Background

Dexter Simpson Kimball was born on October 21, 1865 in New River, New Brunswick, Canada, the son of William Henry and Jane Patterson Kimball. His father was a mill-wright whose occupation led the family to settle in 1870 in the New Brunswick company town of Marysville.

Education

Kimball received exceptional grade school education that included physics and algebra through quadratic equations. In 1893 he applied for admission to the engineering program at Stanford University; although lacking certain academic credits he was admitted, and received the bachelor's degree in engineering in 1896 and in 1913 he was awarded the new degree of mechanical engineer.

Career

Kimball's practical education began in Port Gamble, Washington, in 1881; it included running a planing mill in his uncle's shop in Port Madison and culminated in an apprenticeship in the Puget Mill Company machine shop. Having mastered the machine shop environment, by the age of twenty he was chief engineer and machinist at the company's Port Ludlow mill.

In 1888 Kimball moved to San Francisco to take a job with the Union Iron Works, one of the most important machine shops on the Pacific coast. Later he was offered the opportunity to design and install heavy equipment at the Anaconda Mining Company's operations in Butte, Montana. Through the offices of his Stanford adviser, Albert W. Smith, Kimball obtained an assistant professorship of machine design at Cornell University at the end of 1898. But in 1901, seeing advancement at Cornell unlikely for the time being, he accepted a post as works manager at the Stanley Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he took charge of the construction and equipping of a new plant. At Pittsfield, Kimball developed an intimate knowledge of production methods, which, coupled with his practical machine shop experience and academic credentials, made him a logical candidate for the position of professor of mechanic arts at Cornell. Kimball accepted the appointment in 1904.

He was put in charge of reorganizing the shopwork department along more scientific lines, and a year later was made professor of machine design as well. He quickly became a leading spokesman for the transformation of engineering from a practical to a scientific curriculum. His primary technical field remained machine design, and his Elements of Machine Design (1909), written with John Barr, became the standard text. Reacting quickly to Frederick W. Taylor's new ideas of scientific management, Kimball organized courses in shop management at Cornell in 1904. Out of these lectures came Principles of Industrial Organization (1913), again the standard in the field. Kimball was thus able to draw upon his strong credentials in both the old (practical elements of machine design) and the new (scientific education and industrial management) schools of mechanical engineering, and was able to communicate with all groups in engineering education and industry.

His background, bolstered by administrative experience as acting president of Cornell from July to October 1918, led to Kimball's appointment as dean of Cornell's college of engineering in 1920.

In 1931 he was co-author of an American Engineering Council study of the Great Depression that was far more conservative in its recommendations for action than was the business community. In 1927, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover asked Kimball to organize the second Pan-American Standardization Conference. Kimball retired from the deanship at Cornell in 1936. In January 1941 he was asked to take charge of the Priorities Committee on Machine Tools and Equipment of the Office of Production Management, and in 1942 was appointed chief of the priority section, Machine Tool Division, of the War Production Board. In this capacity Kimball allocated the all-important machine tools as they came off the production line. Apparently he coined the slogan "Machine Tools--Master Tools of Industry. "

Achievements

• Kimball became known as a talented machine designer and installer. His main contribution was made through his management and his teaching at Cornell College. He introduced one of the earliest academic course in shop management, which was the first course based on the scientific management. He also supplemented his teaching with the series of textbooks, of which the most notable was Principles of Industrial Organization (1913). In 1933 he was awarded the Worcester Reed Warner Medal.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Progress and Promise of Engineering

    (On The Occasion Of The Centenary Celebration Of The Found...)

  • Principles of Industrial Organization

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Auditing and Cost-Finding: Part I: Auditing, by Seymour Walton ... Part Ii: Cost-Finding, by Dexter S. Kimball

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Cost Finding; Volume 10

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Plant Management

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Elements of Machine Design

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • I Remember

Membership

Kimball served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1921-1922 and of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education in 1929. He became involved, as vice-president from 1920 to 1922, in the new Federated American Engineering Societies, which many social-activist engineers hoped would become a liberalizing influence in the profession. An articulate spokesman for the mainstream of American engineering, Kimball became the president of the federation's successor, the American Engineering Council from 1926 to 1928.

Connections

In 1898 Kimball married Clara Evelyn Woolner. They had three children.

Father:

William Henry Kimball

Mother:

Jane Patterson Kimball

Spouse:

Clara Evelyn Woolner

References

• Encyclopedia of History of American Management