1. Charles Eugene Bedaux was a French-American millionaire who made his fortune developing and implementing the work measurement aspect of scientific management, notably the Bedaux System.
32 Facts About Charles Bedaux
1. 2.
Charles Bedaux was born in the Charenton-le-Pont commune, suburb of Paris, France.
3.
Charles Bedaux's father worked for the French railroad system, and though his two brothers Daniel and Gaston became engineers, Charles became a school dropout.
4.
Charles Bedaux worked a series of menial jobs before befriending Henri Ledoux, a successful pimp from the infamous Pigalle district.
5.
On 14 February 1906, Charles Bedaux moved to the United States, where in 1917 he became a United States citizen.
6.
Charles Bedaux then worked as an interpreter for AM Morrini, an Italian industrial engineering firm studying efficiency measurements.
7.
Charles Bedaux accompanied Morrini to Europe, where Charles Bedaux started working for Louis Duez's consulting company in 1913.
8.
Charles Bedaux returned to the US, settling his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
9.
In 1917, Charles Bedaux divorced Blanche, and married Fern Lombard on 2 July.
10.
Charles Bedaux was one of the leading contributors in the field of work measurement or labor measurement, one aspect of the scientific management movement.
11.
Charles Bedaux named this the "Bedaux System of Human Power Measurement".
12.
The distinguishing feature of the Charles Bedaux System was its use of the Charles Bedaux Unit or B, a universal measure for all manual work.
13.
Charles Bedaux mimicked Frank Gilbreth by introducing a motion study Kodascope package which he propagated with an early Charles Bedaux client, Kodak.
14.
Charles Bedaux became associated with one of Taylor's circles, Harrington Emerson, whose management consultancy firm, The Emerson Institute, Charles Bedaux emulated in engineering and other sectors of modern industrial economies.
15.
Major Charles Bedaux clients included DuPont, Imperial Chemical Industries, Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Fiat, and Campbell's.
16.
The Charles Bedaux system was introduced at Campbell's in 1927, where B standards were 'the cause of the majority of the shop floor battles between management and labor' for years.
17.
Charles Bedaux Britain had several labor issues: in 1929, there was a strike over the Charles Bedaux System at the Rover plant in Coventry.
18.
The Charles Bedaux System met with resistance at the Pertusola mines in Sardinia.
19.
The party failed to reach their destination, and the original movie was never made, but in 1995, Canadian director, George Ungar, produced a television biography of Charles Bedaux incorporating Crosby's footage of the expedition, The Champagne Safari.
20.
In 1927, Charles Bedaux purchased the sixteenth-century Chateau de Cande in Indre-et-Loire, France and lived there with his second wife, the former Fern Lombard, a daughter of lawyer James Lombard of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
21.
Charles Bedaux arranged the couple's visit, where they publicly met the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
22.
Charles Bedaux was quickly demonized in the media around the globe.
23.
In 1941, Charles Bedaux experimented with a political-economic system of his own invention, Equivalism, in Roquefort, Vichy France, though recent research has shown that the experiments amounted to tinkering which locals hardly noticed.
24.
The countersabotage plan then became obsolete, though it looked suspicious when Charles Bedaux was later investigated by the FBI and MI5.
25.
In December, 1942, shortly after the Allied military landings in North Africa in Operation Torch, Charles Bedaux was in Algeria promoting the construction of water and peanut oil pipelines between West Africa and the Mediterranean coast for the benefit of Allied forces.
26.
Charles Bedaux was kept in custody without charge for a year.
27.
Charles Bedaux was eventually flown to the US, and, awaiting charges of trading with the enemy and treason, killed himself by taking an overdose of barbiturates while in FBI custody in the Dade County Prison in Miami, Florida.
28.
Charles Bedaux's death featured prominently in the contemporary US media, where Bedaux had few friends.
29.
Charles Bedaux was not discussed in Urwick's comprehensive management prosopography The Golden Book of Management.
30.
Many of Charles Bedaux's possessions are on display at the chateau.
31.
Charles Bedaux appears as a thwarted efficiency expert, Monsieur Bedou of Ratio Ltd.
32.
At the time of his death, some suggested that Charles Bedaux was either killed or allowed to kill himself in order to prevent him from implicating other prominent businessmen.