C-3s and Model Ts: The Machines behind Two Lovely Farewells

Abstract

B. F. Skinner’s 1976 editorial “Farewell my LOVELY,” eulogizing the passing of the cumulative record as a primary form of data analysis, borrowed its title from a 1936 E. B. White essay of the same name. In it, White, a well-known 20^th century essayist and children’s book author, eulogized the Model T Ford. This article considers the parallels between the machine behind the cumulative record—the cumulative recorder—and White’s Model T. The cumulative recorder considered for comparison is the Ralph Gerbrands Company Model C-3, widely considered by scientists of the time to be the best of the cumulative recorders that proliferated between the 1950s and the 1990s. On a much more modest scale, the C-3 became as popular, visible, distinct, and important in research laboratories devoted, but not limited, to the experimental analysis of behavior as was the Model T on the roads of early 20^th century America. Not only were there parallels in manufacture and marketing, but, more importantly, in reliability, durability and ease of function of these two machines that changed the respective practices and culture of behavioral psychology and the world.

In 1976, B. F. Skinner penned “Farewell, my LOVELY,” an editorial on the demise of cumulative records. In it he “expressed a . . . nostalgic longing for curves that were curved” (Skinner, 1983, p. 362) and especially for the research that yielded the kinds of transitional behavioral effects such cumulative records reveal. Skinner is well-known for literary allusion in his writings, perhaps most famously the title of his utopian novel, Walden Two (Skinner, 1948). Two of his most important books, Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953) and Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957), are sprinkled liberally with quotations from and references to famous literary works from the Greeks through Shakespeare to Rousseau. The title of his editorial,1 as he noted in his autobiography (Skinner, 1983), was borrowed from a New Yorker magazine article of the same title written in 1936 by E. B. White (1899–1995). White was a celebrated American essayist and author of several children’s books, including Stuart Little (White, 1945) and Charlotte’s Web (White, 1952). He also was, from the 1959 edition on, coauthor with William Strunk (1869–1946) of the well-known writing guide, The Elements of Style (Strunk & White, 1959).

In the editorial, Skinner (1976) suggested that “we have not long to wait for an issue of JEAB [Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior] without a single cumulative record” (p. 218). Poling (1979) illustrated the decline with a graph showing a negatively decelerating function of the relation between cumulative records per page of JEAB and year of publication from 1958 to 1979. Kangas and Cassidy (2011) thereafter summarized the further demise of the cumulative record as means of data analysis, showing that by 2010, cumulative records rarely appeared in any issue of JEAB. Despite their absence in JEAB articles, cumulative records remain today an exceptionally useful tool for showing the kinds of changes Skinner (1976) discussed: “a quick and comprehensive look at the fine grain of . . . behavior” (p. 218).

White’s original “Farewell, my lovely” was a eulogy for the Model T Ford, which was last manufactured in 1927, some 9 years before his fond farewell. Skinner’s title selection was apropos in that both authors celebrated the demise of a cultural icon. The Model T was the first commercially successful automobile manufactured in the United States (beginning in 1908). Not only the Model T, but also Ford’s innovations for its manufacture—most notable was the assembly line—forever changed not only American life, but world life. In a related, albeit more modest, way, Skinner’s cumulative record also changed a culture—that of psychology. The latter changed the focus of the study of behavior, as he outlined in his editorial, toward the fine-grained analysis of responding of individual subjects in real time.

There is, however, a missing element in the analogy between a Model T and a cumulative record. The Model T is a machine and the cumulative record is a product of a machine. Perhaps a closer analogy is to the machine that produced the cumulative records, the cumulative recorder, which was not mentioned by Skinner (1976). The purpose of this article is to examine parallels between the subject of White’s farewell and the most widely used version of the cumulative recorder, the Ralph Gerbrands Company Model C-3 (see Fig. 1), thus a machine-to-machine comparison.

Fig. 1.

