Frederick Winslow Taylor - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that March 20 is the anniversary of the birth of American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor who sought to improve industrial efficiency.

Image: Frederick Winslow Taylor scientific management

Frederick Taylor Scientific Management
"Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management Theory is a classic approach in organizational studies and Ford used Taylorism more than most companies. Taylor's work over 100 years ago still influences our lives at work today. This video explores Scientific Management including division of labor, hierarchy, time and motion studies, and more. The video includes the Ford Motor Company as an example and extension of Frederick Taylor's influence."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNfy_AHG-MU

1. Background from units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/taylor.htm
"Frederick Winslow Taylor
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (Mar. 20, 1856 - Mar. 21, 1915), efficiency engineer and inventor, was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa., the youngest child of Franklin and Emily Annette (Winslow) Taylor. He was a descendant of Samuel Taylor, who settled in Burlington, N. J., in 1677. His father was a lawyer, more interested, however, in literature than law; his mother was an ardent abolitionist and a coworker with Lucretia Mott [q.v.] in this cause. Taylor received his early education from his mother. In 1872, after two years of schooling in France and Germany, followed by eighteen months of travel in Europe, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy at Exeter, N. H., to prepare for the Harvard Law School. Though he graduated with his class two years later, his eyesight had become in the meantime so impaired that he had to abandon further study, and between 1874 and 1878 he worked in the shops of the Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a pump-manufacturing company in Philadelphia, learning the trades of pattern-maker and machinist. In the latter year he joined the Midvale Steel Company, Philadelphia, as a common laborer. In the succeeding twelve years he not only rose to be chief engineer (1884), but in 1883, by studying at night, obtained the degree of M.E. from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N. J. On May 3, 1884, he married Louise M. Spooner of Philadelphia. His inventions during these years effecting improvements in machinery and manufacturing methods were many, the outstanding one being the design and construction of the largest successful steam hammer ever built in the United States (patent No. 424,939, Apr. 1, 1890). After three years (1890-93) as general manager of the Manufacturing Investment Company, Philadelphia, operators of large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin, he began a consulting practice in Philadelphia--his business card read "Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty"--which led to the development of a new profession.

Behind this lay Taylor's years of observation and study of manufacturing conditions and methods. From these he had evolved a theory that, by scientific study of every minute step and operation in a manufacturing plant, data could be obtained as to the fair and reasonable production capacities of both man and machine, and that the application of such data would, in turn, abolish the antagonism between employer and employee, and bring about increased efficiencies in all directions. He had in addition worked out a comprehensive system of analysis, classification, and symbolization to be used in the study of every type of manufacturing organization. For five years he successfully applied his theory in a variety of establishments, administrative and sales departments as well as shops. In 1898 he was retained exclusively for that purpose by the Bethlehem Steel Company, Bethlehem, Pa. In the course of his work there he undertook, with J. Maunsel White, a study of the treatment of tool steel which led to the discovery of the Taylor-White process of heat treatment of tool steel, yielding increased cutting capacities of 200 to 300 per cent. This process and the tools treated by it are now used in practically every machine shop of the world. While he was at Bethlehem, too, Taylor's ideas regarding scientific management took more concrete form. Being convinced of the results that would be attained if these principles should be generally adopted throughout the industrial world, he resigned from the Bethlehem Steel Company in 1901, returned to Philadelphia, and devoted the remainder of his life to expounding these principles, giving his services free to anybody who was sincerely desirous of carrying out his methods. While he met with many unbelievers among both employers and employees, he lived to see his system widely applied. In 1911 the Society to Promote the Science of Management (after his death renamed the Taylor Society) was established by enthusiastic engineers and industrialists throughout the world to carry on his work.
Among Taylor's contributions to the technical journals were "A Piece-Rate System" (Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, vol. XVI, 1895), an exposition of the principles on which his system of management was subsequently based, and "Shop Management" (Ibid., vol. XXIV, 1903), which was translated and published in almost every country of Europe. An active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he served as vice-president in 1904-05 and as president in 1906, when he delivered as his presidential address his exhaustive monograph "On the Art of Cutting Metals" (Ibid., vol. XXVIII, 1907). In 1911 he published The Principles of Scientific Management, and submitted to Congress a report entitled " 'Taylor System' of Shop Management" (House Report 52, 62 Cong., 1 Sess.). In addition to these publications he was joint author with Sanford E. Thompson of two works on concrete, A Treatise on Concrete, Plain and Reinforced (1905) and Concrete Costs (1912). He received about one hundred patents for various inventions during his lifetime. For his process of treating high speed tool steels he received a personal gold medal at the Paris exposition in 1900, and was awarded the Elliott Cresson gold medal that same year by the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. He was much interested in amateur sports, particularly tennis, and with Clarence M. Clark won the doubles championship of the United States at Newport, R. I., in 1881. He died in Philadelphia of pneumonia, survived by his widow and three adopted children.

