Birth of the Replicant

 Something strange happened in America at the turn of the 20th century: a society based on individualism began to celebrate identical, replicable people. This episode tells the story of two men who drove this profound change in American culture. One was a business consultant named Frederick Winslow Taylor. The other was an artist named Charles Dana Gibson. Each created an identical human being, a replicant who would serve the needs of the economy. Taylor's replicant was Schmidt, a worker who could be "scientifically managed" for limitless productivity. Gibson's was the Gibson Girl, a woman who would be liberated by consuming products. Together, the replicants would change forever the way Americans thought about their place in a society based on limitless consumption.