with its equipment manufacturer, Western Electric in the United States, and the two manufacturing companies similarly shared information and technical components as well until the mid-1960s. See Rens, Jean-Guy: The Invisible Empire, Montréal: McGill-Queen's Press 2001, p. 65 and 217–218.

geography and the reluctance of Canadian investors prompted the company's directors to consolidate operations in Québec and Ontario, which were Canada's most populous provinces and home to its largest and most prosperous urban centres, Montréal and Toronto. Headquartered in Montréal, Bell Canada was never part of the (American) Bell System, but it did function as a Bell operating company, and the two companies were closely linked, freely sharing technical information and business strategies, until the mid-1960s.

Bell operating companies, including Bell Canada, were unique among their competitors in recognising the important role of repair and maintenance in the development and proper functioning of telephone networks (fig. 1). Unfortunately, the routines and rationales of repair operations were not carefully documented during the period prior to the introduction of Scientific Management techniques to Bell's operations in the late 1920s. Information on what was repaired and how, as well as who was responsible for repairing, is difficult to ascertain from company records.2 Similarly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the practices and routines of repair have received less than their due of attention by historians of telephony. Like other scholars interested in histories of repair, I am attracted to the avenues of investigation that the study of repair and maintenance opens up.3 For historians of technology, shifting the focus away from histories

2 Unlike North American independent telephone companies, Bell operating companies allocated a percentage of revenues for maintenance and repair and drew attention to this fact in their publicity and promotions. A Bell operating company spokesman noted that a "telephone plant deteriorates rapidly – more rapidly, perhaps than the mechanical equipment used by any other modern industry", that any telephone company that did not make such investments was failing both its subscribers and its shareholders. A pamphlet produced by another Bell operating company suggested that Bell companies allotted 8% of the cost value of their networks to maintenance and repair. See MacDougall, Robert: The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Golden Age, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2014, p. 144–145.

3 For example: Denis, Jérôme/Pontille, David: "Material Ordering and the Care of Things", in: Science, Technology, & Human Values 40, 3 (2015), p. 338–367; Jackson, Steven J.: "Rethinking Repair", in: Gillespie, Tarleton/Boczkowski, Pablo J./ Foot, Kirsten A. (eds.): Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press 2014, p. 221–239; Krebs, Stefan: "Dial Gauge versus Senses 1–0: German Car Mechanics and the Introduction of New Diagnostic Equipment, 1950–1980", in: Technology and Culture 55, 2 (2014), p. 354– 389; Lucsko, David N.: Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust: Salvaging the Automotive Past, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2016; Strasser, Susan: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: MacMillan 2000.

of innovation and discovery allows closer attention to be paid to what David Edgerton has called "technology-in-use", to the materiality of technological artefacts under study, and to the economic and social aspects of the practices and relations of labour involved in the activities of maintenance and repair.4 It also, certainly in the case of the telephone, makes the interconnection between technological systems and human networks of workers and users more explicit and visible.

**Figure 1.** In this advertisement Bell Canada boasts about the scale of its repair operations and offers instructions on how to care for telephones (Montreal Gazette, 3 May 1917, BCA, File: Newspaper Clippings 1910–1918).

The repair and maintenance of a "technology-in-use" as vast as a telephone system is necessarily ongoing and occurs at many sites. The local loops, trunks, and switching offices, and the millions of kilometres of wire that link these components, are all potential sites of breakdown and failure. Likewise, telephone users

4 Edgerton, David: "From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Theses on the Historiography of Technology", in: History and Technology 16, 2 (1999), p. 111–136.

also constitute potential sites of technological breakdown, particularly during the period under study here. For this reason, I focus on the repair and maintenance of telephone subscriber equipment, in other words the technological instruments people used to make a telephone call: the telephone sets and private branch exchanges (PBXs) that were installed in residences and offices in Canada's urban centres. While Bell operating companies famously documented and quantified almost every aspect of their operations after the adoption of Scientific Management methods in the 1920s, information on Bell Canada's early repair and maintenance practices was more difficult to find and had to be gleaned from references in contracts, meeting minutes, and internal correspondence. The most fortuitous and useful source of information was a set of oral interviews conducted with retired repair workers who worked in Bell Canada's Telephone Contract Division at different times between 1907 and 1983. These interviews provide rare insight into the work of repairing telephones and the working lives of telephone repairmen that, like telephone use itself, are typically considered too mundane to warrant documentation. By looking at conditions on the ground through the accounts of those Bell employees most directly involved in the maintenance and repair of telephone equipment, this chapter contributes to the project proposed by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel to "knit together stories and anecdotes – microhistories, if you will – into an overarching narrative of maintenance".5 This narrative is valuable, in and of itself, for what it tells us about technologies-in-use and the myriad ways that technologies were integrated into modern societies.

