International
To the land of the free and equal, where every mother's son had a chance to become a millionaire or President, sailed from France 29 years ago one Charles Eugene Bedaux. Although slight in stature and of no great muscle, this ambitious little Frenchman promptly took the highest paid job he could qualify for in Manhattan as an unskilled laborer, that of a "sand hog" digging skyscraper and subway foundations under heavy air pressure which gives a workman who emerges too quickly cramps and pains called "the bends." Using his brain as well as his shovel, Sand Hog Bedaux was able after a few years to begin living the American success story of which he had dreamed in France. The new trade of "efficiency expert" had fired his imagination and he invented the Bedaux System of "B (for Bedaux) Units" now defined by Webster's Dictionary as "A system of wage payment in which work is subdivided into units equivalent to the number of minutes that a task should take and the payment of the worker on the basis of the number of points of work accomplished in a given length of time."
It was Success when the onetime Sand Hog married as his second wife a pretty Daughter of the American Revolution, Middle-Western Miss Fern Lombard. It was Success when the small, swarthy little emigrant returned to his native France and bought for $750,000 a princely chateau in Touraine, ordering its ancient vineyard grubbed up to make a golf course which proved that Charles Eugene Bedaux had been thoroughly amalgamated in the American Melting Pot. It was Success for Mr. & Mrs. Bedaux to disport themselves on the Riviera with a wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Herman Rogers, one of whose dashing friends was a Mrs. Simpson. By this time Science was being served in columns of newsprint by the Bedaux Expedition of French Citroen caterpillar cars to the subarctic regions of Canada.
The American Federation of Labor's American Federationist said in its issue of September 1935 that the Bedaux system "stripped of its pseudo-technical verbiage, is nothing more nor less than a method of forcing the last ounce of effort out of workers at the smallest possible cost in wages." Next for Charles & Fern Bedaux a unique pleasure was in store—the abdicated King of England married Mrs. Simpson in their chateau in France (TIME, June 14). Later the honeymooning Duke and Duchess stayed at the Bedaux chateau in Hungary. And this week Mr. & Mrs. Bedaux landed in Manhattan charged to arrange and carry through a tour of the U. S. and possibly Canada by the present King of England's elder brother and His Majesty's eldest sister-in-law who are expected to arrive November 11 on the Bremen.