Halbert Powers Gillette
[1][2][3] Born on August 5, 1869,[4] in Waverly, Iowa, to Theodore Weld and Laetitia S. (Powers),[5] Gillette attended the Hammond Hall Academy in Salt Lake City, from which he graduated in 1886.
Six years later in 1892, he received his engineering degree at the School of Mines at Columbia University,[5] where he was classmate of Edward B.
[6] After some years working in the industry, Gillette served as assistant New York State Engineer under Campbell W. Adams from 1896 to 1898.
Gillette died on June 18, 1958, and was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
[4] Starting in the early 1900s, Gillette wrote and co-wrote more than a dozen books on topics ranging from rock excavation, to management and cost accounting, to his latest work in the 1930s on forecasting weather.
A glance at the wide range in contract bids for most earthwork jobs will convince anyone that few contractors do more than guess at costs.
When we consider the labor, the power and the powder required to mine and to quarry products in the aggregate so enormously valuable, we can not fail to be impressed with the scantiness of literature on the economics of rock excavation.
A dozen years ago, when called upon to estimate the cost of some open cut rock excavation, I was astonished to find no text book that in the least served to guide me.
Juniper Prize-winning author Steve Yates wrote, "Here was a book created when engineers could still write like Henry David Thoreau and think like James B. Eads.
"[10] In the 1900s Gillette published as series of books on the more topic of construction cost keeping and management, which included: In Construction Cost Keeping and Management, Dana & Gillette (1909) gave an overview of the many appliances which were used in his days to compile records, and process information in business offices, including time clocks, the mimeograph, mechanical calculators (separate adding machines and multiplying machines), etc.
Dana & Gillette explained: ... it would be futile to attempt to make a complete outline that would apply to any contracting firm.
Gillette explained how this system worked at an engineering designing and general contracting office in Indianapolis, Indiana: The essential and fundamental feature of the system depends upon the form of the time sheet used (front view of time sheet (first image), and back view (second image)).
Under the old system with individual time sheets, prepared especially for each job, the forms of the time sheets were many and various, and, for this very reason timekeepers presumed to incorporate their own ideas and make changes and innovations, resulting in a bunch of data that required hours, and generally the personal attendance of the timekeepers, to work out.
In the beginning his theories made such bizarre reading from the point of view of scientists, that little attention seems to have been paid to them.
The real nature of electrons, and their ubiquity, now being better recognized, his ideas fall more into line with the thought of the day.Gillette has sought to tie up his theories to the clay varves, or seasonal layers, in lake deposits.
