ABSTRACT
The subject of the connection of burden with cost is & important that 1 must try to make my position clear in regard to Mr. Gantt’s proposals, as far as they have been disclosed by his original paper, supplemented by his letter on p. 385. So far as 1 can see, the whole claim made by Mr. Gantt is that embodied in italic type in his paper as a “general principle”: “The indirect expense chargeable to the output of a factory bears the name ratio to the indirect expense necessary to run the factory at normal capacity, as the output in question bears to the normal output of the factory.” Now it is to be presumed that Mr. Gantt supposed this discovery to be one either original with himself or at any rate (if really originated by the lute F. W. Taylor, as implied in his letter) as yet unpublished, and unknown to the world at large. In my criticism of this paper on p. 209 I tried to suggest as mildly as possible that in so far as this “general principle” was true, it had been announced by me 15 years ago, but that as stated it seemed to me to be too broad a claim, and open to doubt, unless some more exact method than the ordinary percentage for burden distribution was employed. Mr. Gantt now says that some such system (devised by Taylor) was implied, but he certainly did not say so in his original paper.
