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• 1 2017-07-20T08:57:20-07:00 Corporate Connections 13 plain 2017-10-07T09:12:39-07:00 After the Civil War, American businesses began to consolidate into larger and more complicated organizational forms. In many industries, like railroads and steel production, owners discovered that there were advantages to be realized by integrating the many different aspects of their business – extraction, transportation, manufacturing, and marketing, for example – into one corporate unit. Doing this successfully often required developing new ways of visualizing industrial processes and mapping the lines of communication between far-flung managers, offices, and departments.
   
  Business charts became an important technology of corporate integration. These graphics were not merely technical, however. They told a story about how individual corporations functioned. Note how over time, the connections they depicted became more directional and self-contained, presenting the large firm as a complex machine with interlocking parts in constant motion. Consider the myriad purposes such presentations served - clarifying relationships between different corporate actors, yet also conveying to investors, regulators, and the general public a vision of stability and coherence. Indeed, as corporations stretched themselves across the national canvas, these charts began to tell a story about the rational workings of the economy generally. Economic events in one place – a spike in Texas oil prices or a dip in New York employment – could be understood as the consequence of a subtler disruption earlier along the pathway of a tangled but ultimately logical economic chain.
  
  
   
• 1 2017-07-12T09:18:28-07:00 Early Corporate Charts 11 Version 1 gallery 2017-07-13T06:53:58-07:00 As corporations became larger and more complicated after the Civil War, new ways of seeing them became necessary. Some firms, like the Erie Railroad Corporation, had dabbled in images to explain the organization of their firms, and as their tree-like plan illustrates, could be creative and even artistic in their representations. But as demand grew, charts depicting corporate organization became more standardized. As the images from postbellum decades show, corporate charts became more linear, directional, and internally-focused than earlier attempts. They were designed to explain to the many members of an individual firm, who no longer necessarily knew each other personally, what the other parts of the company were doing, and where their own department fit in the chain of production. They presented the modern corporation as a machine, with its interlocking parts constantly in motion.
  
• 1 2017-07-13T06:57:38-07:00 Early Corporate Charts 3 Version 2 plain 2017-07-13T07:00:18-07:00

  As corporations became larger and more complicated after the Civil War, new ways of seeing them became necessary. Some firms, like the Erie Railroad Corporation, had dabbled in images to explain the organization of their firms, and as their tree-like plan illustrates, could be creative and even artistic in their representations. But as demand grew, charts depicting corporate organization became more standardized. As the images from postbellum decades show, corporate charts became more linear, directional, and internally-focused than earlier attempts. They were designed to explain to the many members of an individual firm, who no longer necessarily knew each other personally, what the other parts of the company were doing, and where their own department fit in the chain of production. They presented the modern corporation as a machine, with its interlocking parts constantly in motion.