The Philadelphia Catechism

Abstract

Henry Dana, Jr. was a raw Harvard law graduate in 1834 when he walked up the gangplank of the Pilgrim, a brigantine sailing out of Boston on the hazardous voyage around Cape Horn that would bring him five months later to California. Dana had joined the ship as an ordinary seaman in an attempt to recover his health and eyesight. Reading the law had become impossible after an attack of measles, and the doctor’s somewhat drastic advice had been to spend some time at sea as a curative.

The only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

(Jean Giraudoux, 1882–1944)