Letter to Kempton P.A. Taylor

              which he did, to our great pleasure. He came to our Executive Offices in Boston, from which we control and operate all of our twenty or more plants, and in the afternoon went with a party of our managers to Manchester and visited several of our factories. He seemed very much interested in our Company and I think he felt rather suprised to find a company which had gone ahead independently on many of the theories with which he was so much in sympathy.

Mr. W.H. McElwain, the Founder of this Company, was like Mr. Taylor and his ideas were strikingly similar. He was an analytical business thinker and organizer. Many of the ideas which he formulated and put into execution check absolutely with the principles of scientific management. Before we knew Mr. Taylor our business contained in a form which it was unnecessary to alter in any substantial degree many of the ideals toward which Mr. Taylor was striving, such as scientific routing of material and product in process; predetermination of production; preplanning capacity of men, machines, departments, and factories; systematized storekeeping and systematic handling of what in our industry would correspond with tools and equipment; elimination through predetermination of delays in process, and a high development of such service to the workman as would make it unnecessary for him to have delays in the planning of his work; the payment of high wages to employees of high efficiency; more carefully standardized piece rates by intensive study, etc.

Mr. Brandeis in his pamphlet on "Business a Science" mentions Mr. McElwain as one of the men who had approached his business in a scientific way and had been successful in eliminating seasonal employment, thereby making the business not only a benefit to the workman and the public, but also deriving a financial benefit. To us it was a great source of regret that Mr. McElwain could not have lived to meet Mr. Taylor, as we feel very sure they would have formed immediately a very strong friendship. As I think I stated in one of my other letters, our organization look to Mr. Taylor and Mr. McElwain as the two men to whom we owe almost all of our best ideals. In our Vice-president's office we have Mr. Taylor's and Mr. McElwain's pictures side by side.

We all regard Mr. Taylor as unquestionably one of the remarkable men of this generation and we believe history will place him in a very high rank.

If for any reason you would like to get the exact date of Mr. Taylor's visit to our Manchester factories, I will be glad to look it up for you in my diary, and can also give you the exact dates on which we paid our first visit to Mr. Taylor in Philadelphia.