Kenneth Hopper

Kenneth Hopper (formally known as Robert D. Kenneth Hopper), a Scots engineer and now a US citizen, has made a lifelong study of different national manufacturing cultures. His studies of the origins of America's factory management culture and its influence on Japanese factory management and elsewhere after World War II have received international recognition. He is the author of numerous academic and professional articles on manufacturing and management.

He is married to Claire White Hopper, a former bank executive, and lives in Hackettstown, New Jersey. His brother, William Hopper, is an investment banker, based in London. Kenneth Hopper was born Glasgow, Scotland (May 1926).

Kenneth Hopper is the son of an eminent Scottish professor of chemistry who had been raised on a small farm in Northern Ireland and educated in a one-room schoolhouse through secondary school. The father's talent, however, earned him a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Science in Dublin. Professor Hopper, being Irish, was not allowed to serve in the Army during World War I, so he found employment as a graduate foreman with British Dyestuffs ( later the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd.). The nitroglycerine section, where he worked, was known as "the land of the one-legged stools," as plant operators could not be allowed to doze off allowing a vat of new highly explosive liquid to overheat and explode. His father, in addition to his duties at the Royal Technical College, was co-author of a respected text on organic chemistry which is still being used. Professor Hopper also headed the Scottish section for the Society of Chemical Industry. Kenneth recalls many discussions about the chemical industry around the family table, particularly the issues raised about his father's opinion that the Haber labs in Germany were much superior to any British installation. This question of the superior efficacy of various nations' manufactures was thus an early perception of Kenneth Hopper's.

Hopper attended "public" schools in Glasgow, graduating in 1942. During college, he worked one summer as a "production chaser" in the Cathcart Pump works and another in G & J Weir—a young man with a wheelbarrow fetching parts from remote departments, as he describes it. This also gave him the opportunity to visit many areas of the works and observe first-hand the practical problems of major manufacturers. He matriculated at Glasgow University, the premiere British training ground for technology. Upon graduation in 1946, he earned First Class Honours in Mechanical Engineering, Glasgow University.

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