Abstract
Looking back to the 1930s and the start of a decades-long career in industrial design, Ralph Kruck recalled a profession mired in tradition and resistant to innovation. Amid the first wave of professional industrial designers, Kruck found that those who "suggested deviating from the styles in his grandmother’s parlor were looked upon as a revolutionary, a radical and a crackpot" by tradition-bound engineers and salesmen. Aiming to make products more functional and efficient, industrial designers would become fixtures at leading firms and transform everything from vacuum cleaners to railroad locomotives.
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