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into the machineshop of a small pumpmanufacturing concern, owned by a friend of the family’s, to learn the trade of patternmaker and machinist. He learned to handle a lathe and to dress and cuss like a workingman.
    Fred Taylor never smoked tobacco or drank liquor or used tea or coffee; he couldn’t understand why his fellow-mechanics wanted to go on sprees and get drunk and raise Cain Saturday nights. He lived at home, when he wasn’t reading technical books he’d play parts in amateur theatricals or step up to the piano in the evening and sing a good tenor in
A Warrior Bold
or
A Spanish Cavalier.
    He served his first year’s apprenticeship in the machineshop without pay; the next two years he made a dollar and a half a week, the last year two dollars.
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    Pennsylvania was getting rich off iron and coal. When he was twentytwo, Fred Taylor went to work at the Midvale Iron Works. At first he had to take a clerical job, but he hated that and went to work with a shovel. At last he got them to put him on a lathe. He was a good machinist, he worked ten hours a day and in the evenings followed an engineering course at Stevens. In six years he rose from machinist’s helper to keeper of toolcribs to gangboss to foreman to mastermechanic in charge of repairs to chief draftsman and director of research to chief engineer of the Midvale Plant.
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    The early years he was a machinist with the other machinists in the shop, cussed and joked and worked with the rest of them, soldiered on the job when they did. Mustn’t give the boss more than his money’s worth. But when he got to be foreman he was on the management’s side of the fence,
gathering in on the part of those on the management’s side all the great mass of traditional knowledge which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen and in the physical skill and knack of the workman.
He couldn’t stand to see an idle lathe or an idle man.
    Production went to his head and thrilled his sleepless nerves like liquor or women on a Saturday night. He never loafed and he’d be damned if anybody else would. Production was an itch under his skin.
    He lost his friends in the shop; they called him niggerdriver. He was a stockily built man with a temper and a short tongue.
    I was a young man in years but I give you my word I was a great deal older than I am now, what with the worry, meanness and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It’s a horrid life for any man to live not being able to look any workman in the face without seeing hostility there, and a feeling that every man around you is your virtual enemy.
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    That was the beginning of the Taylor System of Scientific Management.
    He was impatient of explanations, he didn’t care whose hide he took off in enforcing the laws he believed inherent in the industrial process.
    When starting an experiment in any field question everything, question the very foundations upon which the art rests, question the simplest, the most selfevident, the most universally accepted facts; prove everything
,
    except the dominant Quaker Yankee (the New Bedford skippers were the greatest niggerdrivers on the whaling seas) rules of conduct. He boasted he’d never ask a workman to do anything he couldn’t do.
    He devised an improved steamhammer; he standardized tools and equipment, he filled the shop with college students with stopwatches and diagrams, tabulating, standardizing.
There’s the right way of doing a thing and the wrong way of doing it; the right way means increased production, lower costs, higher wages, bigger profits:
the American plan.
    He broke up the foreman’s job into separate functions, speedbosses, gangbosses, timestudy men, orderofwork men.
    The skilled mechanics were too stubborn for him, what he wanted was a plain handyman who’d do what he was told. If he was a firstclass man and did firstclass work Taylor was willing to let him have firstclass pay;