11/28/2016 Chelsey Coombs
Lillian Gilbreth is held to be the first true industrial/organizational psychologist.
Written by Chelsey Coombs
You may have read the book or seen the movie “Cheaper by the Dozen,” the story of the Gilbreth family of 14. But Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were more than just busy parents of a large family; they were also instrumental in founding the discipline of industrial engineering.
Born in Maine in 1868, Frank Bunker Gilbreth was apprenticed to a bricklayer after graduating from high school. During his apprenticeship, Frank saw that no two bricklayers used the same method, and that this inconsistency led to inefficiency. To solve this problem, he created a scaffold to prevent the workers from having to bend down to pick up bricks, which resulted in a decrease in the number of motions bricklayers had to perform from 18 to only 4.5, thus increasing the number of bricks put in place from 1,000 to 2,700 per day.
Born in 1878 in California, Lillian Moller Gilbreth came of age in time when most women did not have the opportunity to pursue higher education. Lillian went above and beyond, completing a B.S. and an M.A. in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, then a doctorate degree in English with a minor in psychology at Brown University.
The two married in 1904 and Lillian joined Frank as a full partner in his contracting firm. During this venture the couple became important pioneers in industrial engineering and workplace psychology. They were among the first to use movies for motion studies and created the micro-motion study. They would film workers performing tasks, then break down each movement involved into parts called therbligs (Gilbreth spelled backward).
Later, during his service in World War I, Frank suggested similar innovations for the field of wartime surgery: instead of having doctors hunt for their own surgical instruments, nurse could hand doctors their tools. In hindsight, this seems like a simple fix, but it was a major improvement.
The Gilbreths’ twelve children often served as “guinea pigs” for the pair’s experiments. Trained in efficiency, they helped streamline everyday activities such as taking a bath and completing assigned chores.
Their parents’ household management style inspired Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and his sister, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, to write two books, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “Belles On Their Toes.”
After Frank’s death in 1924, Lillian continued their consulting business alone, working with manufacturers to improve kitchen appliance efficiency and pioneer techniques that would allow disabled people to more easily perform household tasks. She even designed the triangular configuration of the kitchen that appears in most houses today, in which the refrigerator, stove and sink enclose a counter perimeter of 26 feet or less. A desk she designed was shown at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
In addition to writing four books and teaching at Purdue, Bryn Mawr and Rutgers, Lillian devoted much of her time to public service, serving on President Hoover’s Emergency Committee for Employment and many subsequent boards up through the Korean War. She was the first woman to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the first member of the Society of Women Engineers. She died in 1972.
We salute the Gilbreths for the important role they played in initiating the work that the Illinois Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering carries on today: making life easier and more efficient for people around the world.