Frederick Winslow Taylor

Mechanical Engineer

  • Born: March 20, 1856
  • Birthplace: Germantown, Pennsylvania
  • Died: March 21, 1915
  • Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

American engineer and inventor

Taylor studied the functions and practices of workers and machinery in minute detail and drew up detailed plans for saving time and increasing productivity. Many of the principles on which he worked have formed the basis of modern managerial practice.

Areas of achievement Engineering, business and industry, invention and technology, economics

Early Life

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born just outside Philadelphia in the affluent community of Germantown. Both his father’s and his mother’s families were of old New England stock. Taylor’s father was a lawyer who was interested more in literature than in the expansion of his practice. His mother was a prominent reformer abolitionist, Transcendentalist, and female suffragist. It was from her that Taylor’s early education came. Her qualities were transmitted to the young Taylor through rigorous drilling and training. From his mother, Taylor learned to be spartan, exacting, methodical, and extremely competitive. In the Taylor household, everyone had specific jobs. Throughout his life, Taylor was a most intense individual with an extraordinary power to arouse and inspire others, but he was temperamental, difficult to work with, and intolerant of the skepticism of others concerning his own theories. Friends testified to his great sense of humor, amiability, sociability, and sensitivity.

For three and a half years, Taylor’s parents took him around Europe to complete the first stage of his education. While there, he became a fluent speaker of German. On their return to the United States in 1872, Taylor entered Phillips Exeter Academy to prepare for Harvard Law School. Despite gaining honors in the entrance examination to Harvard, Taylor abandoned further study because of eye trouble. An independent young man, Taylor chose his own path and obtained a job as an apprentice with the Enterprise Hydraulics Works in Philadelphia, whose owners were family friends. Within four years, Taylor was a skilled machinist and pattern-maker.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-two, Taylor embarked on his career in industry as a common laborer for the Midvale Steel Company of Philadelphia. His rise was meteoric. After only two months, he went from laborer to clerk, machinist, and “gang boss.” Within six years, he was promoted to foreman of the machine shop, master mechanic in charge of repairs and maintenance throughout the entire works, chief draftsman, and finally, chief engineer. In that time, Taylor developed a system of shop management never before known.

At first, Taylor merely goaded workers into working harder and producing more through a system of threats, wage cuts, fines, and inspirational exhortations. During his time as gang boss and foreman, Taylor was subjected to death threats, but because of his combination of imperiousness, personal courage, and rigorous honesty, as well as the power he could wield, he got his way: Machinery was speeded up and production increased.

Taylor observed minutely each function of work and set standards and times for each. If a worker did not reach Taylor’s standards, it was, according to Taylor, because the man was physically or mentally unfit for the job or because the man was shirking. It was during his time with Midvale that Taylor invented the time-and-motion study. It was the function of management, Taylor believed, to plan, and the function of workers to execute management’s directives. There was no place in Taylor’s scheme for the worker to have any role other than to do exactly as he was told. If he cooperated, then the worker should be well rewarded. Increases in production should be accompanied by increases in wages. Indeed, as a result of his systematic study, Taylor was able to increase production by 300 percent and to raise wages by 25 percent to 100 percent. During his time at Midvale, Taylor also produced a number of inventions that made improvements on machinery and on manufacturing methods. His outstanding achievement was the design and construction of the largest steam hammer ever built in the United States.

Shortly after he became chief engineer at Midvale, Taylor was married, on May 3, 1884, to Louise Spooner, a doctor’s daughter and a friend since childhood. Taylor was of average height, blond, blue-eyed, about 145 pounds, with a slim, athletic build. Indeed, in 1881, he and a brother-in-law had won the United States National Championship in tennis. Typically, Taylor had used a racket of his own invention.

In 1890, Taylor resigned from Midvale to become general manager of the Manufacturing Investment Company, which operated large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin. Taylor attempted to put his ideas into practice, but opposition from both workers and his group of financial backers made his job frustrating. In 1893, he opened his own consultancy business. His business card read “Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty.” The business was not noticeably successful; he had few clients.

