An Introduction to the Psychological Problems of Industry
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ELIMINATION OF FATIGUE THROUGH MOTION STUDY1 § i. THE WORK OF MR. F B. GILBRETH No one at this stage will deny that a great deal of industrial work is quite unnecessarily fatiguing and that a little forethought would eliminate the larger proportion of that which is due to ignorance and carelessness. In this connection the investigator who has probably done more than anyone else to introduce anti-fatigue devices into industry, and whose work has consequently aroused the greatest interest and fiercest controversy, is Mr. F. B. Gilbreth, an American engineer born in 1868. He came under the full influence of the late Dr. F. W. Taylor in 19o6, and since then he has devoted himself wholeheartedly to furthering the scientific management movement, making good many of the deficiencies of his master'
...s work. But as early as 1892 he had received a silver medal for devices which reduced considerably the fatigue of bricklayers at their work. Gilbreth's analysis and improvement of the bricklayer's art has excited widespread admiration and brought him an international reputation, so that we ought to study his methods closely. They were the mature fruit of the seed sown by Taylor in his time-and-motion experiments carried out with the aid of the stop-watch. 1 See footnote, p. 21. J See Bricklaying System. so During his preliminary observations of the habits of work of several representative bricklayers, Gilbreth discovered to his astonishment that they were all performing thousands of times a day movements which were exceedingly laborious and yet utterly unnecessary ; like Taylor's pig-iron loaders, they often put themselves unnecessarily " under load" and tired themselves when there was no real occasion for doing so. Bricklaying is one of the oldest of human occupa...
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