Thinkers Timeline

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was an American mechanical engineer whose systematic approach to industrial work created the school of thought known as scientific management and shaped twentieth-century factory production throughout the industrialised world. He was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy Quaker family. His father was a Princeton-trained lawyer, his mother a committed abolitionist and feminist. Taylor was prepared for Harvard but, suffering from severe headaches and eye strain, instead became an apprentice machinist at a pump-manufacturing works in Philadelphia in 1874. He moved to the Midvale Steel Company in 1878, where he rose rapidly from labourer to chief engineer within six years while completing a mechanical engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology by correspondence. At Midvale he began the detailed time studies and analyses of work processes that would become the foundation of his later theory. He moved in 1890 to the Manufacturing Investment Company, then in 1893 set up as one of the first independent management consultants. His most famous consulting engagement was at the Bethlehem Steel Company from 1898 to 1901, where he conducted studies of shovelling, pig-iron handling, and metal-cutting that became the central examples of his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management. He was forced out of Bethlehem in 1901 after conflicts with new management. He spent the rest of his career promoting his methods through lectures, consulting, and writing, and building a network of disciples. His ideas faced strong opposition from organised labour; the American Federation of Labor denounced his methods and Congress investigated them in 1912. He died in 1915, aged fifty-nine, bitter about the resistance his ideas had met. His influence grew rapidly after his death; by the 1920s scientific management had become a global phenomenon, adopted in factories from Detroit to Moscow.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was an electrical engineer and inventor whose work on alternating current, induction motors, and wireless power transmission helped shape the modern electrical infrastructure of the world. He was born to an ethnic Serbian family in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Habsburg Empire, in what is now Croatia. His father was a Serbian Orthodox priest, his mother an unschooled woman with a remarkable memory and a gift for making household tools. Tesla studied engineering at the Polytechnic in Graz and briefly at the University of Prague, though he did not complete a formal degree. He worked in Budapest and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1884. He worked briefly for Thomas Edison in New York, then set out on his own. In 1888 he patented a practical alternating current induction motor and a polyphase power system; these patents were acquired by George Westinghouse, and the system they made possible became the backbone of modern electrical power distribution. During the 1890s Tesla also demonstrated wireless lighting, developed the Tesla coil, and experimented with the transmission of energy through the atmosphere. His later career was marked by increasingly ambitious and often impractical projects, financial difficulties, and growing eccentricity. He died alone and nearly forgotten in a New York hotel in 1943, aged eighty-six. His reputation has been rebuilt in the decades since, though not always with the precision his work deserves.

Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929-1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer whose innovations transformed how tall buildings are designed and made the modern generation of skyscrapers possible. He was born in Dhaka, then part of British India and later the capital of Bangladesh, to a family of educators. His father was a mathematics teacher who later became director of public instruction for East Bengal. Khan studied civil engineering at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta and at Dhaka University. In 1952 he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earning two master's degrees and a doctorate at the University of Illinois by 1955. He joined the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where he spent his entire career and became a partner in 1966. Working closely with architects including Bruce Graham, he designed two of the most important skyscrapers of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, and the Sears Tower, completed in 1973 and the world's tallest building for twenty-five years. He also designed Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport, one of the largest fabric roof structures in the world. He died of a heart attack in Saudi Arabia in 1982, at only fifty-three. His tubular design systems and his broader philosophy of structural efficiency have become the foundation on which nearly every tall building built since has been constructed.

Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-American computer scientist. She is one of the most important researchers in the field of AI ethics. Her work has shown how artificial intelligence systems can encode and amplify racial bias, gender bias, and other forms of harm. She was born in 1982 or 1983 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She came to the United States as a teenage refugee. Her family fled Ethiopia after political violence affected her brothers. She arrived in the US in 2001 and faced typical refugee challenges. She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University in electrical engineering. She earned a PhD at the Stanford AI Lab in 2017, studying under the leading computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li. Her doctoral work used Google Street View images to predict demographic and political patterns from cars in different neighbourhoods. The research drew attention. After her PhD, she did postdoctoral work at Microsoft Research, then joined Google in 2018. She co-led Google's Ethical AI team alongside Margaret Mitchell. In 2020, Gebru and her colleagues drafted a research paper about the risks of large language models, then a new technology. The paper, often called the Stochastic Parrots paper, argued that very large AI language systems carried serious risks. Google ordered her to retract the paper or remove her name. She refused. Google fired her, though Google described the departure differently. The firing caused a major public controversy. Many researchers signed petitions in her support. Several Google researchers later resigned in protest. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research lab focused on AI ethics. She has continued speaking publicly about harms in AI systems. She has become one of the most visible critics of how the technology industry develops AI.