Furthermore, I suggest that understanding the historical role of maintenance and repair in the telephone industry is especially important today, for the insights it offers into the persistence of technology in the pre-liberalised telephone industry and beyond. Owning and leasing its telephones, and making significant investments in the maintenance, repair, and reuse of its equipment, allowed Bell to expand its networks and, most importantly, to safeguard its monopoly, during times when telephones were in short supply or when technological components malfunctioned. In turn, it can be argued that Bell Canada's monopoly status provided the conditions that made the integration of maintenance and repair in its operations both possible and logical. It is notable, though, that AT&T and Bell Canada chose to expand and rationalise their maintenance and repair operations in the mid-1920s, the same period that the majority of North American manufacturers embraced planned obsolescence. Key to making sense of this decision was

5 Russell, Andrew L./Vinsel, Lee: "After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance", in: Technology and Culture 59, 1 (2018), p. 1–25, here p. 7.

the associated companies' conception of the telephone as a technology and a utility rather than a commodity. This distinction made the maintenance and repair of telephone technology, or its persistence, a central concern of telephone operations. The telephone industry's valorisation of technology's persistence is instructive, especially when considered in the context of the present environmental crisis, to which the mass disposal of telecommunications devices contributes. Documenting the essential role played by repair and reuse in this modern technological industry helps to demonstrate that there was nothing natural or inevitable about 20th-century capitalism's embrace of obsolescence and disposability, and perhaps offers a means to imagine new ways of thinking about technological devices and their users.

#### **MAINTAINING THE "TELEPHONE PLANT"**

During the first 100 years of telephone service, Bell Canada, like AT&T, owned not only its systems' cables and wires, switchboards and central exchanges, and the public telephones found in city streets and inside stores, hotels, train and bus stations; it also owned the private telephones used by its residential and business subscribers. Altogether this technological apparatus – from the cables and wires to the telephones installed in homes and offices – made up what the Bell companies called their "telephone plant", a single operational entity that they owned, managed and maintained.

The affiliated Bell companies' conception of the "telephone plant" – with the telephone set imagined as just one component of the larger telephone system, and not a product, appliance or commodity – is significant for historians of technology because it distinguishes them from other utility companies and helps to explain why the repair and maintenance of subscriber sets was critical to the operations of the Bell telephone companies. Most utility companies – electric and gas companies, for example – provided services but did not manufacture or own the lamps, stoves and furnaces that their subscribers used. Since the consumers of these utilities purchased and owned their lamps, stoves and furnaces, it followed that it was their responsibility to maintain, repair or replace them as they saw fit. The condition of any one customer's technical devices was of little concern to a utility company because it did not affect the operation of its larger system. This was not the case with the telephone system, however, because subscribers using inferior telephone sets would experience inferior service and so would anyone they were calling.

Retaining ownership of and responsibility for the telephone set, and leasing it to Bell subscribers, was an early and strategic decision. It gave the Bell companies a degree of control over the technical and political problems associated with maintaining both the telephone system and their monopoly status. Bell Canada was granted a monopoly in 1882 by the federal government by arguing that its telephone service was "a work for the greater advantage of Canada".6 Government support for Bell's monopoly rested on the company's argument that single ownership was the only way to guarantee quality of service across the entire telephone system, and so subscribers complaining of inferior service could threaten Bell's monopoly. By providing them with telephone sets that met its technical standards, Bell was able to ensure the quality of service and meet its government-imposed mandate. Ownership of "the entire plant" also allowed Bell to control the pace of technological change, and thereby to avoid the early obsolescence of equipment by introducing new technologies or components only when it was financially advantageous to do so. The leasing system also allowed Bell to monitor and maintain the quality of its telephone sets. Under Bell's leasing arrangements, when subscribers cancelled their service or moved, their telephone set would be disconnected and removed. All disconnected telephones were returned to Bell's storerooms, where they were inspected and repaired or reconditioned. Worn parts would be replaced, technical components that had become obsolete would be updated and the telephone's appearance would be refreshed if necessary, its casing polished and new telephone cords fitted.

