ABSTRACT
If Mr Taylor can determine the maximum output of the miscellaneous pieces of work comprised in the everyday operation of the average machine-shop, he has accomplished a great work. By 1880 workshop owners could look back with pride upon half a century of achievement. They had accumulated handsome competencies and built impressive industrial edifices in North Philadelphia and along the banks of the Delaware. In 1856 Fred Taylor was born into an upper-class Germantown family. His father, Franklin, briefly practised law, but the family lived on the proceeds of an inherited investment portfolio. A comparison with the life of Samuel Vauclain, a head of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, reveals the significance of Fred's distance from workshop culture and his role as outsider. The Taylor family's mildly out-of-the-ordinary decision to allow their son to spend so much time on the shop floor of a Philadelphia engineering business, of itself, is hardly the stuff of history.
