Frederick Taylor's Path: From Tennis Champion to the Shovel Stopwatch

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Frederick Winslow Taylor was born into old Philadelphia money in Germantown, with a mother descended from Mayflower pilgrims and a father who was a wealthy lawyer. He studied in France and Germany and passed the Harvard entrance exams with honors, but studying at night damaged his eyesight, so he became an apprentice pattern maker and machinist at a pump company instead. At Midvale Steelworks he rose from laborer and time clerk to chief engineer, helped by family ties: the owner's son married his sister and was his partner when Taylor won a national tennis doubles title that preceded the US Open. There he saw workers soldiering, deliberately slowing down because faster output led management to cut piece rates.

At Bethlehem Steel, Taylor and Maunsel White ran thousands of metal-cutting tests and created a high-speed tungsten steel that cut metal two to four times faster; selling the English patent rights made Taylor wealthy for life. His studies set the ideal shovel load at 21.5 pounds, and his pig iron account of a worker he called Schmidt was later found to have been revised repeatedly. Louis Brandeis coined the phrase scientific management during 1910 railroad rate hearings, but when Taylor submitted The Principles of Scientific Management to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which he had once led, it was rejected and he published it himself.

• As ASME president, Taylor tried to reorganize the society with his own system and forced out its longtime secretary.
• The manuscript went to editor Leon P. Alford, already a critic of Taylor's methods, before the rejection.
• French journalist Paulette Bernège applied time and motion study to housework.
• Konosuke Matsushita argued that confining thinking to a few managers wastes a company's collective intelligence.
• Taylor died of pneumonia in spring 1915, a day after his 59th birthday, and Peter Drucker called him the first to study manual work systematically.