Screen Time

Citation:

Lepore, J. 2009. “Screen Time.” newyorker.com.

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I’ve got a piece in this week’s magazine about scientific management, and the work of the industrial engineers Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who wanted to systematize work, but in different ways. Taylor wanted workers to put a stop to loafing; the Gilbreths wanted to eliminate wasted motion, so workers wouldn’t get so tired in the first place. And the Gilbreths also brought scientific management into the home: They raised twelve children, two of whom, when they grew up, wrote about their childhood in “Cheaper by the Dozen” (1948), a book I’ve always loved.

What I hadn’t known is what happened to Lillian Gilbreth after her husband died, in 1924. To make a living and to support her children, Gilbreth reinvented herself as an expert on scientific housekeeping, purporting to eliminate wasted motion in the kitchen—which is funny, because she didn’t know how to cook.

For the piece, I read their books and letters. Lillian Gilbreth’s papers are at Purdue, where, beginning in 1935, she taught in the School of Management and the School of Home Economics. But, in the spirit of loafing, I also wasted a lot of time watching the Gilbreths’ films. Between 1910 and 1924, Frank Gilbreth shot two hundred and fifty thousand feet of 35-mm. film with a hand-cranked camera. He filmed masons laying bricks; ladies typing; factory workers chopping nuts; a one-armed man hammering. The footage is herky-jerky. Much of it looks like it could easily have been swapped out for a reel of Charlie Chaplin’s, “Modern Times” (1936), which lampooned efficiency. Gilbreth, in his films, put a clock in every picture, a “microchronometer,” so that whether he was cranking slow or fast, he could still figure out the rate at which people were moving. By his lights, they were never moving fast enough. Everyone’s getting sped up. You can watch about thirty minutes’ worth of the footage in “The Original Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” part 1 and part 2.

Not to be missed: a motion study of the pitching staff of the New York Giants . And “Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth and Nine of Their Eleven Children”, where no one is moving much, except for Frank, in the back, talking fast, trying, and managing, to make his whole family laugh—even Lillian who, for once, is sitting still.

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Last updated on 12/04/2012