As a consequence of the political and technological arrangements of both AT&T and Bell Canada, their telephones were manufactured to distinctive criteria. Unlike manufacturers of lamps, stoves and furnaces, for whom consumer preferences and popular style trends were key factors in company decisionmaking, the affiliated Bell companies' overriding concern was that the technological instruments and components that made up its telephone plant, including subscriber sets, should be long-lived, durable and repairable.

#### **INTEGRATING MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR**

At the turn of the century, the North American telephone network was still a work in progress and the telephone industry was far less organised than it would

6 Armstrong, Christopher/Nelles, H. V.: Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1986, p. 72.

become by the mid-1920s. Bell's 1885 attempt to stave off competition by buying up independent competitors and attempting to build a long-distance network left it chronically undercapitalised, just as demand for telephone service was beginning to grow. The rising demand for telephone service was a mixed blessing for Bell. More subscribers meant more revenue but also more expenditure on new central offices and new equipment. At this time, Bell purchased its telephones from a number of manufacturers (including Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of its American counterpart AT&T), but telephone manufacturers were unable to produce enough telephones and switchboards to satisfy demand. 7 Bell's repair operations provided it with the ability to (almost) keep up with demand, as well as giving it a degree of control over the costs and quality of equipment. The great demand for telephone service – and the difficulty meeting it – was a concern that reached the highest offices at Bell. In 1882, Bell's vice president wrote to the manager of the Ontario division enquiring about unused equipment that appeared in his inventory report: "Are these out of order? If so, you can ship them here [to Montréal], and we will repair them. We wish to put all this old material in order, that we may be able to utilize it as much as possible."8 Any telephones that could be repaired were, so that they could be put into service.

The minutes of a meeting of Bell's senior officers and agents held in May 1887 demonstrated both the company's understanding of the importance of maintenance and repair and the nascent state of the telephone industry at that moment. Decisions about who would do the work of inspection, maintenance and repair and how it was to be done were still unresolved. The need to establish a system of inspection, whereby an inspector would be employed to visit central exchanges and inspect the equipment on a regular basis, was identified, but there was little agreement on whether this person should also be expected to do repair work. It was initially proposed that inspectors should only carry out inspections – that is, they should be separate from repair work, with Bell's vice president and managing director noting that inspectors should not be put in the position of inspecting repairs that they had made in the past. One district manager countered

7 The number of Bell subscribers in Québec and Ontario grew eight-fold between 1906 and 1929, from 95,145 to 761,456. See Mussio, Laurence B.: Becoming Bell, Montréal: Bell Canada Enterprises 2005, p. 40. The number of telephones in service in Canada grew rapidly between 1920 and 1930, from 856,000 in 1920 to 1,403,000 in 1930. Armstrong/Nelles: Monopoly's Moment, p. 295.

8 Memo from C. F. Sise, Vice President, to Hugh C. Baker, Manager, 12 Jan. 1882. Bell Canada Archives (henceforth BCA), Repair Service, Subject file: Correspondence 1882.

that Bell should purposely seek out agents capable of doing both their own inspections and repairs, while another proposed that the inspector "should be a sort of travelling repairer". Yet another agent suggested that, in smaller offices, telephone operators might also be trained in repair work. 9 The meeting yielded no conclusive agreement about how the company should organise inspection and repair work, thus leaving managers and agents to continue making their own judgements about how best to maintain their telephone equipment.

Nevertheless, evidence of Bell's desire to develop systems of quality control over its operations can be seen in these discussions.10 An important step in this direction took place in 1895, when Bell established its own manufacturing subsidiary, Northern Electric, to build and repair telephones for its system as well as for independent telephone companies. In September 1912, Bell Canada and Northern Electric formalised their relationship by signing an agreement that established what would come to be known as the "Telephone Contract Division". It designated Northern Electric as Bell Canada's agent responsible for procuring "by manufacture, purchase or otherwise … any apparatus, supplies, or materials" that the telephone company might require. The term "otherwise" undoubtedly referred to repair work: "Operating a local repair and emergency shop" was notable on the list of the new division's responsibilities.11 The growing demand for telephone service exceeded the production capacity of Northern Electric and that of independent manufacturers as well. By repairing and reusing telephones that it already owned, Bell was able to fill more subscribers' orders and continue to expand its network.

