Building a Better Mouse Trap

A snow shovel, as any home owner knows, looks something like this:

In the opinion of New York University's Erwin R. Tichauer, that snow shovel is poorly adapted to its user. For the flabby, middle-aged and out-of-condition male it can be dangerous, since the position of its handle imposes an unnatural and unnecessary strain on the wrist, the arm, and consequently, the heart. A far safer and more efficient design, says Tichauer, would look like this:

With equally prejudiced eye, he rejects the standard four-legged stepladder, which in his judgment is an excellent device for "tossing people off":

Tichauer would eliminate one leg, and spread the other two to make that most stable of all bases, the tripod:

The bottom-hinged oven door appalls him. How can the housewife, forced to lean across it to extract a 10-lb. roast, possibly avoid lower-back pain? Like all good solutions, Tichauer's seems beautifully simple: hinge the oven door laterally, just like on the refrigerator:

Easy solutions to the ramifying problems of a technological age leap almost unbidden into Tichauer's mind, for he is both an inventive and a lazy man. His first impulse is to find an easier way to do anything. This ambition, together with a heartfelt concern for the physical vulnerability of man, has led him into a new and little-known discipline. Tichauer is a biomechanist: a scientist who is half-anatomist and half-engineer, and who seeks to improve the fit between man and machine. Under the prodding of human engineers like Tichauer, technology is beginning to accept the indisputable truth that man cannot be redesigned--but tools and machines can.

Human Limitation. As obvious as this fact may be, says Tichauer, industrial society has long overlooked it. Basic tools were reproduced in traditional shapes mainly out of habit. Well into the 20th century, more complicated machines were designed without any serious consideration for the limitations of their human operators--in part, at least, because scarcely anyone understood what those limitations were. Biomechanics, Tichauer notes with satisfaction, is beginning to change all that.

In addition to teaching at N.Y.U., Tichauer is a well-known industrial consultant with more commissions and clients (among them: Western Electric, Texas Instruments, Caterpillar Tractor) than he can possibly handle. "I'm sort of an industrial 'Dear Abby,' " he says. "They come to me only when there's a mess." One such distress call came from Western Electric in Kansas City, which was having trouble with a certain production line. Working with the staff engineers, Tichauer evolved a pair of pliers with a 30DEG bend in the handle. As a result of this consideration for the human wrist, which tires quickly when awkwardly contorted, efficiency took an immediate and gratifying climb:

Some of Tichauer's troubleshooting solutions involve not tools but a basic understanding of the body's internal machinery. At one factory where workers were complaining of headaches, Tichauer traced the cause to the machines they operated, which were transmitting vibrations of 18 cycles a second. After adoption of his proposal to base the machines on a cushion of neoprene, the vibrations and the headaches disappeared. At another plant, he reduced a near-epidemic of severe chest pains by raising the workers' chairs and modifying the seating angle. Much too low in relation to the work level, the chairs had compelled the workers to keep their arms in an agonizingly upraised, elbows-off-the-table position.

Arm and Ax. Born in Berlin 51 years ago, Tichauer indulged a youthful interest in anatomical engineering by watching brewery horses pull their heavy load up the city's slopes. The lithe movements of the big cats, pacing their cages at Berlin's Tiergarten, riveted his attention for hours on end. Studying the exhibit on paleolithic man at the Museum fur Voelkerkunde, he pondered the relationship between that brawny prehistoric arm and the stone ax it brandished at onlookers. After earning degrees in science and mechanical engineering, Tichauer decided to investigate for himself.

In his chosen field, he found very little competition. Nearly all the literature was out of date: for example, the notable 1909 studies of bricklaying by Frank B. Gilbreth, an American engineer and efficiency expert. Among other things, Gilbreth developed an easily adjustable scaffold that eliminated the need to stoop for every brick and helped increase bricklaying performance from an average of 120 bricks an hour to 350.

"Fifty years ago," says Tichauer, "men like Gilbreth produced many solutions, but there were no problems. Today we've got the problems." Even where the problems are now resolutely faced, he claims, they are often approached from the wrong direction. He contends that too often equipment is manufactured today for a person who, in his opinion, does not exist: the average man. The human frame comes in a dismaying range of sizes and configurations, and industry must reach at least a reasonable compromise with this unavoidable fact.

By contrast, nearly everything surrounding America's astronauts has been handcrafted to fit not only their dimensions but their shortcomings in the hostile environment of space. Earth-bound man is also surrounded by a hostile and ill-fitting mechanical environment, and Tichauer sees no reason why the ordinary tool user and factory hand should not rate the kind of consideration shown to men in space.

Finger Dexterity. By now, Tichauer is so accustomed to the uninformed mistakes of machinery makers that he can readily redesign almost any device used by modern man. He would, for example, move the control of an electric skillet farther away from the heat and replace the dial, which requires great finger dexterity, with something even an arthritic old lady could manage:

He would also revamp the familiar telephone dial. "A man with Parkinson's disease or a man with fat fingers has great difficulty dialing," he says. "Why have holes at all?"

Wherever feasible, he would abolish the trigger pull on tools ("The index finger tires easily, and is not well suited for pulling a trigger all day") to give more work to the thumb, the most powerful digit of all:

Tichauer shows little interest in the marketing and profit potentials of his designs. In any event, many of them are unpatentable--a fact that may help explain why the industries that consult him sometimes treat his suggestions as trade secrets. As Tichauer himself says: "Efficiency is the by-product of comfort. The enterprise that manufactures no sore backs, shoulders, wrists or behinds is at a competitive advantage over one with suffering workers." But Tichauer's basic humanitarianism shows through his practicality. "I don't design," he insists. "I fertilize. And I prevent sore elbows." He seems quite content with these relatively modest goals, and with the satisfaction of knowing that he has added something to the comfort, efficiency and dignity of the machine's human attachment.

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