Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

The Prosthetics of Management: Motion Study, Photography, and the Industrialized Body in World War I America

9 The Prosthetics of Management Motion Study, Photography, and the Industrialized Body inWorldWar I America Elspeth Brown I’D LIKE TO BEGIN with a familiar metaphor, first coined by Adam Smith and subsequently revised by many observers of business and economics. The metaphor is that of the “invisible hand,” which Smith used to describe a capitalist market coherence driven by individual gain but resulting in common economic good.1 Although this metaphor may have been persuasive to Smith’s eighteenth-century mercantile audience , by the early twentieth century, social engineers and technocratic utopians began to reconsider the advisability of an “invisible” hand.2 Rexford Tugwell, the Taylorite whom cultural historians remember for his role in fostering the Farm Security Administration’s photography project, argued that Smith’s invisible hand was a myth and that, instead , “a Taylor was needed for the economy as a whole.” “The jig is up,” he wrote. “The cat is out of the bag. There is no invisible hand. There never was. . . . instead, we must now supply a real and visible guiding hand to do the task.”3 To borrow the business historian Alfred Chandler’s formulation, “the visible hand” of management would replace Smith’s “invisible hand” of market forces.4 The visible hand of managerial reform, however, made the “hand,” itself a synecdoche for the industrialized worker, increasingly invisible under scientific management, as the worker became abstracted as “the labor process” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 As 249 managers sought to erase the worker and her “hands” from representation —visual, discursive, or political—they sought to insert themselves, as engineers, efficiency experts, and industrial consultants, into the performance of work as the planners and publicizers of industry’s managerial revolution.6 The question of the hand and its visibility under scientific management was an especially pressing one for the management consultant Frank Gilbreth. Along with his wife, the industrial psychologist Dr. Lillian Gilbreth, Frank Gilbreth used photography and film to rationalize industrial production both before and after World War I.7 Motion study, the umbrella name for their visually based technologies, enabled them to analyze the precise trajectory of moving body parts, which in turn allowed them to redesign industrial work for increased efficiency. Although their consulting was primarily directed toward able-bodied workers, during the war years the anxiety over “the problem of the crippled soldier” caused the Gilbreths to reassess not only motion study, but also the assumptions underlying the relationship between the body and the machine more generally. Their analysis of the human-machine nexus led them to champion interchangeable prostheses, based on the pioneering work of the French physiologist Dr. Jules Amar. Eventually, however, the Gilbreths offered an alternative “American” approach to human engineering, one that emphasized the redesign of work environments and machines over the design and use of artificial body parts. In this formulation, motion study emerged as the key technology in analyzing the relationship between the individual and the workplace environment ; managerial analysis, rather than artificial body parts, became the necessary “addition” for disabled veterans seeking reemployment after the war. Like his onetime mentor Frederick Winslow Taylor, the “father of scienti fic management,” Gilbreth shocked his middle-class family by donning overalls and pursuing an apprenticeship in the trades. He began as a bricklayer, but by 1895 he had started his own contracting company, eventually specializing in speedwork and running large-scale jobs across the country.8 Gilbreth’s December 1907 introduction to Taylor had a decisive impact on Gilbreth’s career, as over the next several years he introduced elements of Taylor’s system to his construction jobs while developing a very close relationship with Taylor and his management ideas. At the same time, Gilbreth continued refining his own studies in 250 ELSPETH BROWN bricklaying efficiency, which—to carve out a market distinct from Taylor ’s “time study” and to sidestep labor opposition—Gilbreth had begun calling “motion study.” By 1912, riding the wave of the era’s popular efficiency craze, Gilbreth was ready to exploit the potentially universal applicability of motion study by starting his own consultancy business.9 Two threads mark Gilbreth’s early work as a contractor: an increasing concern with system and efficiency in human motion, and a growing interest in the use of photographic technologies. Like many fellow Progressives, Gilbreth was infatuated with the promise...