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Technology and Culture 47.2 (2006) 286-310


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Efficiency and Pathology

Mechanical Discipline and Efficient Worker Seating in Germany, 1929–1932

Jennifer Karns Alexander

At first glance, the Elmo-workstool seems unremarkable: it is just a chair (fig. 1). Developed between the world wars in the Elmowerk, the small electrical motors division of Siemens-Schuckertwerke, the Elmo-workstool has several features that are now standard in chairs marketed as "ergonomic," including its broad, scooped seat and its adjustable, curved backrest. The potential of the Elmo-workstool to increase worker efficiency and lessen fatigue earned it a place in an exhibition on work spaces and seating that opened in Berlin in 1929 and toured Germany during 1931–32.1 This display did more than demonstrate specific ways to enhance physical comfort and support, however. It also illustrated an industrial need for regularity and uniformity in human motions and signaled the creation of a pathology of movements that did not fit industrial patterns. To combat this new pathology, the exhibition offered a solution: workers would be rendered efficient through a mechanical form of discipline in which their individual movements would be constrained, much as were those of a machine. The methods on display therefore went beyond a simple choreography of allowable motions to include physical structures that supported, directed, and constrained workers into regular and uniform movements.2 [End Page 286]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
The Elmo-workstool, developed at Siemens-Schuckertwerke. The height and position of the backrest are adjustable. (C. W. Drescher, "Arbeitssitz und Arbeitstisch: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung," Siemens Jahrbuch 1930 [Berlin, 1930], 448.)

The point, as the reviewer for a prominent journal of labor health put it, was to eliminate "all motion not directly necessary for work."3 Thus the exhibition and the Elmo-workstool exemplify a push toward worker control in the name of efficiency—a push, according to early critics, that effectively reduced workers to the role of cogs in the industrial machine. In a related study, Richard Lindstrom maintains that in spite of these motion studies and other efficiency measures, workers remained irreducibly individual.4 However, this case study suggests that there may well be no need to [End Page 287] choose between these two interpretations. For in the worker seating exhibition of 1929–32, motion study was indeed intended to eliminate the individuality of workers' motions. The techniques on display were designed to overcome the complexities inherent in people's bodies and personalities.

Focusing on Workers

"Work Seats and Work Tables" opened in May 1929 at the Labor Protection Museum in Charlottenburg, Berlin. A contribution to Germany's controversial rationalization movement, the exhibition was created and sponsored by the German Bureau of Economy and Efficiency (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit, or RKW) and its Committee for Economical Production, in conjunction with the Reich Labor Ministry and the German Society for Industrial Hygiene. For a modest entry fee of thirty pfennigs, visitors could study full-scale installations of efficient seating and working arrangements currently in use, and they could also examine the details of the medical research on which they were based. The exhibition was so successful that in May of 1931 its sponsors unveiled a traveling version, scheduling stops at Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, Nuremberg, and Leipzig, and—given the favorable reviews in the labor, engineering, and medical press—soliciting invitations from other prospective hosts.5

The RKW itself began modestly in 1921, charged with extending the standardization measures that had been adopted during World War I. In 1925, it accepted a more ambitious mandate: to remake the German economy [End Page 288] through rational management and industrial cooperation, with the hope of ameliorating the inequalities and the possibility of social strife that worried many of Germany's policy makers and social observers. Funded by the government and supported in-kind by its own industrial members, the RKW possessed no regulatory powers. Still, by 1929 the RKW had become one of Germany's most visible economic institutions, widely known as a clearinghouse for information and advice on all aspects of...

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