Gilbreth Stopwatch
date: label: associated date
content: 1910-1920
name: label: referenced
content: Gilbreth, Lillian Moller
label: referenced
content: Gilbreth, Frank Bunker
notes: label: Description
content: Using custom stopwatches, specialized timers, and still and moving pictures, Frank Gilbreth and his wife Lillian created a system for analyzing human motion in time. Their main clients were industrial managers, who sought to increase worker output while saving time and money. Their study subjects were workers, whose job satisfaction the Gilbreths hoped to increase as they decreased wasted motions.
label: Description
content: The Gilbreths did not invent stopwatch studies. Instead, in their system of motion study, watches were secondary, in direct reaction to worker resistance to earlier stopwatch studies conducted in industrial workplaces by management reformer Frederick Winslow Taylor beginning in the 1880s.
label: Description
content: Taylor's approach came to be known as Taylorism or "scientific management" and included numerous measures to make industry more productive and cost-efficient. As a small part of this program, he advocated the stopwatch as the "scientific," objective arbiter of work, a means of measuring, controlling, and standardizing the amount of time a worker spent at a task. The popularity of stopwatch studies rose among industrial managers, and Taylor's work inspired generations of industrial engineers, who used stopwatches in their research well into the 1960s.
label: Description
content: But as stopwatch studies spread at the beginning of the 20th century, craft unions mounted bitter campaigns against them in open revolt against the new techniques aimed at speeding up their work and controlling their time. The stopwatch became an object of contention between managers and workers, the single most visible manifestation of the new management systems.
label: Description
content: In the short span of Taylor's lifetime, the stopwatch became the symbol of everything hated and revered about scientific management. Although the stopwatch no longer provokes the passions it once did, scientific management's compelling emphasis on standardization, order, and efficiency and its obsession with time persists in our own age.
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Mechanisms
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content: Work
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content: Industry & Manufacturing
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content: American Enterprise
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content: National Treasures exhibit
label: Exhibition
content: American Enterprise
label: Exhibition Location
content: National Museum of American History
publisher: label: Related Publication
content: Kendrick, Kathleen M. and Peter C. Liebhold. Smithsonian Treasures of American History
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: John M. Gilbreth
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1980.0808.01
label: accession number
content: 1980.0808
label: serial number
content: 367102
label: serial number
content: 376880
label: catalog number
content: 1980.0808.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: stop watch, pocket
label: Object Name
content: Gilbreth stop watch
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: nickel-plated copper alloy (case material)
label: Physical Description
content: glass (face material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 2 1/4 in; x 5.715 cm