Neat article at Slate about how she revolutionized the American kitchen.
To quantify the efficiency of the Kitchen Practical, and a later, similar kitchen designed for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine, Gilbreth used a metric from the motion study of the production line: steps. As described in the 1931 Better Homes Manual,
The test of the efficiency of the new kitchen was made with strawberry shortcake…The cake was first made in a typically haphazard kitchen…Then an exactly similar shortcake was prepared in the Herald Tribune Kitchen, which has the same equipment and utensils as the other kitchen, but has them arranged for efficiency. The results of this test were so startling as to be almost unbelievable. The number of kitchen operations had been cut from 97 to 64. The number of actual steps taken had been reduced from 281 to 45—less than one-sixth!
…In the 1940s, what Gilbreth called “circular routing” became known as the kitchen “work triangle,” a concept that designers still rely on today.
I feel a certain kinship with this woman’s style. And if only she had gotten her way with respect to countertop heights, we short cooks would have even more to thank her for.
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