In Our Prime (7 page)

Frederick W. Taylor, 1911

Taylor seems to have
expressed . . . with almost visionary clarity the general spirit of the age.

T
he painter Thomas Cole felt tired and chilled after returning home from church one Sunday in February 1848. Three days later he died. He was 47.

At a memorial at the National
Academy of Design, William Cullen
Bryant, the Romantic poet and editor of the
New-York Evening Post,
delivered the funeral oration. Death comes in childhood, youth, and old age, Bryant said, noting that Cole “passed into that next stage of existence” while “in the strength and activity of his faculties,” and in “mid-strength of his intellect.” Or, as Cole himself had labeled it in his
Voyage of Life
series, in Manhood. Bryant did not utter the words “middle age.”

By the time Bryant died thirty years later, however, the term was popping up in everyday conversation to denote a distinct phase of life. “
Thirty is the age of the gods
—and the first gray hair informs you that you are at least ten or twelve years older than that,”
The Ladies Repository
explained in 1861. “Apollo is never middle-aged, but you are.” As the decades progressed, headlines like “The Privileges of Middle Age,” “At Forty Year,” and “The Middle-Aged Woman” became more common. The December 1874 issue of
Scribner's Monthly
offered some thoughtful seasonal advice under the heading “Holidays for Middle-Age.” (In a mini-forerunner of
The Feminine Mystique,
every family was urged to give mother a winter vacation, so she was not driven insane by overwork and anxiety.)
In 1881, the
New York Times
declared
a man's “powers are at the highest point of development” in middle age. Later in the decade,
Harper's Bazar
initiated a regular column titled “Middle Age.” In 1889, the magazine helpfully defined the term with more specificity for its readers: “those who have arrived at middle age—that is to say women who number anywhere from forty to sixty years.”

References proliferated. In 1893, Henry James, just 50, titled his short story about a writer “The Middle Years.” In 1898, Thomas Hardy included “Middle-Age Enthusiasms” in his collection
Wessex Poems.
Romantics who found James and Hardy a bit taxing after dinner could turn to tales of amour in
Middle-Aged Love Stories
(1903), a forerunner of Harlequin romances. That same year,
The Cosmopolitan Magazine
published an essay titled “The Woman of Fifty,” which noted: “The woman who today is celebrated for distinctive charm and beauty, ripe views, disciplined intellect, cultivated and manifold gifts would, two score years ago, have been relegated to the heavy ranks of the dowagers and grandmothers—forced by the stern conventions of prevailing opinion to confront the
bitter knowledge that, just as she had gained a mastery of the rules, she was expected to retire from the game.”

Clearly, something happened between Bryant's funeral oration for Cole in 1848 and the regular appearance of columns devoted to middle age three decades later. A wisp with a barely discernible outline, middle age condensed into a sturdy stage of life that took up space in people's thoughts, discussions, and writings. Social change, of course, occurs gradually. Ideas spread in fits and starts, and cultural shifts occur in years, not months. Various currents of thought eventually converged in the second half of the nineteenth century and altered the stories people told about the ebb and flow of their lives. Between Cole's death and his own, Bryant had seen the development of the germ theory of disease, anesthetics, and vaccines; the invention of the internal combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, the phonograph, practical refrigerators and typewriters, elevators, a faster process for making steel, a dozen ingenious tools of measurement, including the radiometer (to gauge radiation), galvanometer (electricity), dynamometer (force), and the interferometer (distance); the spread of railroads and gas lighting, pocket watches, and the laying of the first transatlantic cable; the publication of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species,
the introduction of new novelistic
techniques to mark the passage of time, the Census Bureau's categorization of residents in ten-year age groups, and the rapid falloff of the apprenticeship system. Bryant had witnessed the creation of a new industrialized, bureaucratic, and technological epoch.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, known as “the father of scientific management,” was a child of this new science-centered world. His obsessions and interests mirrored those of the rapidly changing era.
In 1878, the year Bryant died
, Taylor got a job at Midvale Steel Works, where he later commenced his pioneering time-and-motion studies. He believed that, through careful observation and experiment, he could discover the optimal way to perform every task in the workplace to maximize productivity. He broke down each job into tiny pieces, meticulously analyzing the sequence, tools, and motions in order to put them all back together in
the most efficient form. From the mundane to the complex, every job was explained in a set of minutely detailed instruction cards that workers were supposed to follow assiduously. Describing his later experience at Bethlehem Steel in 1898 with the hapless workman Schmidt, Taylor wrote in
Principles of Scientific Management
about calculating the best way to load a four-by-four bar of pig iron weighing ninety-two pounds: “Schmidt started to work, and all day long, and at regular intervals, was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, ‘Now pick up a pig and walk. Now sit down and rest. Now walk—now rest,' etc. He worked when he was told to work, and rested when he was told to rest, and at half-past five in the afternoon had his 47½ tons loaded on the car.” Every motion and moment mattered.

Whether or not Taylor
was a fraud who cooked his data and exaggerated his success, as some historians later claimed, there is no disputing his impact. Taylor's ideas about efficiency and standardization eventually served as a strut for mass production and a mass market as homebuilders, homemakers, libraries, schools, and hospitals incorporated his time-and-motion studies and scientific management theories into their designs and practices.
Principles,
published in 1911, influenced Henry Ford's assembly lines in Detroit.
In 1913, Ford's workers
took twelve and a half hours to assemble a car. By 1914, it took just over an hour and a half. The abundance and affluence that industrialized countries enjoyed in the last century were partly founded on the tremendous gains in productivity that Taylor's system extracted, enabling goods to be made faster and more cheaply.
One management scholar judged
that “the United States owes a large, if incalculable proportion of their immense productivity and high standard of living” to Taylor.

