Daniel Craig McCallum (January 21, 1815 – December 27, 1878) was a Scottish-born American railroad engineer, general manager of the New York and Erie Railroad and Union Brevet Major General of the United States Military Railroad during the American Civil War, known as one of the early pioneers of management. He set down a group of general principles of management,John E. Clark, John Elwood Clark (2004) Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat.. p. 13 and is credited for having developed the first modern organizational chart.Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. p. 101
Early life and education McCallum was born in Johnstone in the council area of Renfrewshire in the west-central Lowlands of Scotland in 1815. In 1822, while he was still a boy, his family emigrated to Rochester, New York. He did attend elementary school but did not want to follow his father's footsteps and become a tailor. Instead, McCallum left school to become a carpenter and worked his way up.Daniel A. Wren (2005). The history of management thought. Wiley, 2005. p.85.
New York engineer In the early 1840s, McCallum worked as a civil engineer in Rochester, designing buildings including Saint Joseph's Church. Soon he started building and maintaining railway bridges as subcontractor for the New York and Erie Railroad.Renfrewshire's emigrants: Daniel Craig McCallum at renfrewshire.gov.uk. Accessed January 31, 2014, By the late 1840s, the New York and Erie Railroad placed McCallum in charge of its bridges,"McCallum's Patent Timber Bridge" in: American Railroad Journal. Saturday, June 19, 1852. and he started experimenting with new construction methods. He developed and in 1851 patented a new type of bridge, named the "McCallum Inflexible Arched Truss Bridge", which could withstand heavier loads and required less maintenance than previous designs. One such at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania over the Susquehanna River, drew national attention for its durable construction.
In the early 1850s, the New York and Erie Railroad promoted McCallum to the superintendent of the Susquehanna Division, one of the railroad's five operating divisions. About two years later (1854/54) he received another promotion, becoming the railroad's General Superintendent and succeeding Charles Minot during Homer Ramsdell's presidency. In this position, McCallum supervised the entire railroad, as well as restructured it to make it more efficient and safe. New management and communication methods used the telegraph. McCallum also described these new management principles and introduced the first modern organizational chart.The cases of Daniel McCallum and Gustavus Swift On February 25, 1857,Roger Pickenpaugh (1998) Rescue by Rail: Troop Transfer and the Civil War in the West, 1863. p. 17
In 1858, McCallum resigned from the Erie Railroad and founded the McCallum Bridge Company.John D Wright (2012) "McCallum, Daniel: Union general and military road director" in: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Civil War Era Biographies. p. 392
U.S. military railroads
On February 11, 1862, weeks after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Railways and Telegraph Act of January 31, 1862 (which authorized the president to seize and operate any railroad or telegraph company's equipment for use during the American Civil War), the new secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton appointed McCallum as military director and superintendent of the United States Military Railroad with the staff rank of colonel. The USMRR's primary mission was to repair and operate captured Southern lines to support the Union army.
The previous secretary of war, Simon Cameron, had called on the Pennsylvania Railroad's Vice President Thomas A. Scott to coordinate railroads and Scott had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of War. However, President Lincoln replaced Cameron in January after newspapers reported he unduly favored the North Central Railroad in which he was a stockholder, at the expense of rival railroads including the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, including allowing removed B&O track and telegraph wire to be shipped to repair damaged Virginia lines.Daniel Carroll Toomey, The War Came by Train: the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad during the Civil War (B&O Railway Museum 20130 pp. 61-63, 72-74, 80-82 On April 22, 1862, Stanton summoned West Point graduate Herman Haupt, who had become a leading railway engineer after resigning his U.S. Army commission and who had applied for Scott's job, to evaluate the engineering required to rebuild the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac line in Virginia. On May 28 Haupt was also appointed a colonel, but he twice refused military rank (including a promotion to brigadier general on September 5, 1862), instead of becoming the civilian Chief of Construction and Transportation in the Department of the Rappahannock. Although Haupt would have difficulties dealing with some military men, he worked well with McCallum.Toomey pp. 98-102
McCallum remained in Washington during the war to oversee the "big picture" of USMRR operations, and especially coordinate deliveries of locomotives and other equipment with manufacturers. He received a brevet promotion to brigadier-general of volunteers for faithful and meritorious services on September 24, 1864, and his authority was extended to the Western Theater and to support Sherman's Atlanta Campaign.Toomey pp. 98-99 He received another promotion to major general in 1865. In July 1866 McCallum was mustered out of the service and published a report on the military railroads during the war.
MacCallum also wrote a set of poems.THE WATER - MILL; AND OTHER POEMS By D. C. McCALLUM. 1871 The most famous was called 'Lights on the Bridge', which he wrote shortly before his death, memorializing his friend, Sam Campbell, a railroad engineer killed in 1842. McCallum himself died in Brooklyn, New York, on December 27, 1878.
