LESSON 2: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ERGONOMICS / HUMAN FACTORS

ENGINEERING

Brief History of Ergonomics

Introduction:

It is commonly thought that ergonomics is a new concept. If the truth be known, however,
ergonomics has been around for a very long time. The word “ergonomics” may be fairly new,
but the basic idea of ergonomics and the concepts that surround it are far from new.

Since the beginning of time, man has searched for ways to do things differently – methods to do
things quicker, more efficiently and at the same time, reduce as much physical and emotional
stress as possible. It is a fact that man has become more knowledgeable through the centuries
and he has been to use this to help make life easier and less stressful, while accomplishing for
than ever.

Based on findings, scientists believe that early man made tools from pebbles and scoops from
antelope bones in an attempt to accomplish their tasks quicker and more efficiently. Tools,
machines and various work processes were created and fine-tuned through the centuries,
improving the effectiveness and their tasks. The Industrial Revolution brought even more
creative ways of doing things with the invention of the spinning jenny and rolling mills. The
concept behind developing these products is the same ideas behind much of ergonomics today.

Work-related injuries are documented back into the 16th century … as to complaints from
patients … In the publication of the journal … its written … relationship between various injuries
and occupations.

In 1857, (Wojciech Jastrzebowski) created the word “ergonomics” in a narrative he wrote about
the science of nature. Ergon (work) and nomos (natural law) … means how to work according to
nature – as to oppose to fighting against what is naturally best for us. It can be best explained
as the “the adaption of the environment to man” --- work strain and work posture as well as work
settings in organizations.

In the early 1900’s, Scientific Management become popular. This was a method whereby a
worker could have greater efficiency by improving the process of the task. At this time, industry
production was still mostly man power and motion. Basic ergonomics concepts were used, but
not completely understood or taken to their full potential.

Frederick W. Taylor was most interested in ergonomics and enjoyed evaluating various tasks to
find the “one best way” to perform them. He developed tools in factories that would make the
work less repetitive and stressful for the workers. Of course, along with this idea, the number of
work injuries decreased while production levels increased. Taylor’s idea was to get the most
output in the shortest amount of time.

Frank and Lilian Gilbreth were interested in Taylor’s Theory, but had a different approach. They
were more interested in reducing the amount of motions required to perform a task. This
concept truly takes us to the heart of ergonomics, which embraces the concept of maintaining a
healthy body while performing necessary jobs. The Gilbreth’s used time motion analysis and
also made standards for tools and materials. Gilbreth completely changed the way bricklayers
work, increasing their number of laid bricks from 120 to 350 bricks per hour. This, of course,
included an increase in production and also a decrease in strain on the worker’s backs, legs and
arms. Lilian Gilbreth was an industrial engineer for GE and she interviewed over 4,000 women
to learn the design that women preferred while working at their stoves, sinks and other
appliances at home.

The ideas of ergonomics continued to develop. During World War II in 1943, an army officer,
Alphonse Chapanis, learned that if the control layouts in the cockpits of planes were simplified,
the pilots made few errors. In other words, these pioneers of ergonomics learned that if we do
things in a different way, we can often be more productive and safer.
It was only after World War II that ergonomics began to include not only productivity, but also
the safety of the workers. Research began to take place in various areas including: the effect of
heavy labor on the heart; maximum loads that should be pulled; pushed or carried; the amount
of muscle force that should be required to perform the manual tasks; and the force on the back
when lifting heavy objects. Because of the bend towards health related issues in ergonomics,
psychologists, physicians, and engineers began to work together to create various ideas on how
people can work more efficiently can work more efficiently and avoid injuring their bodies.

Ergonomics is a concept that has been with us for many centuries. Although it was not
perfected as today, people have been looking ideas of productivity and health for centuries. The
less strain we feel on our bodies, the easier it will be for us to do the tasks at hand and also do a
better job. Ergonomics products are becoming more popular, as people everywhere are
beginning to realize that with these devices and designs, they feel better and are able to get as
much work, or even more work, accomplished in the same amount of time.

Ergonomics came about as a consequence of the design and operational problems presented
by technological advances in the 20th century. It is a hybrid discipline that emerged when
applied scientists came together to solve complex cross-disciplinary problems and it owes its
development to the same historical processes that gave rise to other disciplines such as
industrial engineering and occupational medicine.