A Ralph Gerbrands Company Model C-3 on the left and a 1919 Model T Ford Runabout on the right (not to scale)

The Emergence of the C-3

The cumulative record was a way of representing responses in real time, thereby revealing how such responding changed moment-to-moment as the conditions controlling the behavior changed. It constructed a cumulative graph of responses in real time by releasing recording paper at a constant rate (the x-axis of the graph) while at the same time incrementing with each response a recording pen along the y-axis. If no responding occurred, then there was a flat line across time. The higher the rate of responding, the steeper the slope of the line along the y-axis. Until the mid-1990s, it was a standard machine in virtually every operant conditioning laboratory in the world. Skinner (1956, 1979; see also Lattal, 2004) described several early attempts to develop a reliable cumulative recorder. His quest was, to paraphrase an expression out of context of the character Frazier from his Utopian novel, Walden Two (Skinner, 1948), to have the recorder “behave as it ought,” with consistency and reliability. After Skinner’s development of the early means of cumulative recording, many subsequent iterations of the recorder were fabricated by Harvard’s apparatus guru, Ralph Gerbrands. He began working as an apparatus designer and fabricator at Harvard University in 1929. Soon thereafter, he established what became a well-regarded company that manufactured scientific equipment for use in experimental psychology and, especially, operant conditioning experiments. The C-3 was one of a series of cumulative recorders fabricated by the Gerbrands Company. That company’s underwriting of JEAB through its paid advertising was a significant source of support from the journal’s inception in 1958 until the Gerbrands Company closed its doors in the mid-1990s (Dinsmoor, 1987). Gerbrands retired at age 78 and turned over the Company’s management to two long-term employees who kept the company going until it was closed in 1994, perhaps in part because it failed to adapt to the rapidly expanding use of digital computers in the operant laboratory. Born in 1905, Ralph Gerbrands died in 2005, having lived a full century.

After two earlier commercially successful models of the cumulative recorder, the C-1 and C-2, Gerbrands introduced the C-3 in 1961. The C-3 had the longest “run” of any of Gerbrands’s models, from its inception until 1989, when the Model C-4 was introduced. The latter ended a 28-year production period, 8 years longer than the life of the Model T. Along the way, the C-3 was supplemented with a model C-3 S, which operated on steady state as opposed to electromechanical technology. Data provided by Dinsmoor (1987) suggest that 4,526 cumulative recorders, mostly C-3s, were manufactured and sold between 1955 and 1969. Although cumulative recorder manufacturers and models proliferated during their halcyon days (Lattal, 2004), the C-3 stood beak and wing above its commercial competitors. As Ford’s Model T changed the American cultural landscape in irreversible ways (White [1936] said that “to a few million people who grew up with it, the [Model T] practically was the American scene” [para. 12]), Gerbrands’s C-3 likewise changed and was a significant part of the behavior-analytic landscape.

White (1936) described the Model T as “the Miracle God had wrought. . . . [I]t was hard working, commonplace, heroic. . .” (para. 2). The C-3 had a well-deserved reputation among researchers as the most reliable and durable of all of the commercial cumulative recorders. It was by far the most widely used such device, the one to which everyone who could afford one turned and for which those who could not afford one longed. Behavior analysts enamored by its performance have described the C-3 as the “Cadillac of cumulative recorders,” but perhaps a better analogy, in light of the source of Skinner’s borrowed title, would be to describe it, in the most positive sense of the Model T, as “the Model T of cumulative recorders.” I qualify the preceding description with “most positive sense” because the label “Model T” has a contemporary use which means not only old or dated, which the C-3 is, but also run-down or cheap, which the C-3 was not. The Model T, in its time, was not inexpensive ($850 in 1908, which is equivalent to $24,741 in 2021), but it was a good value. The same may be said of the C-3 (around $350 in the 1960s, which is equivalent to $3,101 in 2021). It was among the most expensive of the commercially manufactured cumulative recorders, but as noted above, in the eyes of many researchers of the time also the best.

C-3s and Model Ts

While White was writing his essay on the Model T in 1936, Skinner probably was putting the finishing touches on research that would become Behavior of Organisms (Skinner, 1938). That research was based in no small part on his analysis of the cumulative records generated by machines that he and his technicians continued to improve over the ensuing years. By the time the cumulative recorder reached its apogee in the Gerbrands Model C-3, the Model T was but a distant memory in American culture. Despite the 34 years separating the last Model T and the first C-3, many of the characteristics of the Model T described by White resonate to characteristics of the C-3. These shared characteristics of the two technological tours de force render Skinner’s choice of title for his reminiscence of the C-3’s product even more apropos.

