Cheaper By The Dozen. By Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

Cheaper By The Dozen

Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

A Yearling Book. First published 1948.

This is a story from Main Street, America - very Reader’s Digest-y. It is a series of humourous, ‘heart-warming’ anecdotes strung together in roughly historical sequence, about a family of twelve children, six girls and six boys, and their parents, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. According to the book, these two pioneered ‘motion study’, or what may today be called ergonomics – the science, and maybe art, of performing tasks, especially industrial tasks in a factory, most efficiently, with no unnecessary effort or time. Considering that their researches were conducted and their theories were developed in the early part of the twentieth century, when Henry Ford had just built the production line to manufacture his cars, it would just perfectly fit in with the ‘zeitgeist’. One could probably place the couple among the earliest industrial engineers.

But the book is only marginally about industrial engineering. It is mainly about the father, Frank Gilbreth, and how he impressed his forceful, if benevolent personality on his family. Probably of necessity, he introduced a large degree of regimentation into their life at home, with some of the measures producing hilarious and unforeseen consequences. By and large this a very readable book, with obvious, but harmless, exagerrations, mostly for dramatic effect. Of course only those stories that can be lead to an overall pleasant effect find place in the book. Surely there must have been many nasty and terrible things that happened, as happens in any family, but these are not even mentioned. Thus, it is not a serious book about a large family growing up in an America that was just then flexing its newly-found muscles as the economic, military, and even cultural, superpower. It is forcibly a ‘happy’ book, with happy stories about a happy white upper-middle class American family. The version I read now is complemented by a Norman Rockwell-like painting of the family on the cover. This is very appropriate, considering that the book is an expression of the light, happy, conservative emotions seen in Rockwell’s paintings.