Henry Gantt's Radical Life: Plantation Heir to Engineer Technocrat

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Henry Laurence Gantt was born in 1861 in Calvert County, Maryland, into a prosperous family that enslaved more than 60 people. The Civil War and its aftermath stripped the family of its land and wealth, and they moved to Baltimore. Gantt attended the McDonogh School, graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1880, taught briefly, and earned a master's in mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology. In 1884 he became a draftsman at a Baltimore iron foundry, and in 1887 he began working with Frederick W. Taylor at Midvale Steel, later Bethlehem Steel and the Simonds Rolling Company, sharing six patents with him.

From 1902 to 1919 Gantt worked as an independent consultant and in the 1910s developed his charts, including the man's record, where a black line marked a met task and a red line required a written reason. His task and bonus system paid managers only when all their workers hit their tasks, which modern historians compare structurally to plantation task systems even though Gantt opposed slavery. In Work, Wages, and Profits (1916) and Organizing for Work (1919) he argued that business must serve society. Influenced by Thorstein Veblen, he formed The New Machine in 1916 and, with Marxist Walter Polakov, pushed for production run by engineers rather than financiers. He died in 1919.

• Gantt helped found the Taylor Society in 1911 to promote scientific management.
• His daily balance of work sheet summarized a whole factory's progress at a glance.
• Polish engineer Karol Adamiecki created a similar harmonogram in 1896 but published in Polish and Russian.
• Gantt argued that if industry did not distribute its returns fairly, society would seek to seize the means of production.
• The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which his faction tried to split, still awards a medal in his name.