Carl Georg Lange Barth was a Norwegian-American mathematician, mechanical and consulting engineer, and lecturer at Harvard University.
Background
He was born on February 28, 1860, in Christiania, Norway, the fourth of nine children and third of six sons (the second to survive infancy) of Jakob Boeckman Barth and Adelaide Magdalene (Lange) Barth. His father, Norway's first technically trained and educated forester, was descended from Daniel Barth, a mining engineer who emigrated from Saxony to Norway in 1623; his mother was an intelligent and well-educated woman of strong character, the daughter of a Danish clergyman. Carl was a spirited boy, interested in machinery from the moment of his first visit to a foundry and machine shop at the age of twelve.
Education
After graduating from junior high school at Lilliehammer, Norway, at the age of fifteen, he entered the Naval Technical School at Horten, Norway. Though he was the youngest pupil ever to be admitted, he was graduated with the highest honors won up to that time.
Career
He then began a five-year apprenticeship in the boiler and machine shops of the navy yard at Horten, but his abilities were soon called into play as a teacher of mathematics in the Technical School. Dissatisfied with the limited opportunities for advancement in his native country, when his five years were up he set out for America. Barth arrived in Philadelphia in 1881 and secured employment with William Sellers and Company, machine tool manufacturers, as a draftsman, the beginning of fourteen years' service, during which he rose to the position of chief designer.
To provide for his growing family Barth taught evening classes in mechanical drawing at the Franklin Institute for some years, giving this up only in order to pursue engineering studies with the ambition of becoming a university professor. In 1895, wishing to explore the field of engine building, which was new to him, he took a job at a lower salary with the Rankin and Fritch Foundry and Machine Company in St. Louis, as engineer and chief draftsman. The company failed, however, in 1897.
After a few months as designer of special machinery for the St. Louis Water Department, Barth accepted a position as instructor in mathematics and mechanical drawing at the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton, Pa. , where he rewrote their textbook on machine design. In the following year he was instructor in mathematics and manual training at the Ethical Culture School in New York City. Meanwhile Barth had become acquainted with Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of the scientific management movement in America. Taylor in 1899 invited Barth to join him in experimental work at the Bethlehem Steel Company, Bethlehem, where he was then applying his methods of detailed scientific analysis of machines and manufacturing operations in the interests of greater productive efficiency.
For some time Taylor had been seeking a means of computing the most efficient combination of feed, speed, and depth of cut at which a lathe or a comparable machine tool for cutting metals should be operated, feed being the amount of travel of the cutting tool along the work per revolution and speed being the number of revolutions per minute. This problem, involving twelve variables, had been worked on unsuccessfully by engineers and professional mathematicians over a period of nearly two decades. In five months Barth devised a compound slide rule (later termed by Taylor a "magic instrument") which solved the problem. The slide rule was only one, though probably the most important, of the standardized "tools" invented by Barth that were essential to what became known as the Taylor System of Scientific Management.
Although continuing in close association with Taylor until the latter's death in 1915, Barth in 1905 established an independent consulting practice which he carried on for nearly twenty years. Serving important industrial establishments, he either installed, or extended and strengthened, the Taylor System. Along with his consulting work Barth was a regular and frequent lecturer at colleges and schools of engineering, principally the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and the University of Chicago. In 1923 he retired to his home in Philadelphia to devote his remaining years to the study of higher mathematics and the reading of philosophy. Unfinished at his death was a book entitled "The Non-Infinitesimal Calculus. "
Achievements
Barth is known as one of the foreman of scientific management, who improved and popularized the industrial use of compound slide rules.
Politics
Barth was a leftist and anticapitalist.
Personality
Of small, slight stature, early bald, and wearing a closely cropped beard, Barth was a man of powerful intellect. He was a born teacher, full of zeal for his ideas and convictions. His enthusiasm inspired scores of younger men, and in their later industrial success he found his keenest delight.
Connections
In March 1882 he married Henrike Jakobine Fredriksen of Lilliehammer, who had followed him to the United States in the previous fall; they had four children, Jacob Christian, Carl Georg Lange, Inger Adelaide, and Elizabeth Fredrike.