In 1898, another phase in Taylor’s career began when he was retained exclusively by the Bethlehem Steel Company. It was at Bethlehem that he perfected his system and completed, with J. Maunsell White, a study he had begun while at Midvale of the treatment of tool steel. The resulting Taylor-White process increased steel-cutting capacities by between 200 percent and 300 percent and won national and international awards. The daily struggle that Taylor faced at Bethlehem, however, made the introduction of his system virtually impossible. He was not allowed the free rein he had demanded as a condition of accepting employment with the company, and after being denied support by the company’s president, Taylor was fired in 1901. He devoted the remainder of his life to expounding his principles and giving his services free to anyone sincerely desirous of carrying out his methods. These methods and principles were never comprehensively set out. However, his publications, “A Piece-Rate System,” “Shop Management,” “On the Art of Cutting Metals,” and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), taken together with his testimony before a Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management, in January, 1912, offer a sample of his thoughts.

The resistance Taylor faced from workers, foremen, and managers in the companies where he attempted to introduce his system was replicated in his own professional body, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). While his early work was published by the society and he was elected president of the ASME in 1906, Taylor had to go elsewhere to get The Principles of Scientific Management into print. Indeed, opposition to Taylor and his disciples proved so great that in 1911 a group of insurgent engineers founded the Society to Promote the Science of Management. After the death of its chief inspirer, it was renamed the Taylor Society.

Despite opposition, the reputation of what came to be called Taylorism spread. Taylor’s full system was most closely adopted by two small companies, Tabor and Link-Belt, where it was introduced by Taylor’s associates. The system excited the interest of the ordnance department of the Army and was adopted by it at the Watertown Arsenal near Boston in 1909. In 1910, the Taylor system was championed by Louis D. Brandeis during arguments over the level of freight rates before the Interstate Commerce Commission. The Taylor system was vindicated. Publicity surrounding these developments sparked a popular efficiency craze that, by 1912, reached into homes, schools, and churches.

While “efficiency” enjoyed enormous popularity among the population as a whole, industry continued to resist the Taylor system. Other forms of efficiency and many of Taylor’s principles, if not his methods, were adopted. Abroad, Taylor’s work enjoyed a greater reputation. His works were translated into almost every major European language, and attempts were made to adopt his methods. France especially seemed taken with Taylorism, particularly in the period following World War I. Russian leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin wrote enthusiastically and urged adoption of Taylorism throughout Russian industry. In Great Britain, eclectic as always, Taylor’s system tended to be blended with other forms of efficiency-oriented systems of shop management but exercised great influence. Taylor died of pneumonia March 21, 1915, at his home in Philadelphia, but his work continued to reach wider audiences.

Significance

Taylor was the leading figure in pioneering the rational management of industrial corporations. At a time when business was expanding in size, scope, and complexity, Taylor found a system to replace arbitrary and chaotic conditions with rational planning based on minute observation and study. He sincerely believed that once his system was introduced into industry, everyone could be duly rewarded and industrial harmony would result: The key was productivity.

Taylor was as much a visionary as a practical man. Resistance to his ideas was based on a number of factors. Workers were required to stop thinking altogether on the job. Foremen and supervisors were to be transformed from autonomous decision-makers with tremendous personal power over the workers under their command into enforcers of task definitions and production targets with little power of initiative (the concept of “functional foremanship”). Managers and employers were expected to relinquish much of their personal power to efficiency experts, who would take care of the detailed planning, preparation, and scheduling of work. None of these groups wished to do this. In addition, Taylor’s personality induced resentment and even disbelief, especially his impatience with skeptics and his tendency to become carried away with his own rhetoric. Finally, his system did contain flaws, the major one of which was his crude conception of human motives, which led him to underestimate the importance of employee attitudes to work as a controlling variable in production.

Nevertheless, Taylor inspired a generation of young engineers with the concept of efficiency. The tremendous success of American industry at home and abroad in the twentieth century is, in part, a result of his ideas and principles.

