(Excerpt from Bearings and Their Lubrication
The aim of t...)
Excerpt from Bearings and Their Lubrication
The aim of this book has been two fold; to present the underlying principles involved in the design of all classes of machinery bearings and to show modern practice in the construction and application of important commercial types. It is believed to be the first treatment of these subjects ever put into book form.
The tendency of modern machine design in many fields is toward the use of high speed shafts and spindles and friction reducing forms of bearings. There fore the present seems a peculiarly fitting time to present these data with the purpose of making them permanently useful to engineers, designers, draftsmen and machinists; in fact to any one who is interested in any way with machinery bearings and their proper lubrication and care.
Many of the data have never before been published in any form. Many of the experiments and researches quoted are from European sources and official transactions of technical societies and are not generally known to American readers.
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Leon Pratt Alford was an American engineer and organizational theorist. He served as an administrator for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Background
Leon Pratt Alford was born on January 3, 1877 in Simsbury, Connecticut, United States. He was the youngest of five children of Emerson and Sarah Merriam (Pratt) Alford. His father, who had earlier been one of Connecticut's pioneer tobacco growers, was superintendent of the Collins Axe Company; he later served in the state legislature.
Education
Alford was educated at the Plainville high school and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1896.
Alford completed a thesis entitled "Power Problems in Connection with the Development of Plans for a Manufacturing Plant, " for which in 1905 he received the Master of Engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic.
Career
Alford joined the McKay Metallic Fastening Association in Winchester, Massachussets, which in 1902 became part of the United Shoe Machinery Company. He rose rapidly from assistant machine shop foreman to production superintendent, and when in 1902 the United Shoe Machinery Company built a new plant in Beverly, Massachussets--at the time the world's largest reinforced concrete factory building--he assisted in its design and in the installation of its machinery. In 1906 he was promoted to head of United Shoe's mechanical engineering department.
Alford moved to New York City in 1907 to become associate editor of the American Machinist, a prestigious machinery and manufacturing journal to which he had contributed articles. While in New York he also became active in the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (A. S. M. E. ), and through it became acquainted with such pioneers in industrial management as Frederick W. Taylor and Henry L. Gantt. Thereafter Alford devoted his life to publicizing the ideas and programs of this movement. Alford's report of 1911, "The Present State of the Art of Industrial Management, " constituted in effect the first endorsement of Taylor's approach by the A. S. M. E. In two later reports for that organization (1922, 1932) Alford summed up and analyzed developments of the preceding decades.
As editor-in-chief, from 1911 to 1917, of the American Machinist, and then as editor of Industrial Management (1917-1920), Management Engineering (1921-1923), and Manufacturing Industries (1923-1928), he provided a platform for ideas in industrial management. He himself wrote many articles interpreting the work of Taylor, Gantt, and others to a large audience of engineers; he published a biography of Gantt in 1934. At the 1926 meeting of the A. S. M. E. , Alford read a widely praised paper in which he presented a codification of scientific management principles. This codification was later expanded and published as Laws of Management Applied to Manufacturing (1928); it was largely incorporated into his later text, Principles of Industrial Management (1940).
In 1927 Alford helped organize the Institute of Management, a research group affiliated with the American Management Association, and later served as the Institute's president.
As vice-president from 1922 to 1934 of the Ronald Press Company, Alford prepared some of the first handbooks in the management field, Management's Handbook (1924) and Cost and Production Handbook (1934). He was active in other groups, including the American Engineering Council and the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education. He left Ronald Press in 1934 (though remaining on its board of directors) to head the manufacturing costs unit of the Federal Communications Commission.
In 1937 he was appointed chairman of the department of industrial engineering at New York University, a position he retained until his death. He died of a heart ailment at the Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City the day before his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried at Avon, Connecticut.