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By Root 1239 0

great deal of equipment had dials and controls that were hard to interpret or hard to fine-tune. Some required unnatural or needlessly complicated human movements that swelled the likelihood of mistakes and accidents. An example was the British Mosquito, a World War II fighter-bomber designed before psychologists appeared on the scene. The throttles were on the pilot’s left and the landing-gear control on the right. Consequently, at take-off the pilot had to let go the throttles in order to hold the wheel with his left hand so that he could reach over with his right to raise the landing-gear lever, although the throttles, when he let them go, tended to jiggle back, reducing power just when maximum power was essential.

During the war, when many kinds of new and more complicated military equipment were being developed, the military services and their contractors began hiring psychologists to help make the products compatible with human perceptions and responses; this was the start of what became known as human engineering or engineering psychology. Psychologists redesigned equipment to increase the legibility of instrument dials, the ease with which an operator could make fine adjustments of controls, the naturalness of the movements required, and the like.13

Jack Dunlap, a naval officer in charge of a unit doing research on gunnery training, had been a professor of psychology at Fordham. His firsthand experiences of gunnery equipment and his understanding of the psychological difficulties in using it led him, after the war, to form the first human-engineering firm, Dunlap & Associates. A short, rotund, ebullient man, Dunlap had both the expertise and exactly the right outlook for applied psychology. “Balls of fire!” he genially roared at one visitor in 1951. “I can’t stand all this academic horseshit about pure science. Science isn’t worth a damn unless it makes life better for people.”14

The firm’s growth was phenomenal. Dunlap started it in 1948 with a capital investment of $21,000 and within three years was grossing over $700,000 from work for the Department of Defense, an airplane manufacturer, an office machine company, a maker of heavy electrical equipment, and a flashlight manufacturer, among others.

A typical bit of Dunlap & Associates human engineering solved a pharmaceutical company’s problem of incorrect pill counting (over-counts meant lost income, undercounts violated federal law, and both were far too frequent). A workman counting pills would not actually count them but would slide an aluminum board with, say, a hundred little indentations into a bin of pills. When he slid it back out, pills rested in nearly every hole, and at a glance he could see that he merely had to add four or five by hand to what the board had picked up, then dump the lot into a hopper for automatic bottling. At least, that’s how it should have worked, but the pill counters kept making errors. A Dunlap staffer,after studying the process, realized that the color of the boards did not contrast sharply with the color of many pills. He added a dab of orange paint to the bottom of each indentation with the result that any hole not filled by a pill showed up like a warning light. Accuracy shot up instantly; problem solved.

Since the 1950s human engineering has been a recognized branch of applied psychology; its practitioners work on everything from jumbo jets and subway control centers to cell phones and home computers. Psychologists in human engineering have researched scores of such questions as whether a rotating calibrated dial that moves past a fixed marker is easier to read than a pointer that rotates around a fixed calibrated dial (the rotating dial is easier), and how to make the handles of controls easier to recognize (one way: by color coding them; another: by giving them shapes that signify their use even without one’s looking at them— for instance, giving a landing-gear handle a round, wheel-like end, a flap handle a flaplike wedge shape).15

Until recently, the most potentially disastrous equipment in America, its nuclear power