Biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor | Engineer.

(Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1856 - Philadelphia, 1915) American engineer who devised the scientific organization of work. Coming from a wealthy family, Frederick Taylor gave up College of law by a problem in the view and from 1875 was devoted to work as a laborer in one of the steel industrial companies of Philadelphia.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Your training and your personal ability helped Taylor move immediately to conduct a workshop of machinery, where carefully observed the work of the workers who were responsible for cutting metals. And it was this practical observation where Frederick W. Taylor removed the idea of analyzing the work, breaking down it into simple tasks, timing them strictly and demanding workers carrying out tasks at the right time.

This analysis of the work allowed, moreover, organize tasks in such a way that they reduce to the minimum the downtimes by worker displacement or change of activity or tools; and establish a salary wage (per part produced) according to the time of estimated production, wage that should act as an incentive to intensify the pace of work. Tradition was thus replaced by the planning workshops, passing control of the work of the hands of the workers to the directors of the company and putting an end to the struggle between workers and employers in terms of productivity standards.

Taylor became engineer attending night courses, and after personally struggling to impose the new method in his workshop, went on to work as a Chief Engineer in a large steel company of Pennsylvania (the Bethlehem Steel Company) from 1898 to 1901. Taylor surrounded himself with a team which developed its methods, completed its organizational innovations with purely technical discoveries (such as steels for fast cutting, in 1900) and published several books defending the «scientific organization of labour» (the main was principles and methods of management science, 1911).

The scientific organization of work or Taylorism is expanded by the United States since the end of the 19th century, sponsored by industrialists, who saw in it the possibility to increase its control over the work process, while accelerating productivity and could employ unskilled workers (non-unionized immigrants) in increasingly simplified manual tasks mechanical and repetitive.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas