Weird Science History

Loading

The Scientist Behind It · Engineering

The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost the Time Bandaging His Throat

In a bathroom in Montclair, New Jersey, in the 1910s, a large man stood at the bathroom mirror with a lathered face, a stopwatch, and a razor in each hand. Frank Gilbreth had already worked out that soaping his face with two brushes at once saved him 17 seconds. Two razors, he reasoned, should save even more. According to his children, it did: about 44 seconds. The bandage on his throat cost him two minutes.

By the Curiosities Desk · · 5 min read · Filed under Engineering · Today’s round

The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost the Time Bandaging His Throat

What happened: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

Frank Bunker Gilbreth was born in Fairfield, Maine, in 1868, and his story begins on a Boston building site. He passed the entrance exams for MIT but chose to go to work instead, so his widowed mother could stop running a boarding house. In July 1885, at 17, he started as a bricklayer’s helper in Boston.

That’s where his obsession began. Gilbreth noticed that no two bricklayers laid bricks the same way. Each one bent, reached, turned and tapped in his own pattern, and each teacher showed an apprentice a slightly different method. Gilbreth started counting the motions. Many of them, he decided, were wasted.

So he redesigned the job. He invented an adjustable scaffold that rose with the wall, with a shelf that kept bricks and mortar at waist height so the bricklayer no longer had to bend down for every brick. He had lower-paid laborers stack the bricks ahead of time on wooden frames, each brick turned with its best face the same way, so the skilled worker never had to flip one over to inspect it. He laid all this out in his 1909 book, Bricklaying System.

The results, by Gilbreth’s own account, were dramatic. In a 1915 article, he reported that his methods cut the motions needed to lay one brick from about 18 to 5, and raised output from 120 bricks an hour to 350. (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers puts the drop at 18 to 4½.) These are his figures, not independent measurements, but they made his name. His own contracting firm later built a laboratory for MIT, the school he had skipped.

In 1904 he married Lillian Moller, a California English graduate who would go on to earn a PhD in psychology from Brown University. The two became partners in work as well as life. Around 1912 they left construction to study “motion” full time, in factories, offices, and eventually operating rooms. They had 12 children who survived infancy, and they raised them partly as a running experiment.

Frank carried a stopwatch in his vest pocket. He buttoned that vest from the bottom up, because, his children reported, it took 3 seconds instead of 7. He timed fire drills. He taught the kids to touch-type in a few weeks on a typewriter with blank keys, and filmed them doing it. The two-razor shave was one of these trials, and he dropped it.

Most of what we know about this side of Frank comes from Cheaper by the Dozen, the affectionate 1948 memoir by two of those children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. It’s a family story told for laughs, so treat the exact seconds as their telling, not a lab record. The habit behind them was real.

Why it was strange: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

We tend to imagine efficiency experts as cold men with clipboards. Gilbreth was the opposite: loud, playful, and so curious about movement that he couldn’t stop measuring his own. The shaving experiment sounds like a joke about efficiency gone too far. To him it was simply another test, and a failed one, which he was happy to admit.

His real target was fatigue. Gilbreth argued that a worker who made fewer motions would get more done and be less exhausted at the end of the day. That eventually set him apart from his one-time ally Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose “scientific management” focused on timing workers with a stopwatch. Gilbreth broke with Taylor in 1914. His interest wasn’t how fast you moved, but whether the movement needed to happen at all. For another engineer whose curiosity turned inward, see The Engineer Who Built a Flip Table to Shake a Gold Coin Out of His Own Windpipe.

What scientists learned: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

To see motion, the Gilbreths had to invent ways to record it. They filmed workers next to a clock that marked tiny fractions of time on each frame, a method they called micromotion study. They also tied small lights to workers’ fingers and photographed them, so each movement left a glowing trail on the plate. With a flashing light, the trail became a dotted line that showed speed and direction, a picture called a chronocyclegraph. Some of these trails were later bent into wire sculptures, three-dimensional models of a single task.

Then they broke every task into basic building blocks: search, grasp, transport, hold, release, and so on. They called these units “therbligs,” roughly Gilbreth spelled backward. Most accounts count 17 or 18 of them. The idea was that any job, from packing soap to stitching a wound, could be written as a string of therbligs, and the useless ones crossed out.

In 1921, Frank and Lillian presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers called “Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work.” It showed how to map an entire process with standard symbols before changing any step. For another 19th-century mind who couldn’t stand a wasted moment, see The Computer Pioneer Who Declared War on London’s Organ Grinders.

How it reaches us today: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

That 1921 process chart is an early ancestor of the flowchart, now used for everything from software to hospital procedures.

In surgery, Gilbreth is widely credited with proposing that the surgeon shouldn’t hunt for tools. Instead, a “caddy” would hand over each instrument as it was called for, an approach often described as a forerunner of the modern scrub nurse’s role. He also filmed operations for teaching, an early use of motion pictures in the operating room.

After Frank died of a heart attack in June 1924, at 55, Lillian carried the work into the home. She studied kitchens, rearranged them to cut wasted steps, and designed layouts for homemakers with disabilities. In 1965 she became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Whenever an ergonomics study redesigns a workstation, the Gilbreths’ counting is somewhere in the background.

Fun fact: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

Gilbreth’s motion studies were read far outside engineering. In 1916, Vladimir Lenin copied notes from one of Gilbreth’s articles into his private notebook, including the bricklaying numbers: 18 motions down to 5, and 120 bricks an hour up to 350.

Sources: The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost

← Back to the archive