9 Minutes of a meeting of the officers and principal agents of the Bell Telephone Co. of Canada, Montréal, 16 May 1887, BCA, B-26606, p. 4–5.

10 Paul J. Miranti describes how the Bell System's efforts to "certify the reliability of its equipment and to provide economical service" between 1877 and 1929 provided the "learning" that resulted in the gradual development of an "organizational structure for coordinating and controlling quality assurance activities at both the staff and line levels and between the corporate elements of the Bell System". Miranti, Paul J.: "Corporate Learning and Quality Control at the Bell System, 1877–1929", in: Business History Review 79 (2005), p. 39–72, here p. 39. Although Miranti focuses on Bell's US operations, similar processes and systems were implemented by Bell Canada. Miranti does not address the roles played by repair and maintenance in the development of systemic quality assurance, but their importance can be easily drawn out from his account. See ibid.

11 Agreement between the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Limited and the Bell Telephone Company of Canada Limited, 10 Sep. 1912, BCA, B-21121-S contract 1912.

As the number of telephones in service grew over the first decades of the 20th century, the need for workers to repair and maintain the telephone plant grew, too. While the 1912 agreement had identified telephone repair as an integral part of Bell's operations, the actual work of repair remained an ad hoc practice for some years, as Bell struggled to meet demand and maintain service quality. Northern Electric's manufacturing activities were consolidated in a single building in Montréal in 1912, but Bell continued to operate local storerooms and repair workshops (including in Toronto and Montréal) until 1925 and 1929, when Distribution Houses were built in both cities.

### **EARLY MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR PRACTICES AT BELL CANADA**

While there are few records of Bell's repair operations prior to 1925, a series of interviews conducted in 1968 with retired Bell repairmen have proven to be invaluable sources of information about that under-documented period (and beyond). Employed over the period between 1907 and 1966 in Bell's Toronto Plant Department, they offer insights into the day-to-day routines of repairmen and how the role and practices of repair changed as the company grew.

The interviewees were all hired between the years 1907 and 1925, a period when high demand for telephone service coincided with wartime labour shortages. They describe Bell's hiring practices as being relatively informal – each of them recalled being recruited by neighbours and relatives who were Bell employees, and it seems that Bell's workshop supervisors had the authority to hire workers directly. Each of the men was hired without previous experience doing telephone work, which was not unusual given the relative newness of the industry. A job at Bell was seen as offering good, steady, dependable work. George Dumbleton, who appears to have been in his very early teens when he was hired in 1907, spent the first 18 months on the job "cleaning sets", "repairing receivers" and "doing odd jobs around the Storeroom" before he was transferred to work in installations, and then moved on to work in repairs.12 His long sojourn in the storeroom was likely due to his young age. Harald Judson, who was in his early

12 George L. Dumbleton. Interviewed by A. Barwell. Life Story. Toronto, 8 Dec. 1967. BCA, Bio-file: G. L. Dumbleton. Dumbleton talks about preparing for the Owen Sound cut-over, which took place in 1959, and then goes on to describe working for a number of years after that, so he likely retired in c. 1960. If he was 14 years old in 1907, and he worked until 1960, he would have retired at 68 years of age.

20s when he joined Bell in 1922, also started as a storekeeper (at \$0.35 an hour) but only stayed there for six months before being moved into installation work.13 "Ted" Eames was hired in his mid-20s and was assigned to installations from the start, but only worked there for six months before being transferred to repair work.14 According to Judson, installation work was "a young man's game, lots of speed, and go, go, go" and moving to repair work was seen as a step up, but the boundaries between installation and repair during these years were fairly permeable. While Dumbleton and Eames remained working in repairs once they were transferred, Judson described being reassigned to installation work at various times in his career when the need arose.

The repair shops operated on an apprenticeship model: new employees received their training in telephone repair and maintenance on the job from more experienced workers. If installation work was a "young man's game", repair work was the purview of a more diverse group of workers. Judson recalled that one of the three senior men who worked exclusively repairing and testing subscriber equipment was a war amputee, one of a number of veterans who found work at Bell after the First World War ended. Another, a part-time employee, was "an odd type" but "a magnificent pianist", who Judson believed was hired so that he could play in the Bell Telephone Orchestra.

