Frederick Winslow Taylor

He was born into money and walked away from it into a machine shop. His father Franklin was a Princeton-educated lawyer who lived on mortgage income, his mother Emily an abolitionist who had worked alongside Lucretia Mott, and the household was Quaker and orderly. Taylor passed the Harvard entrance examinations with honors in 1874 and then did not enroll, his eyesight having deteriorated from studying at night. He apprenticed instead as a patternmaker and machinist at the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia, and in 1878 hired on as a machine-shop laborer at Midvale Steel. His eyes recovered. He climbed from laborer to time clerk to foreman to chief engineer, and in 1883 took a mechanical engineering degree from Stevens Institute by correspondence.

At Midvale he began doing something nobody had thought worth doing: standing beside a lathe with a stopwatch, breaking the job into elements and timing each one. Out of that came a system with a plain and radical premise, that the planning of work should be taken away from the men who do it and given to a department that studies it. He published A Piece Rate System in 1895 and Shop Management in 1903, and when the mechanical engineers declined The Principles of Scientific Management he printed it himself in 1911. At Bethlehem Steel he and Maunsel White produced a tungsten-alloy tool steel that doubled or quadrupled cutting speeds and earned him 100,000 dollars on the English patents alone. He also fixed the ideal shovel load at 21 and a half pounds and had shovels built for each material.

His own book says the first requirement for a man fit to handle pig iron is that he be so stupid and so phlegmatic that in his mental make-up he more nearly resembles the ox than any other type. The laborer he called Schmidt was the system's showpiece, and the story would not hold still: Charles Wrege and Amadeo Perroni found that Taylor revised the account at least three times, each version making Schmidt's exertions more impressive, more voluntary and better paid. The historian David Montgomery's verdict was that Taylor was no charlatan but that his message required suppressing every trace of worker dissent. The shops answered him anyway. Bethlehem Steel forced him out in 1901 after fights with its managers, workers at the Watertown Arsenal struck, and Congress called him to testify in 1912.

Pneumonia caught him in the early spring of 1915 and he died on March 21, one day past his 59th birthday. He is buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. He had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that year, and the mechanical engineers had made him their president in 1906. What survives is mostly the adjective. Taylorism became shorthand for the timed and deskilled job, and the argument has not resolved: a 2009 study found real productivity gains where he claimed them, while the work on how he told his own stories still stands. Both can be true at once.

Frederick Winslow Taylor's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Piece Rate System article
  His first paper, read to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 1895
• Taylor-White high-speed tool steel invention
  Developed with Maunsel White at Bethlehem. Doubled or quadrupled cutting speeds. 1900
• Shop Management book
  The system set out for managers before the famous book made it a movement 1903
• The Principles of Scientific Management book
  Published at his own expense after the mechanical engineers turned it down 1911

• 1874 aged ~18 Passes the Harvard entrance examinations with honors and does not enroll Night study had wrecked his eyesight. It recovered in the machine shop.
• 1878 aged ~22 Hires on at Midvale Steel as a machine-shop laborer
• 1881 aged ~25 Wins the doubles title at the first US National Championships tennis tournament Partnered with Clarence Clark at the Newport Casino.
• 1883 aged ~27 Takes a mechanical engineering degree from Stevens Institute by correspondence
• 1895 aged ~39 Reads A Piece Rate System to the mechanical engineers
• 1898 aged ~42 Goes to Bethlehem Steel and runs the pig iron and shoveling studies
• 1901 aged ~45 Bethlehem Steel forces him out after discord with its managers
• 1911 aged ~55 Prints The Principles of Scientific Management himself The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which had elected him president in 1906, would not publish it.
• 1912 aged ~56 Testifies before a House committee investigating shop management systems The strike at the Watertown Arsenal had brought Congress into it.
• March 21, 1915 aged 59 Dies of pneumonia in Philadelphia, a day after his 59th birthday

• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. adapted his method
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. popularized the term
• Samuel Gompers 1850–1924
  Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization. opposed by organized labor under
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. critic
• Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977
  British-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era. satirized the timed job
• Alfred P. Sloan 1875–1966
  General Motors leader who established the multidivisional corporation and professional management systems copied across industry. built the corporate form his methods filled