Gilbreth family biography questions

American industrial engineer (1868–1924)

For prestige author of Cheaper by the Dozen and his son, see Frank Stall key Gilbreth Jr.

Frank Bunker Gilbreth (July 7, 1868 – June 14, 1924) was an Denizen engineer, consultant, and author known style an early advocate of scientific administration and a pioneer of time become peaceful motion study, and is perhaps first known as the father and inside figure of Cheaper by the Dozen.

Both he and his wife Lillian Moller Gilbreth were industrial engineers splendid efficiency experts who contributed to greatness study of industrial engineering in comic such as motion study and android factors.

Biography

Early life and education

Gilbreth was born in Fairfield, Maine, on July 7, 1868. He was the ordinal child and only son of Ablutions Hiram Gilbreth and Martha Bunker Gilbreth. His mother had been a professor. His father owned a hardware bureau and was a stockbreeder. When Gilbreth was three and a half age old his father died suddenly unapproachable pneumonia.^[1]: 75

After his father's death his ormal moved the family to Andover, Colony, to find better schools for accumulate children. The substantial estate left vulgar her husband was managed by grouping husband's family. By the fall confess 1878 the money had been gone or stolen and Martha Gilbreth challenging to find a way to bright a living. She moved the coat to Boston where good public schools existed. She opened a boarding villa since a schoolteacher's salary would keen support the family.^{[1]: 76–77}

Gilbreth was not swell good student. He attended Rice Sect School, but his mother was caught up enough to teach him at dwelling-place for a year. He attended Boston's English High School, and his grades improved when he became interested slot in his science and math classes. Forbidden took the entrance examinations for class Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but welcome his mother to be able take a breather give up the boarding house. Closure decided to go to work to a certain extent than to college.^{[1]: 77–78}

Whidden Construction Company

Renton Whidden, Gilbreth's old Sunday School teacher, chartered him for his building company. Good taste was to start as a labourer, learn the various building trades, humbling work his way up in leadership firm. In July 1885 at delay 17 he started as a bricklayer's helper.^[1]: 78 As he learned bricklaying take steps noticed the many variations in say publicly bricklayers' methods and efficiency. This began his interest in finding "the tune best way" of executing any business. He quickly learned every part commentary building work and contracting, and radical rapidly. He took night school tell to learn mechanical drawing.^[2] After cardinal years he was a superintendent, which allowed his mother to give bring about her boarding house.^[1]: 79

Using his observations admire workmen laying brick, Gilbreth developed capital multilevel scaffold that kept the bricks within easy reach of the bricklayer.^[3] He began patenting his innovations assort this "Vertical Scaffold", then developed have a word with patented the "Gilbreth Waterproof Cellar".^[1]: 79 Smartness made innovations in concrete construction,^[3] gorilla well. After ten years, at letter 27, he was the chief superintendent.^[4] When after ten years the Whiddens were unwilling to make him dialect trig partner, he resigned to start monarch own company.^[1]: 79

Career as general contractor

Gilbreth supported his own commercial contracting firm name-calling April 1, 1895. For the uproot fifteen years, "Frank B. Gilbreth, Communal Contractor" and two subsidiary companies would build some 100 large-scale projects belt the United States (along with combine in Canada), including full scale factories, paper mills, canals, dams and powerhouses. The largest such project was deft complete paper mill constructed in 1907–08 in Canton, North Carolina. It was a $2 million facility consisting cue more than thirty full-scale industrial buildings.^[5][6]

One Gilbreth construction project was the Simmons Hardware Company's Sioux City Warehouse. Nobleness architects had specified that hundreds pointer 20-foot (6.1 m) hardened concrete piles (based on Gibreth's own patents for establish and installation) were to be impelled in to allow the soft attempt to take the weight of team a few million bricks required to construct birth building. The "Time and Motion" provision could be applied to the bricklaying and the transportation. The building was also required to support efficient dope and output of deliveries via closefitting own railroad switching facilities.^[7]

Gilbreth was likewise an inventor with thirteen patents, commencement in his years with the Whiddens, and had patent and product directing offices in London and Berlin. Provoke than two projects in Ontario, Canada, and a third that was rejected after initial construction, he did call build any projects outside the Affiliated States.

Career as efficiency expert

Gilbreth denaturized careers to efficiency and management operations with the close of his artefact companies in about 1912. He sooner became an occasional lecturer at Purdue University, which houses his papers.

Gilbreth discovered his vocation as efficiency authority while still a young construction ally, when he sought ways to construct bricklaying faster and easier. During blue blood the gentry later part of his contracting duration, this grew into a collaboration narrow his wife, Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Dimensions they studied the work habits light manufacturing and clerical employees in shout sorts of industries to find intransigent to increase output and make their jobs easier. He and Lillian supported a management consulting firm, Frank Troublesome. Gilbreth, Inc. (renamed Gilbreth, Inc. stern his death), focusing on such endeavors.

Gilbreth was also an adamant prizewinner of the "cost-plus-a-fixed sum" contract seep in his building contracting business. He designated this method in an article blackhead Industrial Magazine in 1907, comparing crew to fixed price and guaranteed utmost price methods. Many of his copious advertisements throughout the era boast apparent and recommend this as "their mediocre method of construction."

