History
Engineering psychology was created from within experimental psychology. Engineering psychology started during World War I (1914). The reason why this subject was developed during this time was because many of America’s weapons were failing; from bombs not falling in the right place to weapons attacking normal marine life. The fault was traced back to human errors. One of the first designs to be built to restrain human error was the use of psychoacoustics by S.S. Stevens. S.S. Stevens and L.L. Beranek were two of the first American psychologists called upon to help change how people and machinery worked together. One of their first assignments was to try and reduce noise levels in military aircraft. The work was directed at improving intelligibility of military communication systems and appeared to have been very successful. However it was not until after August 1945 that you saw the level of research increase in engineering psychology. This occurred because the research that started in 1940 now began to show.
Lillian Gilbreth combined the talents of an engineer, psychologist and mother of twelve. Her appreciation of human factors made her successful in the implementation of time and motion studies and scientific management. She went on to pioneer ergonomics in the kitchen, inventing the pedal bin, for example.
In Britain, the two world wars generated much formal study of human factors which affected the efficiency of munitions output and warfare. In WWI, the Health of Munitions Workers Committee was created in 1915. This made recommendations based upon studies of the effects of overwork on efficiency which resulted in policies of providing breaks and limiting hours of work, including avoidance of work on Sunday. The Industrial Fatigue Research Board was created in 1918 to take this work forward. In WW2, researchers at Cambridge University such as Frederic Bartlett and Kenneth Craik started work on the operation of equipment in 1939 and this resulted in the creation of the Unit for Research in Applied Psychology in 1944.
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