Letter to Kempton P.A. Taylor

              W.H. McElwain Company
Makers of Shoes
General Offices, 354 Congress Street, Boston

August 13, 1915

Dear Mr. Taylor:

Replying to your enquiry of the 10th.

The writer will try to give you a few more facts out of which perhaps you can pick something of value.

The W.H. McElwain Company organized in the Spring of 1903 what was called the Labor Department. Mr. W.H. McElwain, the Founder this Company, had felt that the making of piece rates was done in a very unscientific manner and he desired to have a department in the business for the control of wages and piece rates. The writer, Mr. Winfield L. Shaw, was employed to organize this department in 1903. The original plan was to work statistically from the wages of piece workers, but it soon became apparent that we should have a more reliable means of analyzing the possible production on any given operation. About 1905 we consulted with Mr. Wallace C. Sabine of the Jefferson Physical Laboratory in Cambridge to see whether or not we could apply a cronograph to timing operations by steps. We had been trying a stop watch of the old style, which went forward and back to zero. A week or two later we found in a jeweller's store in Boston what was called a foot-ball timer, a stop watch exactly like what is now used for time study work except that it had a minutes and seconds' dial and was used for foot-ball work. We then began timing our operations and dividing the time into respective parts, such as handling time, lost time, etc.

Up to this time none of our managers had ever heard of time study work done elsewhere and Mr. W.H. McElwain died without ever having known of Mr. Taylor's work or of time study work as a new science.

As soon as we heard of Mr. Taylor's work through outside sources, we immediately wrote to him for permission to go down and see him, which we did, I think, in either 1907 or 1908. The first party that went down consisted of