Frederick Taylor's 'science of shovelling' demanded a different scoop for every material
Around 1900, efficiency pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor decided that using one shovel for brown coal on Monday and gravel on Tuesday was wasteful. Match each scoop's size to the density of what it carried, he argued, and the extra output would more than pay for buying a second shovel.
Long before steel, people dug with bone. Neolithic farmers and their predecessors often used the shoulder blade of a large animal as a crude shovel or spade. Purpose-made shovels came later, and for centuries a shovel paired with a pick was the main way anyone excavated a foundation, a mine or a quarry. Coal, ore, sand and grain were heaved in and out of railway wagons and ship holds by hand.
Until the 1950s this work employed enormous numbers of people. Labour gangs of dozens or hundreds were sent wherever digging or loading was needed that week, doing jobs now handled by a few skilled operators on excavators and loaders. Even with low wages, all that labour was a huge expense, so a company's productivity rose and fell with how much its workers could shift.
That is what drew Taylor, whose time-and-motion studies broke manual jobs into their smallest movements. Managers tended to dismiss shovelling as too simple to study, and workers had little reason to hand over control of their methods. Taylor saw untapped savings. From the 1890s through the 1910s he and his colleagues pushed the use of many scoop sizes, each tuned to a material's weight, so every load was the most efficient one.
Machines eventually won. Steam shovels, then crawler excavators around 1900 and later hydraulic backhoes and loaders, took over most bulk digging. The hand tool survives in gardens, farms and archaeological digs, typically a sheet-steel blade folded at the back to form a stiff socket, riveted to an ash, maple or fibreglass handle, with a T-grip for heavy soil.
Source: Shovel
