Fatigue as a physiological problem: experiments in the observation and quantification of movement and industrial labor, 1873-1947

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Fatigue
• physiology
• industry
• quantification
• motion studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Cañales, A Tenth of a Second. Étienne-Jules Marey’s popularization of what he called the “graphic method” occurs across several of his publications but is crystallised in La Méthode graphique. For further discussion on the techniques of the observation of movement, see Paterson, How We Became Sensorimotor, chapter 4.

2. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor for a sustained social history of technology approach. This rich area is also explored by others including Alexander, Mantra of Efficiency; Kanigel, F.W. Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, and Marta Braun’s rigorous examination of Marey, Picturing Time. For a paper which examines the historical antecedents to workplace observation and surveillance of stress, see Pykett and Paterson, “Stressing the ‘body electric’.”

3. Sherrington, quoted in Sinclair, “Sherrington and Industrial Fatigue,” 94.

4. Sherrington, The Integrative Action, 129–30, discussed extensively in Paterson, How We Became Sensorimotor, chapter 1.

5. Sherrington, in Sinclair, “Sherrington and Industrial Fatigue,” 95.

6. McIvor, “Manual Work,” 161.

7. Gillespie, “Industrial Fatigue and the Discipline of Physiology,” 245.

8. Myers, “The Harveian Lecture on Industrial Fatigue,” 907.

9. Gillespie, “Industrial Fatigue and the Discipline of Physiology,” 239.

10. IFRB, “First Annual Report,” 20.

11. For example, Anonymous, “The British Industrial Fatigue Research Board” in Science; and three identically-titled articles “Industrial Fatigue Research Board” in BMJ of 1921, 1922, 1924.

12. BMJ, “Industrial Fatigue Research Board,” 1922, 322.

13. BMJ, “Industrial Fatigue Research Board,” 1924, 349.

14. Gillespie, “Industrial Fatigue and the Discipline of Physiology,” 257.

15. Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” n.p.

16. Florence, Industry and the State, 54.

17. Ibid., 54.

18. IHRB, “Absence from Work: Prevention of Fatigue,” n.p.

19. Di Giulio et al., “Angelo Mosso and muscular fatigue,” 53.

20. Abelson, “Mental Fatigue and its Measurement,” 352–3.

21. Ibid., 353.

22. Mosso, Fatigue, 91.

23. Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency, 15.

24. Mosso, Fatigue, 101.

25. Edwards, Toescu, and Gibson, “Historical perspective.”

26. Mosso, Fatigue, 92.

27. Abelson, “Mental Fatigue and its Measurement,” 353.

28. See e.g. Schmidgen, The Helmholtz Curves.

29. Abelson, “Mental Fatigue and its Measurement,” 352.

30. Helmholtz in Wise, “What’s in a Line?” 97.

31. Wise, “What’s in a Line?” 97.

32. Mosso, Fatigue, 78.

33. Mosso, “Sphygmomanomètre pour mesurer la pression.”

34. The psychophysics of touch, starting with laboratories in Leipzig, is a crucial scientific factor in histories of touch research, explored further in Parisi’s Archaeologies of Touch and Paterson’s How We Became Sensorimotor, Chapter 2.

35. Verdin, Catalogue des instruments, 65

36. Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 612.

37. Binet and Henri, La fatigue intellectuelle.

38. Binet and Henri, as translated in Nicolas and Makowski, “Can Mental Fatigue be Measured,” 19.

39. Amar, The Human Motor, 46.

40. Ibid., 206.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 298.

44. Ibid., 208.

45. Ibid., 299.

46. Ibid., 307.

47. Ibid., 206.

48. Ibid., 463.

49. Ibid., 86.

50. Ibid., 128.

51. Ibid., 463.

52. Helmholtz, “On the Interaction of Natural Forces,” 183.

53. Ibid., 45.

54. Mosso, Fatigue, 83.

55. Amar, The Human Motor, 79.

56. Ibid., 195.

57. Ibid., 182.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 204.

60. Ibid., 206, emphasis added.

61. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 16.

62. Ibid., 9, 12.

63. Amar, The Human Motor, 463.

64. Ibid., 465.

65. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study, 97.

66. Again, for more detailed discussion see for example Alexander, Mantra of Efficiency and Kanigel, F.W. Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency.

67. Gilbreth, Bricklaying System.

68. Gilbreth, Motion Study; Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Fatigue Study; and Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study.

69. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 7.

70. Ibid., 8.

71. Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies, 159.

72. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Fatigue Study, 122.

73. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study, 117.

74. Ibid., 83.

75. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Fatigue Study, 122.

76. Horvath and Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, 19

77. Rockefeller Foundation, “Annual Report,” 167.

78. Horvath and Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, 20

79. See Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge.

80. NRC, Fatigue of Workers.

81. Rockefeller Foundation, “Annual Report,” 222; and Horvath and Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, 22.

82. Horvath and Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, 105–6.

83. NRC, Fatigue of Workers.

84. JAMA, “Fatigue of Workers,” 683.

85. Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” 45, 55.

86. Ibid., 58, 63.

87. Ibid., 63.

88. See for example Folk, “The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory.”