The core science from which ergonomics is drawn from are;

a. Psychology
b. Anatomy
c. Physiology
d. Physics (particularly mechanics and environmental physics)
e. Engineering

It has also been heavily influenced by other emergent disciplines, notably

a. Industrial Engineering
b. Industrial Design
c. Systems Theory
HISTORY

The term ergonomics (Greek ergon, "work"; nomos, "laws"), first appeared in a Polish article
published in 1857, but the modem discipline did not take shape until half a century later. The
study of human factors did not gain much public attention until World War II (1939-1945).
Accidents with military equipment were often blamed on human error, but investigations
revealed that some were caused by poorly designed controls. The modern discipline of
ergonomics was born in the United Kingdom on July 12, 1949, at an interdisciplinary meeting of
those interested in human work problems in the British Navy. At another meeting, held on
February 16, 1950, the term ergonomics was formally adopted for this growing discipline.

1879 Alphonse Bertillon – a French criminologist who develop a scientific method for
identifying people, especially criminals called the Bertillon System. The system records
anthropometric measurements and personal characteristics, such as color of eyes,
scars, and deformities. The following measurements are taken:

1) body: height standing, reach from fingertips to fingertips, length of trunk and
head, or height sitting;
2) head: length and width, length and width of right ear;
3) limbs: length of left foot, length of left middle finger, length of left little finger,
length of left forearm. These measurements are recorded on cards and
claS6ified according to the length of the head.

Bertillon measurements are difficult to take with uniform exactness, and physical
dimensions can change as a result of growth or surgery. For these reasons fingerprinting
and other methods have for the most part superseded the Bertillon system as the
principal means of identification in American and European police systems.

1735 Carolus Linnaeus developed the precursor to the modern classification system called
Systema Naturae, he set out a system for classifying plants, animals, and minerals. To
any particular type of organism, Latin names, the first of which identified its genus and
the second its species. Linnaeus classified humans as animals, an unpopular idea at
the time. He recognized that people belonged with monkeys and apes in the taxonomic
order (a broader level of classification) Anthropomorpha, which he later renamed
Primates. Linnaeus also recognized all humans as belonging to a common genus,
Homo, and species, sapiens. In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus subdivided
humans into four main subspecies (he did not refer to them as races): Homo sapiens
americanus, for peoples of the Americas; Homo sapiens europaeus, for Europeans;
Homo sapiens asiaticus, for Asians; and Homo sapiens afer, for Africans. He
provided no systematic method for determining these divisions. Linnaeus also identified
two other subspecies: Homo sapiens monstrosus, which included people with
deformities, mythological giants, and the Hottentots (see Khoikhoi) people of southern
Africa; and Homo sapiens 'eros, which described wiki children found abandoned in
forests. The taxonomic divisions of the human species developed by Linnaeus
resembled later racial characterizations in that he associated different temperaments
and cultural traits with each subspecies. For example, he identified the Asian subspecies
as melancholy, stiff, and greedy, whereas the European subspecies was described as
gentle, optimistic, and inventive. Linnaeus's classification of humans was not based on
scientific evidence and reflected his own European social prejudices.
1749 George-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon - he rejected racial classification and instead
sought merely to describe the variety of forms and behaviors among human populations.
He was the first to use the term race to refer to a local population. He remarked that
as diverse as humans might appear physically, any man and woman could successfully
reproduce. Thus, he believed all people belonged to one biological group. Like
others of his time, Buffon believed differences in human populations resulted directly
from prevailing environmental conditions and circumstances, mainly diet, climatic
temperature, and the evils of enslavement. These factors could make a person change
form or, in his words, degenerate. According to this thinking, changes in conditions
could change people physically over a few generations.

1790 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called the founder of the science of
anthropology and he was among the first to place comparative anatomy on a
completely scientific basis. His Collectionis Suae Craniorum Diversarum Gentium
Il/ustratae Decades (Illustrated Parts of his Collection of the Skulls of Various Peoples)
contains the results of his observations of the skulls of different races. Blumenbach
advocated the theory of the unity of the human species, which he classified into five
divisions, or races: Caucasians, Mongolians, Malayans, Americans, and Ethiopians.