Work
Architecture, 1830s-40s
McCallum was an architect in Rochester from 1840, and for a few subsequent years.The 1847 Daily American Directory of the City of Rochester (p. 157) still listed McCallum als architect holding office in Minerva Building. He was an accomplished architect and held a high position in his profession.W. H. McIntosh (1877) History of Monroe County, New York: With Illustrations. p. 142 Among the prominent buildings erected by him are the House of Refuge, St. Josephs Church, St. Marys Hospital, and the Odd-Fellows' Hall building. He did much to improve the general architecture of the city. His drawings and studies were carefully made, and his plans well-adapted to location.
The St. Josephs Church was originally built 1843–1846 in the simple monumental tradition of the Greek Revival, with a gray stone facade of series of arched bays on the exterior facade. The simple church was enlarged 1849 into a cruciform plan that sat a thousand. The interior was remodeled in 1895. The first steeple was added in 1859 and replaced with a tower in 1909, designed by Joseph Oberlies.Mary Johna Grzeskowiak, The Adaptive Use of Religious Structures, Rochester, New York: A Case Study (MSc Historic Preservation, Columbia University, 1986), p.83-102.J. Russiello, A Sympathetic Planning Hierarchy for Redundant Churches: A Comparison of Continued Use and Reuse in Denmark, England and the United States of America (MSc Conservation of Historic Buildings, University of Bath, 2008), p.370. Nowadays only the preserved facade of St. Joseph's Church has remained.
McCallum's inflexible arched truss bridge, 1840s–60s Late 1840s McCallum developed a specific truss bridge construction for the railroad bridges, called McCallum inflexible arched truss. It was constructed principally of pine timber, with less than the ordinary portion of iron rods, blots and casings. An editorial notice from Appletons' Mechanics' Magazine, edited by Julius W. Adams commented on McCallum's patent timber bridge, built-in 1851 over the Susquehanna River, near Lanesboro', Pennsylvania, for the New York and Erie railroad:
These inflexible arched trusses were used in wooden railroad bridges across the US and Canada in the 19th century. After his work at the New York and Erie Railroad, in 1858 McCallum founded the McCallum Bridge Company in Cincinnati. The company specialized in railroad bridges, which they build in the Western and Southern States.H.H. Boone, Theodore Pease Cook (1870) Life Sketches of Executive Officers and Members of the Legislature of the State of New York, Volume 3. p. 44 Some of the Howe truss men were so impressed by McCallum's business success (if not by his arguments) that they began arching their top chords, and a notable example of this practice was the Rock Island Bridge over the Mississippi River.Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. 26 The Society, 1892. p. 193 The advent of steel bridges in the 1860s effectively made obsolete his unique design.
Large-scale management problems at New York & Erie Railroad, 1850s
McCallum had started at the New York & Erie Railroad as a subcontractor to build and maintain bridges, was appointed superintendent of one region, and eventually made its general superintendent in 1855, controlling over 5000 employees. In this position McCallum came in contact with the large-scale management problems, which other great railroad companies such as the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad also faced.Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. "The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management". Business History Review 1965 39(1): 16-40. in JSTOR One of the main problems of these largest railroad companies was the rising of costs of moving freight in comparison to smaller companies. McCallum postulated that this was caused by the inefficient internal organization. In his 1856 report to the stockholders of the New York & Erie Railroad he explained:
New methods had to be invented for mobilizing, controlling, and apportioning capital, for operating a widely dispersed system, and for supervising thousands of specialized workmen spread over hundreds of miles. The railroads solved all these problems and became the model for all large businesses. The main innovators were three engineers, Benjamin H. Latrobe of the Baltimore and Ohio, McCallum of the Erie, and John Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania (railroad). They devised the functional departments and first defined the lines of authority, responsibility, and communication with the concomitant separation of line and staff duties which have remained the principles of the modern American corporation.
Illustrative organization chart, 1855
As general superintendent McCallum in 1855 designed an illustrative organization chart of the New York and Erie Railway, which is considered to be the first modern organization chart,Caitlin Rosenthal (2012) Big data in the age of the telegraph, McKinsey Quarterly, March 2013. which was compiled and drawn by the civil engineer George Holt Henshaw. On the chart is written,McCullum & Henshaw "Plan of Organization New York and Erie Railroad," September 1988. that the diagram represents a plan of organization, and exhibits the division of administrative duties and shows the number and class of employees engaged in each department, and is dated September 1855.
The chart explains that the diagram is compiled from the latest monthly report and indicates the average number of employees of each class engaged in the Operating Department of the railroad company. It shows the powers and duties of each individual and to whom they are subject to report. It further describes: