Emile Oscar Garcke (1856 – 14 November 1930) was a naturalised British electrical engineer, industrial, commercial and political entrepreneur managing director of the British Electric Traction Company (BET), and early author on accounting. who is noted for writing the earliest standard text on cost accounting in 1887.
Biography
Born in the Kingdom of Saxon in 1856, Garcke came to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at an early age, becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1880.
In 1883 he became Secretary of the Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, was promoted to Manager in 1887 and became Managing Director of its successor company, Brush Electrical Engineering Company in 1891. In 1893 he was managing director of the Electric Construction Co and lead its reorganisation.
He was a great believer in electric traction and set up the British Electric Traction Pioneer Co. in 1895. The following year he became Managing Director of the new company, now renamed British Electric Traction Co, which was involved in the electrification of tramways in Britain and abroad. The company became the largest private owner of tramways in the British Isles.
He was chairman of the council of the Industrial Co-partnership Association. and helped to found the British Institute of Philosophical Studies. He wrote a number of articles about the use of electricity for the 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica for example the lemma on Electric lighting, and on the Telephone. He was also a keen publisher of electrical books, some of which were published as the “Manuals” series, such as Garcke's Manual of Electricity Supply, even after his death.
In London Garcke was the City's expert on electrical applications, and chaired the Electrical Committee of the London Chamber of Commerce. Garcke was elected Fellow of Royal Statistical Society, and member of the Institute of Actuaries.
Garcke retired in 1929 and died in 1930. He had married Alice, the daughter of John Withers, and had a son Sidney.
Work
Factory accounts, their principles and practice, 1887
In 1887 Garcke and the accountant John Manger Fells (1858-1925) published their book Factory accounts, their principles and practice. In the preface of the second edition they presented their work as the "first attempt to place before English readers a systematised statement of the principles regulating Factory Accounts ; and of the methods by which those principles can be put into practice and made to serve important purposes in the economy of manufacture."
While works on general accounting and new accounting methods had been written since the renaissance, Garcke and Fells specifically focussed on the cost accounting for manufacturing.
The need for factory accounting
In the preface of the second edition of Factory Accounts (1889) Garcke and Fells further explained about the intention of this work.
It is not necessary to convince men of business of the advantages and importance of correct mercantile bookkeeping ; but as regards their factories and warehouses they are for the most part content to accept accounts which are not capable of scientific verification. Such accounts can only be regarded as memoranda of transactions.Our aim has been to show not only that as great a degree of accuracy can be attained in factory bookkeeping as in commercial accounts, but that the books of a manufacturing business can scarcely be said to be complete and reliable unless they are supplemented by, and to a large extent based upon, the accounts special to a factory.The principles of Factory Accounts do not differ in the main from those general rules on which all sound book-keeping is based, and we have but applied fundamental axioms to the practice of an important and extending* branch of industrial accounts ; and with the view of rendering the book of special utility to Accountants we have not dealt with the principles and practice of accounts in so far as they apply merely to elementary and commercial book-keeping, as to do so would, in large measure, be a work of supererogation.
One of the special features of this work was the additional eight page long glossary of terms, while other authors in those days embedded the meaning of term within their text.
Forms for factory administration
A main part of Garcke and Fells' Factory Accounts (1889) relates to the administration of factory events, and specifically the administration of labour, shop orders, stores, and stock with special procedures and forms.