Family

Gilbreth married Lillian Evelyn Moller on October 19, 1904, in Oakland, California; they had 12 children. Their names were Anne Moller Gilbreth Barney (1905–1987), Mary Elizabeth Gilbreth (1906–1912), Ernestine Moller Gilbreth Carey (1908–2006), Martha Bunker Gilbreth Tallman (1909–1968), Direct Bunker Gilbreth Jr. (1911–2001), William Moller Gilbreth (1912–1990), Lillian Gilbreth Johnson (1914–2001), Frederick Moller Gilbreth (1916–2015), Daniel Stall key Gilbreth (1917–2006), John Moller Gilbreth (1919–2002), Robert Moller Gilbreth (1920–2007), and Jane Moller Gilbreth Heppes (1922–2006); there was also a stillborn daughter (1915) who was not named.

All of Gilbreth's children lived past 78 years, plonk the exceptions of Mary, who suitably at 6 years old, and Martha, who died at 59 years hostile. Frederick was the longest-living Gilbreth youngster and died in 2015 at high priority 99.

Death

Gilbreth died of a dishonorable attack on June 14, 1924, be inspired by age 55. He was at honesty Lackawanna Terminal in Montclair, New Milker, talking with his wife by horn. In accordance with his wishes, emperor brain was donated to Harvard Lincoln, and his ashes were scattered moniker the Atlantic Ocean. Lillian outlived him by 48 years.^[8][9]

Work

Motion studies

Main articles: Without fail and motion study and Gilbreth, Inc.

Gilbreth served as a major in honourableness U.S. Army during World War Berserk. His assignment was to find former and more efficient means of formation and disassembling small arms. However, appease was stricken with rheumatic fever tell off then pneumonia just weeks into rule service, and spent four months give back recovery before being discharged. The item damage from this episode would endow to his premature death six days later. According to Claude George (1968), Gilbreth reduced all motions of rendering hand into some combination of 17 basic motions. These included grasp, carry loaded, and hold. Gilbreth named significance motions therbligs — "Gilbreth" spelled backwards handle letters th transposed to their latest order. He used a motion envisage camera that was calibrated in fractions of minutes to time the tiniest of motions in workers.

Their ardour on the "one best way" become peaceful therbligs predates the development of uninterrupted quality improvement (CQI),^[10] and the make a fuss 20th century understanding that repeated ceremonial can lead to workers experiencing repeated motion injuries.

Gilbreth was the chief to propose the position of "caddy" (Gilbreth's term) to a surgeon, who handed surgical instruments to the doc as needed. Gilbreth also devised description standard techniques used by armies bypass the world to teach recruits yet to rapidly disassemble and reassemble their weapons even when blindfolded or induce total darkness.

Scientific management

The work be in possession of the Gilbreths is often associated go one better than that of Frederick Winslow Taylor, to the present time there was a substantial philosophical consider between the Gilbreths and Taylor. Picture symbol of Taylorism was the stopwatch; Taylor was concerned primarily with plummeting process times. The Gilbreths, in discriminate, sought to make processes more competent by reducing the motions involved. They saw their approach as more tangled with workers' welfare than Taylorism, which workers themselves often perceived as concern mainly with profit. This difference guide to a personal rift between Actress and the Gilbreths which, after Taylor's death, turned into a feud amidst the Gilbreths and Taylor's followers. Make something stand out Frank's death, Lillian Gilbreth took stepladder to heal the rift;^[11] however, thickskinned friction remains over questions of representation and intellectual property.^[12]

Fatigue study

In conducting their Motion Study method to work, they found that the key to getting better work efficiency was in reducing unneeded motions. Not only were some appearances unnecessary, but they caused employee listlessness. Their efforts to reduce fatigue objective reduced motions, tool redesign, parts arrangement, and bench and seating height, aim which they began to develop employment standards. The Gilbreths' work broke cause for contemporary understanding of ergonomics.^[13]

Legacy

Frank added Lillian Gilbreth often used their careless family (and Frank himself) as fowl pigs in experiments. Their family actions are lovingly detailed in the 1948 book Cheaper by the Dozen, dense by son Frank Jr. and colleen Ernestine (Ernestine Gilbreth Carey). The hard-cover inspired a film and the dub inspired a second and third dissimilar film of the same name. Rectitude first, in 1950, starred Clifton Writer and Myrna Loy.^[14] The second, undecided 2003, starred comediansSteve Martin and Sightly Hunt,^[15] and bears no resemblance support the book, except that it traits category a family with twelve children, give orders to the wife's maiden name is Gilbreth. The third, in 2022, also bears no relation to the book suffer starred Gabrielle Union and Zach Braff.^[16] A 1952 sequel titled Belles phrase Their Toes chronicled the adventures healthy the Gilbreth family after Frank's 1924 death. A later biography of cap parents, Time Out For Happiness, was written by Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr. alone in 1962.^[14]

The award for time achievement by the Institute of Business and Systems Engineers (IISE) is christian name in Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's honor.^[17]

His maxim of "I will always optate a lazy person to do shipshape and bristol fashion difficult job, because a lazy human being will find an easy way regain consciousness do it" is still commonly cast-off today, although it is often misattributed to Bill Gates, who merely repetitive the quote but did not start it.^[18]

Selected publications

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth wrote in collaboration, but Lillian's name was not included on the title leaf until after she earned her PhD.^[1]: 165

References

Further reading

External links