Because the Model T was mass-produced on an assembly line, it was critical that every Model T be like every other Model T, which Henry Ford made certain to be the case. Likewise, the parts of every C-3 were interchangeable with the parts of every other C-3. Interchangeability was possible, including color. When asked what the consumer’s color choices were for the Model T, Ford once famously quipped that the consumer could have any color of Model T, “so long as it is black.” Every C-3 looked like every other C-3. Until about 1969, owners of C-3s could have their choice of any color so long as it was battleship grey and, thereafter, until the C-3 was retired, any color so long as it was a leathery brownish color (the C models were all metal—the earliest versions of the Gerbrands-fabricated cumulative recorders were housed in wooden boxes; Asano & Lattal, 2012). Because parts were interchangeable, after the C-3 was retired, many labs kept a supply of no longer operative C-3s around to be cannibalized to keep the remaining C-3s operating.

Despite its industrial sameness, every Model T took on a persona: by appearance as its body was exposed to the vicissitudes of early motoring in the United States, but also by individual car’s unique malfunctions and quirks as White so vividly described in his essay. By the same token, despite their manufactured conformity to a template, every C-3 had an individual character. Such character, however, was not because of its malfunctions and quirks. Randomly select any two C-3s, use both to record simultaneously the same response over time and the two cumulative records will be indistinguishable. Listen to those two same recorders clicking away with each successive response and whirring with every reset as they record and the sounds were as unique as a fingerprint. In a laboratory of the C-3 era, filled with the quite deafening sounds of a dozen or two C-3s, as each recorded its own assigned response it was virtually 100% likely that a given researcher could discriminate from the cacophonous din the sounds of the recorder(s) associated with his or her own experiment from all of the others. Ratio runs, switching components of multiple schedules, the end of postreinforcement pauses or sessions all came to function as auditory discriminative stimuli to the trained ear.

Model Ts, according to White (1936), were “born naked as a baby” (para. 6) so that “when you bought a Ford, you figured you had a start—a vibrant spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware” (para. 6), all of which had to be purchased separately. Functional hardware included such things as “a fan-belt guide to keep the belt from slipping off the pulley” (para. 7), a clamp-on dash light, windshield wipers, and reflectors. With only a couple of exceptions, the C-3 came fully equipped. Two items that were not included were a cable to connect the C-3 to a control panel, which, if not available, also required either construction or purchase. If these items were already available, one needed only to plug in the recorder, connect a few snap leads (Escobar & Lattal, 2014), turn on the motor for the paper driver, and begin experimenting. A few items could be purchased over the basic price, which usually were installed by the Gerbrands Company before the purchase was completed. Notable among these were event pens, which, instead of producing a cumulative record, produced a straight line along the bottom of the cumulative record that could be deflected to indicate stimulus or response events occurring in concert with whatever the cumulative response pen was recording. Gears used to govern the speed of the paper-feed motor also could be changed to produce cumulative records of different “graininess” (cf. Skinner’s [1976, p. 218] comment that much was to be said “for a quick and comprehensive look at the fine grain of the behavior in the cumulative curve”). Another item that could be added was a larger ink reservoir so that the frequent refills of the standard recording pens was reduced. A separately purchased roller also could be attached to the front of the recorder such that the seeming miles of paper on which responses were cumulated as the paper rolled past the pen could be wound up. What happened to the massive collection of cumulative responding once so wound, however, is anybody’s guess.

White (1936) pointed out that not only did Model T owners buy “ready-made gadgets, they invented gadgets to meet special needs” (para. 9). So did users of C-3s. With some ingenuity and the necessary instrumentation skills, the C-3 was modified so that instead of moving only up the cumulative recorder paper, it could reverse directions and run down the page (Hurwitz, 1961), record concurrent operants (Kulli & Bogrow, 1971), or produce histograms (Keller, 1974). The C-3 accommodated these adaptations in part because it was a freestanding instrument, not attached to the relay rack that housed the programming apparatus, allowing easy access to its mechanical workings (as compared to other commercial recorders that attached on relay racks and become covered with snap leads).

