In a field next to the works at Bethlehem, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote, lay some 80,000 tons of pig iron in small piles. Prices had been too low to sell it at a profit. When the Spanish War began, the price rose, the iron was sold, and it had to go onto railroad cars.
A gang of about 75 men did the loading. Each picked up a pig weighing about 92 pounds, walked up an inclined plank and dropped it on the end of a car. Taylor called them “good, average pig-iron handlers” under an excellent foreman, working about as fast and as cheaply as anyone else at the time. They averaged about 12 and a half long tons per man per day.
After studying the work, Taylor’s team concluded that a first-class handler ought to load between 47 and 48 tons. “This task seemed to us so very large,” he wrote, “that we were obliged to go over our work several times before we were absolutely sure that we were right.”
They watched the 75 men for three or four days and picked out four who looked physically able. They chose one: a man who was seen to trot a mile or so home after work, and who on wages of $1.15 a day had bought a small plot of ground and was building a house on it. Taylor’s book calls him Schmidt.
“Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?” the conversation began, as Taylor wrote it down. A high-priced man would earn $1.85 a day. A high-priced man also had “to do exactly as he’s told from morning till night.”
The next day a man stood over Schmidt with a watch. “Now pick up a pig and walk. Now sit down and rest.” At half-past five in the afternoon, by Taylor’s account, he had 47 and a half tons on the car. Taylor credited a law his team said it had found: a man carrying pigs that heavy could be under load for only part of the day, and needed the rest to recover.
Taylor published the story in The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. In a footnote he answered “many people” who had questioned the 47 and a half tons. The same book says that only about one man in eight in the gang was physically able to keep that pace. The man suited to the work, Taylor wrote, should be “so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”
In January 1912 Taylor testified before a special committee of the House of Representatives. The chairman, William B. Wilson, pressed him on the extra time his studies added to a stopwatch reading for unavoidable delays, 20 to 27 percent in one example: “By what scientific formula or mathematical calculation did you arrive at an addition of 20 to 27 per cent to the time which you have determined by that stop watch?” Careful, repeated study, Taylor answered, “not the arbitrary judgment of anyone.”
In 1974 two management historians, Charles Wrege and Amedeo Perroni, re-examined the story. The summary of their paper says the pig-iron story turned out to be “more fiction than fact.” A 2000 follow-up, relying almost entirely on primary sources, called the anecdote “erroneous.” A 2001 study answered that its discrepancies were “relatively minor” beside its lesson.
Taylor’s footnote had made a promise to the doubters. Anyone who multiplied and divided his figures, he wrote, “will find that all of the facts stated check up exactly.”