Gantt was born to a prosperous plantation family in Calvert County, Maryland at the outbreak of the American Civil War.

In 1884, Gantt began working as a draughtsman at the iron foundry and machine-shop Poole & Hunt in Baltimore.

They jointly received six patents and he followed Taylor to Simonds Rolling Company before they went to Bethlehem Steel for a consulting project.

[9] From 1902 to 1919 Gantt worked as a private consultant to industry on efficiency improvement and was active in promoting scientific management, as Taylor's general approach came to be called.

[10] In his later career as an industrial consultant, following the invention of the Gantt chart, he designed the 'task and bonus' system of wage payment and additional measurement methods for worker efficiency and productivity.

In 1916, influenced by Thorsten Veblen Gantt set up the New Machine, an association which sought to apply the criteria of industrial efficiency to the political process.

[14] The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) published his biography in 1934 and awards an annual medal in honor of Henry Laurence Gantt.

He argued that there needed to be a fair distribution of returns from industry to all segments of the community or society might seek to take control of the means of production.

He favored small versus large businesses to promote competition, lower prices and provide better quality and service to customers.

[5] A novel method of displaying interdependencies of processes to increase visibility of production schedules was invented in 1896 by Karol Adamiecki, which was similar to the one defined by Gantt in 1903.