One notable feature of the Model T was its clutch: “[t]he human leg was (and still is) incapable of letting in a clutch with anything like the forthright abandon that used to send the Model T on its way” (White, 1936, para. 4). A clutch also was a notable feature of the Model C-3, and of its predecessor models:

In the C-2, the earlier C-1’s gravity-based reset mechanism was replaced by a clutch-based reset system. When the response-pen holder reached the top of the paper, a microswitch activated a solenoid. The solenoid in turn engaged a clutch that allowed the response-pen holder to be returned to the bottom of the page by a spring-driven mechanism. The latter was inspired by the device used to reset a rotary telephone dial (Morse, personal communication, October 23, 1998). (Lattal, 2004, p. 343)

Perhaps anticipating Skinner’s (1969) distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior, White (1936) noted that “[w]hatever the driver learned of his motor, he learned not through instruments but through sudden developments” (para. 13). The Model T and the C-3 came with a set of operating instructions. In both cases, however, whatever instructions were provided probably were more usefully replaced by direct contact with the contingencies of operating and repairing the machine. Model T owners included among themselves “millions of amateur witchdoctors who . . . applied their own abominable cures” (White, 1936, para. 16) when their vehicles malfunctioned. In the hands of a skilled mechanic, however, even vexing problems could be repaired with simple tools. White described how a former mechanic helped him quickly repair what initially appeared to be a terminal case of malfunction of his Model T’s rear end. By contrast, things rarely went wrong with a C-3, but when they did, as with the Model T, in general they were easily fixed. The most common malfunction was the previously described solenoid. It allowed the response pen to reset by engaging the clutch mechanism when the response pen assembly “maxed out” at around 550 responses (the value could be set manually on the C-3 and with a dial on the later model C-4), allowing the assembly to return to the starting position on the cumulative recorder paper. If left operative for too long, these solenoids overheated, rendering the reset function inoperative. Sometimes it was a matter of waiting for the solenoid to cool down, after which it spontaneously recovered its function, similar to some problems with the Model T: “There were too many authenticated cases of Fords fixing themselves—restored naturally to health after a short rest” (White, 1936, para. 14). If the solenoid required replacement, like many of the parts replacements on the Model T, it was a simple matter. A couple of wires were snipped, a new solenoid inserted, wires resoldered, and the replacement was good for several years of reliable resets of the response pen.

The primary maintenance required on the C-3 was occasionally cleaning the response pen and the rod guiding its upward nudging along the y-axis by each response. The rod over time would “gum up” and not allow the response pen to “zero out” when its reset mechanism was engaged. In such instances, the rod would have to be cleaned with alcohol and sometimes lubricated lightly with graphite (never oil, which would only exacerbate the problem by attracting dust). When its ink reservoir became low or empty, the response pen often required that a fine residue of cumulative recorder paper that had accumulated over time in the hollow pen tip be removed to allow free ink flow to the paper. Just as the hands of the amateur Model T mechanic became covered in hard-to-remove oil, it was common for the amateur response-pen cleaner to have hands and fingers deeply stained in ink for several days after wrestling those annoying paper remnants out of the tip of the pen. Such cleaning was done most effectively by filling the pen reservoir with water and then repeatedly creating a vacuum in the reservoir by pulling air through the system with one’s lips (“sucking”) and then pushing the contents in the opposite direction (“blowing”) until the obstruction was loosened and finally could be flushed from the reservoir. In the process of doing this job, the cleaner ended up with equally ink-stained lips and teeth. It may be presumed that an oil-stained mouth was not an occupational hazard of repairing a Model T.

Other-than-C-3 Connections between the Ford Motor Company and Behavior Analysis

Skinner (1948) created a fictional utopian community, Walden Two, based on his evolving system of psychology. Henry Ford created the real thing. It was a community called Fordlandia, financed and established beginning in the 1920s in the Amazon region of Brazil on the East bank of an Amazon River tributary, the Tapajós River. Walden Two was the fictional manifestation of an ideal; Fordlandia was the real and necessary byproduct of an industrial need. The town was designed to mimic as closely as possible a small American town of the early 20^th century. It was to house Brazilians and imported Americans working to carve a rubber plantation from the forest on a Connecticut-sized piece of Amazonia. Ford’s hope was that it would supply rubber for his automobiles, thereby eliminating the middleman its procurement. Despite a tumultuous start and the ultimate failure to establish a profitable rubber plantation (Grandin, 2009), the community was established and maintained for several years:

