Fatigue as a physiological problem

Experiments in the observation and quantification of movement and industrial labor, 1873-1947

Datos Bibliográficos

ID14800307
AutoresMark Paterson (0000-0003-2701-4827, University of Pittsburgh, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen39
Número1
Páginas65-90
Fecha de publicación2023-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Technology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0734-1512 • E-ISSN: 1477-2620
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07341512.2023.2226288
OpenAlexW4382396823
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas27

The period 1873–1947 was productive in fostering ideas about observing, measuring, and quantifying repetitive human movements, prior to the rise of occupational health and ergonomics within industrial psychology. Starting with physiological experimentation in the lab, instruments of graphic inscription were then applied in the industrial workplace, initially as a benevolent measurement for monitoring worker health, but elsewhere as a more invasive measurement for the surveillance of worker efficiency. Herman Helmholtz’s invention of the myograph, and an adaptation called the ergograph, would help form what Kronecker (1873) and later Mosso (1891) termed the ‘curve of fatigue’, and were used in extensive research on factory workers for Jules Amar’s Le Moteur humain in 1914. Meanwhile, in Britain in 1915 the physiologist Sherrington was observing workers in munitions factories, feeding into the formation of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board in 1919, which produced official reports. In the United States, similar but more high-profile research was conducted by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, who studied movement efficiency to maximize industrial productivity by innovating upon photographic and chronophotographic techniques. Further physiological research was taken up in Lawrence J. Henderson’s Harvard Fatigue Laboratory between 1927 and 1947 on subjects situated in environmental extremes

Aesthetics · Art · Economics · Management · Occupational hygiene · Occupational safety and health · Political science · Productivity · Sociology · Applied Psychology · Computer Science · Ergonomics and Musculoskeletal Disorders · Law · Psychology