Bibliography

Aitken, Hugh G. J. Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908-1915. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. A most illuminating study that compares the theory of Taylorism with its practice in one case study. The author concludes that, although the Taylor system was not adopted in every detail, it did work at Watertown with various modifications and accommodations, the major one of which was the setting up of committees to ensure participation by employees in the determination of piece rates and standard times, the lack of which had led to serious conflicts and had strengthened labor unions in the facility.

Copley, Frank Barkely. Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923. This is the official biography. The author had access to all of Taylor’s correspondence and papers; the full cooperation of relatives, friends, and professional organizations; and the support and counsel of a committee that included Taylor’s widow, longtime associates, and the managing director of the Taylor Society. While it is highly favorable and claims rather too much for Taylor’s achievement, the work is full of important detail and is the most exhaustive treatment.

Gabor, Andrea. The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business Their Lives, Times, and Ideas. New York: Times Business, 2000. Taylor is one of the philosophers included in this study of men and women whose ideas influenced the course of twentieth century business.

Hoopes, James. False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003. Explains why the ideas of Taylor and seven other business management theorists steered American business in the wrong direction. Provides a brief profile of Taylor, an overview of his ideas, and an examination of the successes and shortcomings of his approach to business management.

Hoxie, Robert F. Scientific Management and Labor. 1915. Reprint. New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966. Hoxie headed the investigation of Scientific Management for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. This is his report. He concluded that, as applied, scientific management was crude and insufficiently sensitive to the human rights of workers, though it was certainly worth further experimentation. His fellow experts represented, respectively, management and labor, which accounts for the balanced nature of the findings. The report is based on field studies to plants operating the Taylor system. Well worth reading.

Kakar, Sudhir. Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970. This is a psychohistorical interpretation of Taylor’s life and work. Argues that the limitations of his ideas were to be found in his own obsessional neurosis, his love-hatred for his father, and his general ambivalence about people. Further, it suggests that his achievements were a result of the congruence of Taylor’s own inner crisis with a historical crisis. Interesting, but to be avoided as an introduction to Taylor.

Merkle, Judith A. Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. An interesting study that analyzes Taylorism, distinguishes it from later and more polished approaches to scientific management, and places it in the context of social, political, and economic developments. The second part of the book discusses the adoption of the system in the Soviet Union, France, Germany, and Great Britain, and its metamorphosis in those countries.

Nadworny, Milton J. Scientific Management and the Unions: 1900-1932. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955. This was a pathfinding study that analyzed and chronicled the initial hostility of labor unions to Taylorism before World War I and examined the spectacular change that occurred afterward. Its final chapter, “Scientific Management in Retrospect,” looks at the development and decline of Taylorism in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Well written and informative.

Taylor, Frederick W. Scientific Management. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947. Consists of Taylor’s two most important works, “Shop Management” and The Principles of Scientific Management, and his testimony to the special house committee. The first article quotes extensively from a previous work, “A Piece-Rate System,” and also contains an exposition of the concept of functional foremanship, time-and-motion methods, and Taylor’s attitudes toward workers. The second, an attempt to convince readers of the efficacy of scientific management, contains the famous illustration concerning pig-iron handlers and the workman Schmidt, as well as the mechanics of the system. The final part is a detailed exposition by Taylor of the principles and practicalities of his system and detailed, rigorous questioning by the chair concerning Taylor’s ideas and their effects on workers.

Taylor Society. Scientific Management in American Industry. 1929. Reprint. Easton: Hive, 1972. A detailed statement by the devotees of the Taylor system of their beliefs and practices at the height of their influence. There are some substantial differences between the attitude of the Taylor Society and its mentor, but this represents the development of the movement Taylor founded.

1901-1940: March, 1914: Gilbreth Publishes The Psychology of Management; July, 1916: Fayol Publishes General and Industrial Management; March 14, 1923: American Management Association Is Established; 1924-1932: Hawthorne Studies Examine Human Productivity; 1938: Barnard Publishes The Functions of the Executive.

1941-1970: 1947: Simon Publishes Administrative Behavior.