SOURCE:
"Frederick Winslow Taylor."Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2003. "

2. background from kqed.org/w/collaborations/stopwatch/stopwatch2.html
Stopwatch:
Frederick Winslow Taylor and the "Taylorization" of America

The story of Frederick Winslow Taylor's rise, fall and phoenix-like rise again is a fascinating tale of conflicting ideologies, labor-management disputes and strikes, Congressional investigations and, ultimately, great human drama. "What Taylor did was come in and analyze the smallest pieces of work, tease them apart and break them down into fractions of a minute," says Robert Kanigel, author of The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, the book on which the program is based. "He would determine how much a man can do in the course of, not just a day, not in eight or ten hours, but what he can do in a fraction of a minute."

When Taylor started his first job in 1878, workers learned their professions in much the same way they had in the Middle Ages: through years of apprenticeship. Taylor's scientific management system turned that system upside down, breaking down every trade and profession into smaller elements that anyone could learn in a single day.

Taylor himself was an enigmatic figure. The son of a privileged family, he was expected to attend Harvard and take his place in the leisurely upper class. However, Taylor eschewed that path and learned a trade by becoming a working-class machinist. Yet he could not abide by the status quo and began working on ways to induce workers to be more productive - ultimately developing his scientific shop management system and alienating most workers.

In 1880, at the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Taylor began his first experiments. Although he developed a reputation as an unyielding controller in the workplace, yet he was constantly late for meetings and had a penchant for cross-dressing. He claimed his shop management system would bring greater happiness to workers' lives and professed great respect for laborers yet repeatedly said he did not want them to think on the job. And he believed that any worker who disagreed with his system was simply ignorant.

But by 1910 Taylor's ideas had taken hold of America and he became a household name. Housewives adopted his scientific management principles, rearranging their kitchens to "save steps" and to be more efficient. Scholars and labor experts featured in Stopwatch indicate that Taylorism was applied to many social activities, including the management homes, farms, businesses, churches, philanthropic institutions and government. Trotsky, Lenin and Mussolini all embraced Taylor's theories, and US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis hailed him as brilliant.

But a workers' strike in Watertown, Massachusetts, and a subsequent Congressional investigation into Taylor's management system put his ideas to a severe test. Labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers viewed Taylor as the devil incarnate, and author Upton Sinclair publicly criticized him. Bitter and angry after enduring the long Congressional investigation process, Taylor finally withdrew from the public arena, retiring to his home to conduct other studies, including one that literally involved watching grass grow. When he died of complications from a cold at age 59, he was working on a project to grow the perfect putting-green grass.

Though Taylor himself died a broken and discouraged man, labor leaders could not stem the tide of "Taylorism" or the efficiency movement. From auto-production plants that plan each task workers perform to fire fighting companies that use Taylor's theories to reduce their response time, Taylorism permeates the modern workplace. Even fast-food restaurants use his theories, where signs tell workers how much time they should need to put a hamburger on a bun.

"Taylor may have died in ignominy," says producer Michael Schwarz, "but he probably had the last laugh, because his ideas about efficiency have come to define the way we live today, not just at work but in our personal lives as well."

Stopwatch: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the "Taylorization" of America is a co-production of Kikim Media and Quest Productions and is presented by KQED. Producers are Bill Jersey and Michael Schwarz. Associate Producer is Mark Page. The documentary is based on the book, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, by Robert Kanigel. Funding provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."

FYI LTC Stephen C. LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Maj Marty Hogan SCPO Morris Ramsey SFC William Farrell SGT Mark Halmrast Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Gregory Lawritson CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSgt Brian Brakke 1stSgt Eugene Harless SSG William Jones SSG Diane R.

Great history share.

Maj Marty Hogan Brilliant man.