Like the telephone industry itself, Bell's on-the-ground operations of installation and repair appear to have been somewhat informally organised during the first decades of the 20th century. Bell's Toronto repair workshop was housed in its Elm Street Storehouse, a former garage located in the downtown district. It is possible but unlikely that Bell owned the property; it appears that during this period Bell leased both the buildings and the services it used on an as-needed basis. Dumbleton, who worked at this site, reported that materials used by the repair shop were delivered to the Elm Street site by a "horse and waggon" leased from "Mr. Walsh on Queen St.". Installation crews and their equipment were also transported this way. Bell repairmen, on the other hand, were left to arrange their own means of getting to and from their job sites. The Church Street Storeroom where Judson worked was located in an old church that had been converted into a boxing gym. Bell rented part of the church for its storehouse and it seems that

13 Harald Dowson Judson. Interviewed by F. F. Pendock. Life Story. Toronto, 17 Sep. 1968. BCA, Bio-file: Harald Dowson Judson.

14 Edward (Ted) J. Eames. Interviewed by A. Barwell. Life Story. Toronto, 7 Feb. 1968. BCA, Bio-file: Edward (Ted) J. Eames.

much of the district's subscriber equipment – telephone sets and some PBXs – was repaired here.15

During these years, repair work took place at the repair workshops, at the homes of residential subscribers, and on site at the locations of Bell's commercial subscribers. Repair work that took place in the workshops typically involved repairing and reconditioning telephone sets and smaller PBXs that Bell retrieved when subscribers cancelled their service or moved. Judson explained that repairs to "the simple sets of that era" – 1293 wall sets, D020 desk stands, 295A bell boxes and 1294 wall sets – were straightforward: "[w]e changed hook switches, receivers, transmitters, cords, etc." Once repaired or reconditioned, these telephones could then be picked up by the installation men to be connected at a new location. Even with repaired telephones augmenting Bell's stock, Judson recalled that during this period the storehouses "were [often] very short of sets and installers would come in waiting for them". Judson also recalls that the shortage of telephones was often matched by a shortage of installers. He remembered that sometimes "sets" delivered to homes and offices "might be there for a couple of months before an installer came around to connect them up. Sometimes, by the time the installer got there the people who ordered the phone, had gone". 16 The shortage of workers – and the growing demand for telephone service – was likely the reason that some plant employees worked in both repairs and installations over their careers.

Bell repairmen were also sent to the homes and offices of subscribers to fix telephones that had malfunctioned. While Bell leased trucks when it needed to move materials or deliver equipment, repair workers were responsible for getting themselves and their tools to and from their work sites. Eames recalled that repairmen working in Toronto "either walked to the job or rode a bicycle. The Company paid us \$5.00 a month for the use of our own bicycle. You would put your tools on the back, your wire etc. on the handlebars and either rode or pushed it to the job."17 This was manageable if they were assigned to work in their home district; otherwise repair workers used public transit to get to the job site. Toronto was informally divided into West, Central and East districts – but

17 Eames, p. 4.

15 There is some discrepancy between the accounts of Dumbleton and Judson as to whether the Elm Street Storehouse or the Church Street Storehouse was Bell's first repair shop in Toronto, and whether one replaced the other or both operated simultaneously. The two sites are located no more than 1.5 km apart, approximately a 15–20 minute walk.

16 All quotes Judson, p. 2.

Bell's installation and repair operations were not organised by district at this time. Job orders were sent out from a centralised dispatch office in the downtown district and the repairmen could be sent anywhere in the Toronto territory. Judson, who worked primarily on residential installations and repairs, recalled that this sometimes resulted in workers spending much of their time commuting, not always productively, from job site to job site.

"If you were out in the West and called in, you might be dispatched to the East End and have to pedal all the way across Toronto.... When you got down there the people might be out [and you might then be] sent up [to the north end of town]."18

Repair workers tried to make any necessary repairs they could at the subscriber's location, both in order to save a return trip and because of the scarce supply of replacement sets. "If there was anything wrong with the telephone and it had to be changed, it was quite a job to get a new one. What we used to do was come into the garage at night, look over the telephones recovered by the installation that day and if they looked to be good, those [were] the ones that went into the subscriber's premises the next day." 19 Telephones returned from one subscriber's home or office were quickly pressed into service for the next, as demand outpaced production capacity.

According to Eames, the technologically simple telephone instruments of the period were relatively easy to repair.

"[Most] had an old 323 transmitter that used to get packed every once in a while. So we would undo the screws, loosen the button, give it a twirl with a thumb and put it back together again, perhaps blow into it a couple of times, and most of the time it would make it work all right."20

His account suggests that repair work often relied as much on creative improvisation as on technical skill.

