Frank gilbreth and lillian gilbreth biography

The symbol of Taylorism was the stopwatch ; Taylor was concerned primarily with reducing process times. The Gilbreths, in contrast, sought to make processes more efficient by reducing the motions involved. They saw their approach as more concerned with workers' welfare than Taylorism, which workers themselves often perceived as concerned mainly with profit.

This difference led to a personal rift between Taylor and the Gilbreths which, after Taylor's death, turned into a feud between the Gilbreths and Taylor's followers. After Frank's death, Lillian Gilbreth took steps to heal the rift; [ 11 ] however, some friction remains over questions of history and intellectual property. In conducting their Motion Study method to work, they found that the key to improving work efficiency was in reducing unnecessary motions.

Not only were some motions unnecessary, but they caused employee fatigue. Their efforts to reduce fatigue included reduced motions, tool redesign, parts placement, and bench and seating height, for which they began to develop workplace standards. The Gilbreths' work broke ground for contemporary understanding of ergonomics. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth often used their large family and Frank himself as guinea pigs in experiments.

Their family exploits are frank gilbreth and lillian gilbreth biography detailed in the book Cheaper by the Dozenwritten by son Frank Jr. The book inspired a film and the title inspired a second and third unrelated film of the same name. The first, instarred Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy. The third, inalso bears no relation to the book and starred Gabrielle Union and Zach Braff.

His maxim of "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it" is still commonly used today, although it is often misattributed to Bill Gateswho merely repeated the quote but did not originate it. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth wrote in collaboration, but Lillian's name was not included on the title page until after she earned her PhD.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. American industrial engineer — Fairfield, MaineU. Montclair, New JerseyU. Builder Industrial engineer Management consultant. Lillian Moller. Biography [ edit ].

Early life and education [ edit ]. Whidden Construction Company [ edit ]. Career as general contractor [ edit ]. Career as efficiency expert [ edit ]. Family [ edit ]. Death [ edit ]. Work [ edit ]. Motion studies [ edit ]. Main articles: Time and motion study and Gilbreth, Inc. Scientific management [ edit ]. Fatigue study [ edit ].

Legacy [ edit ]. Selected publications [ edit ]. Bricklaying System. The M. Clark Publishing Co. ISBN LCCN OCLC Together The Gilbreths formed one of the great husband-and-wife teams of science and engineering. In the early s, they started work on the development of motion study as a performance improvement technique. Frank, who started his working life as a bricklayer, had noticed that no two bricklayers seemed to use the same method — each developed his own individual technique.

InGilbreth published Field System, his first book. The book contained the ideas of the men he employed: he had gathered information by asking his workers to record exactly what they did during the course of the day and what they would recommend for improvement. Written for laborers, the book was the first of its kind, documenting daily organizational and functional practices in construction.

It was also the first in a series of similar books by Gilbreth, in which he would provide specific information on work tasks, even using photographic details to show the positions of a worker's feet during certain tasks. As he integrated his work on the expediency of motion with his wife's concentration on the psychology of the individual, Gilbreth grew less involved in the construction industry.

He and his wife began to join their efforts in pursuit of the link between psychology and management, and together they established the fundamental place of psychology and education in effective management. In the Gilbreths started the Summer School of Scientific Management, which for four years was attended by academic and industry professionals from around the world.

Contacts developed through the school gave Gilbreth an international consulting reputation. The early months of World War I found Gilbreth in Germany, visiting industrial plants, teaching, testing, installing new machines, and establishing laboratories. As injured soldiers began returning to Germany, Gilbreth worked to improve surgical procedures, and he was the first to use motion-picture photography in the operating room for the education of surgeons.

He also became an expert in the rehabilitation of injured soldiers. He visited hospitals throughout Europe, watching the motions of the injured soldiers, and developed ways to teach them to manage their daily activities. His paper on this subject, "Motion Study for the Handicapped," was written with his wife and presented at the Tenth Sagamore Sociological Conference in It included ideas such as a typewriter with all capital letters, eliminating the need for a shift key, which requires two-handed operation.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Gilbreth's work during this period was the study of the seventeen fundamental motions used to perform physical tasks, such as search, find, select, grasp, and position. He created a visual chart, used to adapt jobs to injured soldiers, that illustrated each fundamental motion, thereby enabling the visual dissection of tasks and the substitution of motions from one task to another.

The increasing intensity of World War I slowed Gilbreth's work abroad, so he concentrated on building a consulting business that catered to the firms he felt most needed his expertise. He shunned companies that treated their employees poorly, believing that bad treatment of the consultant would follow. Gilbreth loathed companies that benefited from his time-saving methods to increase profits only to keep them from their employees, and contracted with companies that promised to increase wages as sales increased, among them Eastman Kodak, U.

