Frank & Lillian Gilbreth Simulacrum

The Lives

Frank Bunker Gilbreth was born in Fairfield, Maine, in 1868, began his working life as a bricklayer, and rose to become a general contractor whose analytical attention to the physical work of construction produced a systematic method for reducing the wasted motion in manual labour. Lillian Evelyn Moller was born in Oakland, California, in 1878, took a psychology doctorate from Brown University, and was one of the first American women to combine a serious academic career with marriage and a large family. They married in 1904 and collaborated for the following twenty years until Frank's death in 1924. Lillian continued their joint work alone for another forty-eight years, dying in 1972. They had twelve children, and the account of their family life by two of them, *Cheaper by the Dozen* (1948), became an American popular classic.

The Thought

The Gilbreths' central contribution was the development of motion study as a systematic discipline distinct from, and more nuanced than, Frederick Taylor's time study. Where Taylor had asked how long each step in a task should take, the Gilbreths asked whether each step should be performed at all, and if so, in what sequence and with what specific bodily motion. Frank's analysis of bricklaying — using photography to capture the exact motion of skilled workers — reduced the number of motions required to lay a brick from eighteen to five, substantially increasing the productivity of a skilled bricklayer without asking any individual worker to move faster.

The further refinement the Gilbreths introduced — the *therblig* (their surname read backwards, with the *th* transposed), a unit of elementary motion — provided a vocabulary for analysing manual work that could decompose any task into its component motions and evaluate each for necessity and efficiency. Lillian's subsequent work, developed after Frank's death, extended the analysis into the psychological and ergonomic dimensions of work: worker fatigue, the design of kitchens and domestic equipment, the employment of disabled workers, the psychological factors that made some work environments productive and others not.

The Legacy

Motion study and the therblig vocabulary shaped industrial engineering through the twentieth century, and elements of the Gilbreths' approach persist in contemporary ergonomics, human-factors engineering, and the design of manufacturing workstations. Lillian's extensive later work, less famous than the joint motion studies, was substantial on its own terms: her consulting for Macy's, Sears, and General Electric shaped the design of domestic products for an American generation; her research on the kitchen design of the 1930s produced many of the layout principles still used in domestic kitchens. She was, in her own right, one of the first women elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the first American woman to receive honorary doctorates in engineering.