"The diaphragm [of 122 or 144 type receivers] used to get rusty and you could fix that by taking it out, dusting it on the seat of your pants and then putting it back into the receiver. You would tell the subscriber that it was all right now, she would call a friend and then

18 Judson, p. 3.

19 Eames, p. 4–5.

20 Ibid., p. 6.

usually tell you that it was now just 'wonderful'. That would be the extent of many repairs on telephones."21

While all three repairmen downplayed the degree of technical skill required to repair residential subscriber equipment, each of their accounts reflects an awareness of the importance of maintaining good relations with subscribers.

Eames described residential repairs as typically routine, but recalled having a bad experience when a subscriber falsely accused him of taking her purse and "[didn't do] much apologizing" when she later found it.22 Eames found residential repairs neither interesting nor challenging. He was happy when he was sent to work with Bell's business subscribers in Toronto's downtown district, where he was able to maintain and repair a wider range of telephone equipment, including switchboards. Judson, on the other hand, enjoyed the variety and sociability of residential repair work, noting that "there [was] something different all the [time] as no two jobs [were] alike". He observed that it was the nature of repair work that repairmen had to deal with subscribers who were not at their best. "Our reception [by the subscriber] was not always good with the phone out of order. However on installation, if they [had] been waiting a long time for a phone, your reception [was] no better. There is a great sameness about installation and a great variety on repair."23 Apparently, the varied jobs Bell's residential installation and repair workers were called on to do included rescuing cats that climbed up telephone poles and couldn't find a way down. Eames described the established protocol for accomplishing this job without sustaining injuries as wearing a heavy coat, making sure to turn up the collar, climbing up the pole and waiting for the cat to jump on one's shoulder, and then climbing back down, at which point the cat would typically make its happy escape. He claimed to have successfully rescued many cats this way without receiving a scratch.24

Senior and more skilled workers were typically assigned to the repair and maintenance work done on site for Bell's larger commercial subscribers, such as

24 Eames, p. 6–7.

21 Ibid. In his ethnographic study of the field service work performed by Xerox technicians, Julian Orr notes that technicians considered the maintenance of good relations with their customers as being just as important as the maintenance of the machines. He describes how maintaining this "triangular relationship of service" between technicians, customers and machines allowed technicians to establish an image of authority and professionalism. Orr, Julian: Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, Ithaca: ILR/Cornell University Press 1996, p. 78–79.

22 Eames, p. 5.

23 Both quotes Judson, p. 5.

hotels, department stores, and railway stations. This work could include repairing any malfunctioning telephone sets, but primarily involved keeping the switchboards of commercial subscribers in good working order. Maintaining PBXs required a greater degree of technical expertise and these assignments were viewed as a sign of an employee's greater reliability and superior skills, and therefore higher status. Dumbleton explained that when he "graduated" from repairing sets, he spent several years assigned to the maintenance of switchboards for both Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railways at Toronto's Union Station, and then did similar work at the King Edward Hotel.25 Two of the three interviewees described having worked at Eaton's, Canada largest department store, installing and maintaining the switchboards and "order tables" that were required for its business and telephone sales operations (fig. 2). 26 Eames' description of the repair work he did in the downtown district in the 1920s demonstrates both the rudimentary nature of the era's telephone technology and the degree to which ongoing maintenance and repair were critically important to its proper functioning. Many downtown businesses and offices were fitted with 550- and 551-type switchboards, "most of which were battery [fed] from central offices on cable pairs with varying loads. The voltages used to go up and down like a yo-yo. Subscribers had much trouble with this and to overcome this the first thing [Bell] did was to send out a reconditioning crew to current flow all the relays." Apparently, the problems with these switchboards were not easily resolved: Eames noted that "[s]ome of the men did that [work] for months and months".27 Eames estimated that, in order to ensure a reliable telephone service for its business subscribers, Bell had approximately 60 men working in repair and maintenance at this time in the Toronto downtown area alone.

By virtue of the fact that Bell's commercial subscribers required regular service and maintenance, repairmen sometimes found themselves playing a policing role for Bell. Dumbleton described discovering "buckshee" (or "free") connections on his service calls.