On the Tapajós, [Ford’s manager] had finally succeeded in replicating a shiny American town, with neat houses, clean streets, shops, and a town square. It was, one traveler said, a “miniature but improved Dearborn Michigan in the tropical wilderness.” He even managed to re-create some of the social conventions of Main Street America, at least as Ford imagined them, with weekly dances, movies, and other forms of recreation, including golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, and gardening clubs. Fordlandia paid good wages, provided decent benefits, including health care, and tried to cultivate virtuous workers. (Grandin, 2009, p. 291)

Although Fordlandia was part of a commercial enterprise and Walden Two was not, the social goals of Fordlandia were, in principle, similar to Skinner’s goals for Walden Two: a good life safe from danger in which needs for shelter, medical care, leisure, work, and self-fulfillment, were met by the community and for which the residents provided equitable services back to the community. In the case of Walden Two, these services benefited the survival of the community that in turn rewarded them with the above accoutrements. The labors of Fordlandia’s residents, of course, benefited those who lived and worked there, but the ultimate beneficiary was to be the Ford Motor Company as it profited from the rubber to be produced by the workers. Skinner’s Walden Two was a fictionalized ideal located within the pages of a novel. In 1942, Fordlandia succumbed to environmentalist Rob Watson’s observation (cited by Friedman, 2020) that “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.” The methods of planting and maintaining the young rubber trees resulted in myriad ecological challenges that ultimately proved insurmountable. In the early 1940s, however, with U.S. government help, the plantation yielded a modest amount of badly needed latex for the American war effort. Thereafter, the plantation was shut down. With no reason or economic means to sustain the community, it reverted to a small, impoverished village with the skeleton of an American Midwestern town.

In the area of behavioral research, there was at least one other perhaps more nefarious—and certainly coincidental—connection between the Model T and behavior analysis. White (1936) recalled that “[u]nder the dash [of the Model T] was a box of coils with vibrators you adjusted, or thought you adjusted” (para. 13; emphasis added) before cranking the engine to start it. These four coils (one per motor cylinder) were used to induce the high voltage necessary to cause the plug to “spark, thereby igniting the gasoline that powered the engine” (para 13). On an antique behavioral research apparatus-hunting trip in the late 1990s, I was given a device that I was told was used in an even earlier time (the 1950s or 1960s) to deliver electric-shock punishers as part of a research/treatment program at a school for people with developmental delays. It was a small wooden box, about 4-in wide by 6-in long with electrical connectors protruding from its top. It was attached to the back of a relay-rack panel that allowed the coil to be connected to programming equipment via snap leads (Escobar & Lattal, 2014) such that the electric current it generated could be channeled by the equipment to deliver a shock contingent on some response. A few days later, when I showed the device to a colleague who was even older than me, he seemed taken aback as he blurted out, incredulously, “My God, that’s a coil from a Model T Ford.”

Conclusion

The Model T Ford occupies a unique place in American history, so it is not surprising that E. B. White chose it as the subject of his eulogy. The latter was based on his deep personal and experiential familiarity with his subject. Given the unique importance of the cumulative record in the history of behavior analysis, it is not surprising that B. F. Skinner eulogized it some 40 years after White’s essay, with parallel sentiment about and knowledge of his own subject. The cumulative recorder in general and the C-3 in particular translated the subject’s responses into a permanent cumulative record of such behavior. Without that machine, of course, there would have been no cumulative record to eulogize. Like Ford’s Model T, the C-3 became a part of the cultural scene, as visible and distinct—and ubiquitous—in research laboratories devoted to the psychology of learning as the Model T on the roads of America.

It has been argued that White’s “Farewell, my lovely” became his best-known essay. Skinner’s one-page editorial also became well-known, with 155 citations (according to Google Scholar’s count), primarily in the context of comments about the changing methodological and data analysis landscape of behavior analysis. White’s essay ended with a recollection of the Model T’s marginal electrical system. He noted that driving at night one had to rev the Model T’s engine to generate sufficient electricity for the headlamps to illuminate a signpost so it could be read to guide one’s journey. The cumulative recorder required no revving to illuminate the records that were signposts for the journey that is the experimental analysis of behavior. That illumination signaled a farewell to an older system of psychology that began a lovely journey to the modern era.