Howard Scott (engineer)

Howard Scott (April 1, 1890 – January 1, 1970) was an American researcher and founder of the philosophy of Technocracy. He formed the Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated.

Little is known about Scott's early life and he has been described as a "mysterious young man". He was born in Virginia in 1890 and was of Scottish-Irish ancestry. He claimed to have been educated in Europe, but his training did not include any formal higher education.

In 1918, soon before the end of the First World War, Scott appeared in New York City. Scott worked in various construction camps, where he acquired some engineering experience, and in 1918 was working with a cement pouring group at Muscle Shoals. After this, Scott established himself in Greenwich Village as "a kind of Bohemian engineer". Scott also managed a small business named Duron Chemical Company which made paint and floor polish at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. Scott's job was to deliver his goods and show his customers how to use the floor polishing material.

At the end of World War I, Howard Scott helped to form the Technical Alliance which studied economic and social trends in North America; the Technical Alliance disbanded in 1921.

Scott was queried by a few men seeking for research to be done; it's unknown who exactly suggested Scott to them. But when he first did their research it was about copper consumption for a potential copper industry strike, and Scott wasn't aware at first that the men who hired him were officials of the Industrial Workers of the World, or that the research was intended for a strike, though he learned of it eventually.

According to Ralph Chaplin he met Scott in Greenwich Village and was invited to his studio. Chaplin and Scott discussed the improvement of the I.W.W to better help a worker revolution and Scott was said to have made some impressive statements, insisting that the revolutionary force will be with engineers. They also talked about Thorstein Veblen's Soviet of Engineers. Scott was dissatisfied with Veblen's use of the word 'Soviet'. Chaplin spoke of the IWW's need to have organized information. Scott suggested an Industrial Research Bureau explaining the importance of having all the data for an informed decision.

Chaplin wrote: "That idea appealed to me at once. After all, the engineer was included in our revised "One Big Union" chart. But I resented the bohemian atmosphere in which Scott seemed to thrive. All the time he was discoursing so plausibly about teardrop automobiles, flying wing airplanes, and technological unemployment, I was looking at the other side of the studio where an appalling phallic watercolor painting was displayed among blueprints and graphs on a big easel. Evidently the "Great Scott" was a man of diversified interests."

In correspondence between Assistant Professor of Economics J. Kaye Faulkner and Howard Scott, Prof. Faulkner questioned Scott's and Chaplin's interactions, mentioning Chaplin's book "Wobbly, the rough-and-tumble story of an American radical" To which Scott denied having talked to Chaplin for very long, or to having a phallic painting. As Scott puts it — "I never had a painting, phallic or otherwise, and if I had had a painting I certainly would not mix it up with blue prints and mathematical charts."