"One day ... I was repairing one phone and from my position could see another three or four phones around me. I heard someone talking but could not see what phone was being used or who was using it. So I took a good look around and found that one of our exemployees had installed a Stromberg-Carlson switchboard for them and placed phones on every floor, having run a concealed wire to one of our trunks. When I disconnected their

25 Dumbleton, p. 1.

26 Eames, p. 9; Judson, p. 1.

27 Both quotes Eames, p. 8.

concealed wiring, they put up quite a fuss. Later when I checked it again I found it had been reconnected so this time I reported it ... and after some fussing around with various people we got straightened away."28

**Figure 2.** Operators working at the "order tables" at the Eaton's department store. Bell repair and maintenance workers kept switchboards such as these in good working order (Montréal, 1931, BCA, A-30147).

It is noteworthy that Dumbleton chose not to report the unauthorised connections in the first instance. Whether this was due to a reluctance to inform on a former colleague or a gesture of good faith in the business subscriber's integrity, Dumbleton clearly believed he possessed a significant degree of autonomy in his role as a repairman.

While most of Bell's commercial subscribers were businesses located in urban centres, some were located well beyond the limits of the city's public transit network and further than one could reasonably expect a repair worker to travel by bicycle. Dumbleton remembered that when he and his co-workers were sent

28 Dumbleton, p. 4.

out to make repairs at Harris' Slaughterhouse, which was located about threeand-a-half kilometres east of the city, "we had to take the streetcar [most of the way there], and then Harris would send someone with a pony and gig to take us the rest of the way".29 When they were dispatched to do repair work at Taylor's Farm, located to the northeast of Toronto, "we had to take a train so far and then hike it the rest of the way". 30 Judson described the lengthy journey he had to make when he was sent up to do repairs at the Langstaff Jail Farm, approximately 25 km north of the city: he had to pedal up to the north edge of the city, "leave my bicycle there, and take the Radial Car [suburban railway] from there. One of the boys at the prison farm would come out to the Radial to pick [me] up and take [me] back". 31 Bell's apparent lack of concern about the inefficient use of its workers' time underscores the importance it placed on keeping its service in good working order and its subscribers happy. It speaks, too, of Bell's expanding network and the growing ubiquity of telephone service among Canada's urban and suburban populations.

## **RATIONALISING TELEPHONE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR**

As Bell reorganised its operations according to the principles of Scientific Management, new cadres of professional managers, often engineers, began to oversee and then replace the foremen who had been responsible for running the storerooms and workshops.32 Repair work moved from Bell and Northern Electric's workshops to new modern purpose-built facilities. The new Toronto Telephone Distribution House was erected in October 1925, and its Repair Department opened in the autumn of 1926.33 Montréal's Telephone Distribution House was completed in early 1929, with its Repair Department installed in February of that same year.34 While the apprentice model of on-the-job training for novice telephone repair workers continued, it was shaped and supplemented by courses

29 Dumbleton, p. 5.

30 Ibid., p. 5.

31 Judson, p. 4.

32 Miranti, "Corporate Learning", p.46 and 48.

33 Telephone Distributing House Premises–Toronto (1925), BCA, Northern Electric Historical Collection, Vol. 4, #10791.

34 Telephone Distributing House Premises–Montréal (1929), BCA, Northern Electric Historical Collection, Vol. 4, #10508.

that were mandatory for both new and experienced workers.35 Dumbleton recalled taking and enjoying "several of the courses", as did Judson.36 Eames described the implementation of weekly meetings at this time. Led by the Repair Department manager and foreman, the meetings were designed to keep employees informed of technical advances and changes and to convey job safety guidelines and procedures.37

Another effect of Bell's adoption of Scientific Management methods was a sharp increase in the production and circulation of information about Bell's and Northern Electric's operations. In addition to thorough documentation on operational activities and finances in their internal communications, both companies also introduced publications aimed at keeping employees – and, in the case of Bell, its subscribers as well – informed about new developments.38 Whereas it was difficult to find information about Bell's repair and maintenance practices prior to the mid-1920s, by the 1930s, feature articles in these new publications offered detailed accounts and photo documentation on repair operations in the Toronto and Montréal Distribution Houses (fig. 3).

According to a 1938 article in Bell Canada's *Blue Bell* magazine, each Distribution House contained a warehouse, a repair shop, and a company garage that housed a fleet of 100-plus trucks used to pick up returned materials.39 It portrays repair operations at the Distribution Houses as fully routinised, with repair shop workrooms that were modelled on laboratories: orderly, clean and well lit, with fully-equipped work benches. It details the journey that "returned" telephones took from their arrival at the Distribution House through the assessment process that determine whether they would be "junked" or sent to the Repair Shop. Returned telephones deemed worthy of repair were sorted again in the Repair Shop

35 Dumbleton was one of the repairmen who were often assigned to train new employees. In his interview, he recalled that during this period there were "two years steady [when] I don't think there was a week without having someone with me to train.  Dumbleton, p. 4.

