Lillian moller gilbreth awards biography
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Purdue University
Biography of Lillian Moller Gilbreth
Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an industrial engineer and efficiency expert who became Purdue’s first female engineering professor when she joined the faculty in 1935.
Professor Gilbreth’s research focused on combining psychology and engineering to improve efficiency in the workplace and home, and she pioneered the field now known as ergonomics. To improve household efficiency, she invented a number of kitchen devices, including the foot pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves and the electric mixer.
Among many other honors, she was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1965), the second female member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1926) and the first woman to receive the Hoover Medal (1966). In 2001, the National Academy of Engineering established the Gilbreth Lectures in her honor as a means of recognizing outstanding young American engineers. She received more than 20 honorary
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With her innovative work on the design of kitchens, patents for appliances, time-motion studies to determine the most efficient way for workers to perform tasks, and emphasis on human relations in the workplace, Lillian Moller Gilbreth is a scientist claimed both by the field of industrial/human factors psychology and by industrial engineering.
Gilbreth completed bachelor's and master's degrees in literature but, in order to perform consulting work on worker efficiency with her husband Frank, she switched to applied psychology, publishing a 1914 dissertation on the Psychology of Management and earning her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1915. She and Frank used the new medium of film to help analyze tasks and suggest improvements in worker efficiency. They often tested ideas on their own household, which included 12 children and a dog. They wrote books and papers together.
When Frank died suddenly in 1924 on his way to a conference to deliver a speech, Lillian arranged for her chil
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“The workers must understand that they add to the perfectness of the entire establishment. Scientific management fryst vatten built on the recognition of the individual, with all the idiosyncrasies that distinguish a person.”
– Lillian Moller Gilbreth
Lillian Moller Gilbreth’s Story
Lillian Moller Gilbreth, was born in Oakland, California, on May 24, 1878, to a wealthy German American family. One of nine children, she was raised in a Victorian household, where her parents believed that a woman’s role was one of domesticity. Gilbreth however wanted a “strenuous life,” to pursue a higher education and a career. Despite her parents’ opposition, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s grad in English and a master’s grad in Literature. She married engineer Frank Gilbreth in 1904 and they worked together as consultants in scientific management.
In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, they were pioneers of ‘time and motion study,’ analyzi