For a society that used roosters and sunsets to track the hours and kept a sloppy record of birth dates, Speedy Taylor, as he was known in the shop, preached that every second counted and demanded that every second be counted. His views resonated in an era when time and space seemed to shift and collapse as technological advances like the railroad, telegraph, and electric light altered the way people thought about and experienced the passing of the hours.
Clocks began adorning walls in the 1830s
; pocket watches became widely available in the 1860s. In
the 1870s, phrases like “on time,” “behind time,” and “ahead of time” entered the English language. The first international conference to synchronize timekeeping took place in 1884, when Greenwich Mean Time was established as the standard and the globe was divided into time zones.

Between 1890 and 1920, Taylor's approach revolutionized the way Americans thought as much as the way they worked. He roped modern man to the clock and helped bring an exacting awareness of time into every nook of the culture.
Laying out his ideas
with the diligence he advocated in the factory, he wrote that “the same principles . . . can be applied with equal force to all social activities; to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our governmental departments.”

Scientific management was to be the overseer of the entire range of human existence, including the very process of aging. Taylor's attention to time, his valuation of efficiency, his belief in science, and his insistence on classifying and standardizing created the conditions that led to the invention of middle age.

Just as Taylor instructed managers to “break down each task into its component parts,” psychologists, educators, and doctors dissected a single life into separate phases: childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age.

Just as Taylor created a standardized set of step-by-step instructions for every job, the nascent class of experts established norms of behavior, dress, sexual practices, and attitudes that were deemed appropriate for each stage of life.

Just as Taylor valued a worker solely in terms of timed productivity, so was a human life, once conceived in spiritual and moral terms, reduced to its economic essentials. This method of accounting found age to be a handy yardstick for measuring a man's potential worth on the factory floor and in the office; it ultimately led to the view that the young were much more valuable to society than the middle-aged and elderly.

And behind it all was the steady tick of the clock, piped into
workplaces, homes, and schools. That tick, which Taylor tried to harness with his stopwatch, helped awaken society to ever-finer gradations of age.

Taylor's childhood obsessions well positioned him to become the modern world's timekeeper.
He was born in 1856
to a wealthy Quaker family, whose ancestors came to America before the Revolution and settled in Germantown, near Philadelphia. His parents were moderate abolitionists and suffrage supporters. He grew up during the Civil War, when local factories were producing bayonets and army uniforms, and local hospitals cared for wounded Union soldiers.

When Frederick turned twelve, the family traveled to Europe for the grand tour, and stayed for three years. During their sojourn, he meticulously copied the departure and arrival times of the horse-drawn carriages his family took in Norway. While hiking, he experimented to see which stride covered the most ground with the least effort. When the Taylors returned to Germantown, Fred made his friends wait as he spent an entire sunny morning measuring a playing field down to the last inch before agreeing to let the game commence.

In 1872, Taylor was sent off to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
There he witnessed
“the first piece of time study that I ever saw made by anyone.” He was studying mathematics with the legendary George Wentworth, a great bull of a teacher who had a tidy side income from thirty-four mathematics textbooks he had written. Wentworth sat behind a large wooden desk, his watch kept out of sight on a ledge while his fifty or so students figured out a handful of math problems. Each boy was supposed to raise his hand and snap his fingers when he had worked out the solution. When about half the class had finished, Wentworth, in a slipshod suit and sporting a long beard, called out: “That's enough.” After some months, it dawned on Taylor that Wentworth was timing how long it took the boys to work through the equations and geometric drawings. He used the results to calculate how much homework to assign.

If Taylor had gone on to Harvard and become a lawyer as he and his family had planned, he might not have been watching the clock eight
years later.
Complaints of bad eyesight
and pistonlike headaches kept him from moving south to Cambridge, however, and at his parents' urging Taylor decided to become an engineer, an occupation that required less studying and eyestrain. He traded in his Exeter tie and jacket for overalls and a lunch pail and became an apprentice patternmaker in a large, dusty, and growling Philadelphia foundry. His next job was at Midvale Steel, where Taylor was soon made foreman and in 1881, like Wentworth, timed his boys. He was not simply counting how long it took a machinist or a patternmaker to complete a task but also calculating down to the hundredth of a minute every movement along the way.

Robert Kanigel, Taylor's biographer, compares
Taylor's impact to that of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, noting that “each brought a deeply analytical, ‘scientific' cast of mind to an unruly, seemingly intractable problem.”

Most of the nineteenth century's emerging class of experts and managers did not have such grand ambitions, but in trivial and consequential pursuits, psychologists, physicians, biologists, managers, and civil servants shared their deep faith in scientific methods and a belief that human society could be organized rationally and controlled. Everything in nature and thought, from a single human life to the atom, was subject to subdivision and classification.
Even modernist artists were
influenced by science and sought to break experience down into its most elemental parts.

As people migrated to urban centers, the unself-conscious mixing of generations that naturally occurred in rural homes, farms, schools, social halls, and churches was replaced by age-related groupings.
Growing government bureaucracies
like the army used age to help identify, organize, and track the population. Age became the basis for education, statistical compilations, and military enlistment. Channeling schoolchildren into different grades was first introduced in the 1850s and 1860s. By the 1880s, private middle-class organizations like the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, 4-H Clubs, and civic associations began to group members according to birth year. In 1900, the U.S. Census, which previously had grouped inhabitants in ten-year increments, added a question about one's date of birth for the first time.