# Frederick Winslow Taylor American mechanical engineer (born March 20, 1856, Philadelphia; died March 21, 1915) who invented [[Scientific Management]], the stopwatch-and-quota method of running a workplace. He was the original efficiency expert, and the distant intellectual ancestor of the [[Technocracy]] movement that [[Elon Musk]]'s grandfather [[Joshua Haldeman]] helped lead. ## Career - **Midvale Steel (1878 onward):** Starts on the shop floor and rises to chief engineer. This is where he develops time study. Henry Gantt joins him as an assistant in 1887. - **Bethlehem Steel (1898–1901):** Develops high-speed tool steel with Maunsel White and runs the famous pig-iron loading study built around a laborer he called "Schmidt." Bethlehem dismisses him in 1901. - **1906:** Elected president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. - **1910:** [[Louis Brandeis]] makes his system a national cause in the Eastern Rate Case. - **1911:** Publishes *The Principles of Scientific Management*. - **1911–12:** The Watertown Arsenal walkout and a House special committee investigation. Taylor testifies in January 1912. See [[Scientific Management]] for the labor fight and the stopwatch ban that followed. ## The core idea "It was the function of management, Taylor believed, to plan, and the function of workers to execute management's directives" (EBSCO). Knowledge moves out of the worker's hands and into a planning office run by engineers. Everything downstream follows from that one move, from Gantt charts to the Technocracy movement's plan to replace politicians with engineers. ## Disciples Henry Gantt (inventor of the Gantt chart) and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (motion study) were his best-known followers. Gantt matters most for this vault. In 1916 he founded **The New Machine**, an association, influenced by [[Thorstein Veblen]], that sought "to apply the criteria of industrial efficiency to the political process." That is the bridge from Taylorism to Technocracy. ## Connection to Musk Indirect. Taylor died in 1915, and [[Technocracy Incorporated]] was founded in 1933. The lineage runs Taylor → Gantt and Veblen → [[Howard Scott]] → Technocracy Inc. → [[Joshua Haldeman]] → [[Elon Musk]]. Britannica traces the technocracy movement's origins directly to Taylor's scientific management. ## See Also - [[Scientific Management]] · [[Technocracy]] · [[Technocracy Incorporated]] - [[Louis Brandeis]] · [[Thorstein Veblen]] · [[Progressive Era]]