Frederick Taylor and the Therbligs of Work 1884-1913: Discontinuous Labor for "The First Moderns"

Frederick Taylor divided what had been considered continuous tasks of workers into discontinuous parts at Midvale Steel in 1884. In adopting discontinuity, he came after previous thinkers, from Dedekind, who found a way to "cut" the continuous real number line in 1872, Boltzmann, who imposed statistics on molecules (1877), the motion picture "frames" of Muybridge and Marey (1878), and Seurat's "dots" of paint in 1884. Thereafter came the disjunctive poetic images of Laforgue and Rimbaud (1886), Cajal's "neurons" of brain (1889), Weyler's separation of families in concentration camps (1896), Freud's sequestration of conscious from unconscious (1899), the "genes" rediscovered by De Vries in 1900, the "quanta" of Planck (1900) and Einstein (1905), and the juxtaposition of distinct perspectives in Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon" and Strindberg's "Dream Play" (1907). It was hard on labor, and initially hard for Taylor to impose it; but it quickly became a boon to management, and it swept the newly industrialized world.