36 Ibid.; Judson, p. 5.

37 Eames, p. 8–9.

38 For example, Bell began publishing Blue Bell magazine in 1921 to keep its employees informed about new developments and company social events. Northern Electric began publishing its employee magazine, Northern Electric News, in 1927. Bell also began publication of a circular called Telephone News in 1934 to inform subscribers of new developments and proper telephone etiquette.

39 Telephone Repair Shops, Blue Bell, (Jun. 1938), p. 16–18.

according to the types of repair needed, before being repaired, tested, then packaged and sent to the warehouse to await future installation.40

**Figure 3.** "Alvin Keith checks a consignment of miscellaneous material and equipment sent from the Bell Telephone distributing room to the returned material department or the Northern Electric Company on Shaw Street." (Image and caption appeared in Blue Bell, Bell Canada's employee magazine, Oct. 1942, BCA, A-38716-01)

The 1938 article is significant in that it provides a careful account of the volume and value of Bell's repair operations – information that could be inferred from earlier documents but not confirmed. The article reported that the telephone apparatus returned to the Toronto and Montréal repair shops in 1937 had included: 173,000 telephones, 74,000 bell boxes, 460 PBX switchboards and 670 telephone booths, with an estimated total value of C\$4,676,000. Of the total number of returned apparatus, 152,000 telephones, 62,000 bell boxes, 304 PBX switch boards, and 548 booths (or 65 to 85% of the devices) were repaired and/or reconditioned, and moved into storage at the Telephone Contract Division's warehouses, ready to be put back into service. According to the article, the recuperat-

40 Telephone Repair Shops, p. 16.

ed value of the repaired apparatus was C\$3,834,320 at a cost of C\$748,160 for parts and labour.41 To put this into perspective, Bell's repair operations yielded more than C\$3,000,000 of recuperated value in a year when Bell's reported operating balance was C\$12,519,975.55.42

**Figure 4.** "These [wall sets] have been repaired and reconditioned and are being cleaned before being refinished. The Cleaners are left to right, John Wilkinson, Gordon Hann and James Dunn." (Image and caption appeared in Blue Bell, Bell Canada's employee magazine, Oct.1942, BCA, A-38716-04)

The representation of the value of repair and maintenance in this article – and in similar articles and reports that followed in the 1940s and 1950s – is both a demonstration and an effect of Scientific Management's influence on the operations of Bell and Northern Electric's Telephone Contract Division beginning in the 1920s. While these later records offer detailed descriptions of the *fiscal* value of repair and maintenance to Bell's operations, evidence of Bell's recognition of the *instrumental* value can be inferred from its integration of repair and mainte-

41 Telephone Repair Shops, p. 18.

42 Bell Telephone Company of Canada Annual Report, 1937.

nance in its earliest conception of its telephone business. By recuperating, repairing and reconditioning, rather than replacing, its telephone sets and equipment, Bell's repair operations proved to be an important factor in the company's ability to manage costs, meet demand for service, and monitor and maintain acceptable levels of technological quality (fig. 4).

#### **CONCLUSION**

The accounts of the Bell Canada employees offer insights into the day-to-day routines and experiences of telephone repair work in Canada's largest cities during a period for which little documentation exists. Repair work was perceived by these employees as being of higher status than installing telephones, requiring technical knowledge and resourcefulness as well as social skills. They recognised and seemed to enjoy the fact that they possessed a degree of independence that was greater than other workers in the Plant Department. Taken together, the recollections of the repairmen show repair work to have been a necessary and integral component of the telephone as a technology-in-use, which literally ensured that telephones and the telephone network could be "used". They describe how Bell's early telephone repair and maintenance operations not only ensured that the telephone system functioned properly; they also acted as a stopgap that allowed the company to both meet subscriber demand and bridge intermittent shortages of equipment and workers. Just as importantly, they also describe how the practices and role of repair changed over the course of their careers, with the introduction in the 1920s of more systemic organisation and management across all Bell System operations, including those of its Canadian branches, Bell Canada and Northern Electric.43