1830 Adolphe Quetelet attempted to make racial classification into a mathematical

science. He suggested that within human populations, many traits, when plotted on a
graph, could be shown to fall into what is known as a bell curve or normal distribution.
Using stature as an example, this means that a graph of the heights of many people
would always contain very few extremely short and extremely tall people, more
somewhat short and somewhat tall people, and many people near the average height.
Quetelet believed that by plotting curves of physical and intellectual traits, one could
arrive at a profile of the so-called average person of each race. Based on this theory,
scientists tried to establish how the average white European person looked and behaved
as compared with the average person of any darker-skinned population. In these efforts,
scientists were merely trying to confirm the existence of already established racial ;
categories. They devised techniques to measure the physical attlibutes of people, a
practice known as anthropometry. Scientists became especially interested in
craniometry (the measurement of head shape and size), inspired partly by the
popularity in the early 1800s of phrenology, the study of the link between head shape
and mental abilities.

1830 Samuel G. Morton the first person to systematically measure skulls. In the 1830s
and 1840s Morton , conducted various measurements, including cranial capacity, of
more than 1,000 skulls. Based on these 1"'- studies, Morton concluded that the various
human races did not share a common ancestor and were probably unrelated to one
other. This view, known as polygenism, opposed the prevailing doctrine of
monogenism, the belief that races are a single species with a common origin. The
popularity of monogenism stemmed from its compatibility with the biblical idea that all
people descended from Adam and Eve.
1930 Paul Broca, who elaborated on polygenic theory and developed new instruments to
measure the skull. Modem critics of Morton's work argue that his measurements
contained errors that reflected an unconscious racial bias.

1840 Anders Retzius – a Swedish physician who developed one of the most influential
craniometric techniques, the Cephalic Index-the ratio between the width and length of
the head. Retzius used precision calipers to measure the heads of people from different
backgrounds. He generally classified peoples as having one of two characteristic head
shapes-brachycephalic (broad-headed) or dolichocephalic (long-headed). People with
intermediate head shapes were assigned to a third type, mesocephalic. Soon after its
development, the cephalic index gained popularity in Europe and the United States as a
way to classify individuals into races based on similar measurements. As a measure of
racial differences, however, the cephalic index proved problematic. For example,
Germans were largely dolichocephalic, but so were many West African tribes

1850 Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection and the modern concept of
biological evolution. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Darwin thought that human
variation did not lend itself to taxonomic organization because the differences among
people do not fall into distinct categories. In his book The Descent of ' Man (1871) he
wrote, "Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a
group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases ." precisely like that of man;
and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into
each other, into a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give
names to objects that he cannot define." Supporters of polygenism, meanwhile, rejected
Darwin's evolutionary theory and persisted in believing that races were fixed,
unchanging entities.

1911 Franz Boas, a German-born American anthropologist who mounted the most convincing
challenge against the classification of races based on the cephalic index or any other
anthropometric measurements. Boas demonstrated that the stature and head shapes of
children born and raised in the United States differed from those of their parents from
Europe. He thus showed that skull shape was significantly influenced by the
environment (the basis for this influence remains unknown), undermining the use of the
cephalic index as a racial marker. NonetheleS5, scientists continued to use this and
other anthropometric measurements as bases for racial classification well into the mid-
20th century.

1918 Ales Hrdlieka was among the foremost American anthropologists in the science of
anthropometry, which is concerned with measuring the human body and relating the
findings to the study of evolution. In 1918 he founded the American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, and in 1929 he was the founder and first president of the American
Association of Physical Anthropologists. An exponent of several controversial theories,
he argued that the majority of Native Americans were of Asian origin, that the
Neanderthal people did not represent a species distinct from modem humans, and
that the beginnings of civilization occurred in Europe. Among Hrdrleka's important
writings are Anthropometry (1920), and Old Americans (1925).
1942 Ashley Montagu - British-born American anthropologist, One of the first scientists to
argue against race as a biological concept. He published Man's Most Dangerous
Myth: The Fallcy of Race at a time when Nazi Germany was using the concept of racial
superiority to justify the killings of millions of Jews.

1950 Joseph Birdsell, Carleton Coon, and Stanley Garn - biologists and anthropologists met at
a large scientific symposium in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to discuss human origins,
evolution, and race. Three American anthropologists who participated in this
symposium- They and other supporters of racial classification acknowledged that race
was only a classificatory convenience and not a physical reality. Coon and Garn
continued to advocate the use of racial taxonomies for many years in their book Human
Races, Garn identified nine major races corresponding to geographic regions:
Amerindian, Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian, Australian, Asiatic, Indian, European,
and African.