SOURCE: "Frederick Winslow Taylor," in The Making of Scientific Management Volume I: Thirteen Pioneers, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1959, pp. 28-38.

In the following essay, Urwick and Brech discuss Taylor's life and work.

Almost half a century after Charles Babbage, the mathematician and philosopher, observing British industry from without, had propounded the essential principles of the scientific approach to business management, F. W. Taylor, an American engineer, arrived at precisely similar conclusions as the hard-won prize of practical experience. There was no plagiarism in Taylor. He never read Babbage. His ideas were his own, wrung by sheer force of personal effort, energy and originality from the unsympathetic environment of the machine-shops of the United States in the eighteen-eighties. The similarity in the two men's work was born of minds of fundamentally similar training brought by circumstances to a detached examination of identical phenomena.

If Babbage's work produced little...