Rubber, and Pierce Arrow. He reported to the War College in Washington to prepare educational films for soldier training, but a heart ailment ended his service shortly thereafter.

Frank gilbreth and lillian gilbreth biography

The Gilbreth family bought a small house in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to facilitate his recovery, but from that time on he would carry heart medication with him at all times. Gilbreth's consulting business thrived after the war. Inthe American Society of Mechanical Engineers instituted its Management Division, something Gilbreth had been working to establish for many years.

He was now one of the most widely known American engineers in the United States and Europe, reaping financial rewards and many professional honors. He suggested the first international management congress in history to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and it was held in Prague in He died suddenly of a heart attack shortly afterwards, on June 14,while traveling from his home in Montclair, New Jerseyto New York City.

The publisher, however, insisted it appear under the name L. Gilbreth, so that it would not be automatically rejected by its intended male readership because the author was a woman. Frank Gilbreth eventually abandoned his construction business to concentrate on industrial management full time. He wrote more books with Lillian, and both were active in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

This was a federal agency established to monitor the rates that railroads charged their freight customers. He explained to lawmakers the principles behind his motion studies of workers on the job. At one point he even demonstrated his point by stacking up law books to show how a brick wall was built. He argued that the railroads, which had asked the ICC for permission to raise their tariffs, or rates, could be run more efficiently by using some of the ideas behind scientific management.

In the end the commission members voted against the proposed tariff increase, and Gilbreth's new management consulting business earned a lot of free publicity. The year was one of great change for the Gilbreths. They had five children by then, but their second daughter, five-year-old Mary, died at home of diphtheria in January. They frank gilbreth and lillian gilbreth biography had a professional disagreement with Taylor, who even claimed that he had given Frank Gilbreth the idea for the adjustable scaffold back in the s, long before the two had ever met.

Taylor was under a great deal of criticism at the time, and his ideas were called authoritarian favoring blind submission to authority and insulting to the workers. He was forced to defend them before lawmakers who sat on the Labor Committee of the U. House, and that led to a forty-year ban on the use of the stopwatch on any federal project.

Their new consulting firm had also won its first major client, the New England Butt Company, which made the braiding machines that were used to manufacture shoelaces and other consumer goods at its vast Providence headquarters. The Gilbreths installed the factory organization scheme known as the Taylor system there but also put some of their own theories into practice.

One of these was a suggestion box, and the company gave a monthly cash prize to the worker with the best new idea. Lillian was a strong advocate of the rest break, which was considered an unusual concept at the time. She presented studies proving that it actually increased productivity in workers. She also designed a number of motion study experiments, which Frank carried out at the Butt Company.

The motion studies would become the Gilbreths' most significant professional achievement, and they spent hours perfecting their ideas. At their home Frank set up a special desk with a grid pattern on it. He filmed Lillian doing various small tasks over the squares of the grid while she wore a ring with a small electric light attached to it.

They then studied the film footage and plotted out, with the help of the grid, how to reduce wasted motion. Their system, which they named the stereocyclegraph, was first used at their next consulting job, this time for a New Jersey handkerchief factory. In the Gilbreths founded the Summer School of Scientific Management, which offered courses on their motion study and psychology research.

The school was well attended by management professionals from across the United States and helped boost their reputation as innovative industrial engineers. He spent two months touring AEG factories and suggesting improvements, and during this time he saw the permanently injured soldiers returning from the battlefield. He began to think about applying some of the motion study ideas to try to help the suddenly disabled recover physically.

Frank began working with veterans in military hospitals who had lost a limb or part of one. Out of this effort came his study of the seventeen fundamental motions used to perform physical tasks. These included search, find, select, grasp, and position, and each of these he called a "therblig," which was Gilbreth spelled backwards. He devised a chart that showed diagrams for each, which was used to help the disabled relearn certain tasks.

Lillian, meanwhile, was granted her doctorate from Brown in She was the first among the founders of scientific management to earn one in the field of industrial psychology. One of the few women of her generation to accept a Ph. In the years following World War Ithe Gilbreths' consulting business thrived. Frank was determined to avoid the bad reputation that Taylor had earned among ordinary workers and labor unions, and he would only take clients who were progressive in their attitudes.

These included Eastman Kodak, U. Rubber, and Pierce Arrow, an automobile manufacturer. They were also hired by the Remington Typewriter Company to come up with the ideal method for teaching beginners how to type. By then the Gilbreths had discovered that their growing family could be used to help them carry out their research, and they practiced typing methods with the younger children on Remingtons with color-coded keys.

Once the younger ones were put to bed, the older children sat down at typewriters with blanked-out keys. Frank's interests in medicine and recorded motion studies led to his filming of operations in hospitals.