Cheaper by the Dozen

at the table is driving him crazy."
    "Tell him that's not of general interest," said Em.

    It was shortly after the measles epidemic that Dad started applying motion study to surgery to try to reduce the time required for certain operations.
    "Surgeons really aren't much different from skilled mechanics," Dad said, "except that they're not so skilled. If I can get to study their motions, I can speed them up. The speed of an operation often means the difference between life and death."
    At first, the surgeons he approached weren't very cooperative.
    "I don't think it will work," one doctor told him. "We aren't dealing with machines. We're dealing with human beings. No two human beings are alike, so no set of motions could be used over and over again."
    "I know it will work," Dad insisted. "Just let me take some moving pictures of operations and "I'll show you."
    Finally he got permission to set up his movie equipment in an operating room. After the film was developed he put it in the projector which he kept in the parlor and showed us what he had done.
    In the background was a cross-section screen and a big clock with "GILBRETH" written across its face and a hand which made a full revolution every second. Each doctor and nurse was dressed in white, and had a number on his cap to identify him. The patient was on an operating table in the foreground. Off to the left, dad in a white sheet, was something that resembled a snow-covered Alp. When the Alp turned around, it had a stopwatch in its hand. And when it smiled at the camera you could tell through tie disguise that it was Dad.
    It seemed to us, watching the moving pictures, that the doctors did a rapid, business-like job of a complicated abdominal operation. But Dad, cranking the projector in back of us, kept hollering that it was "stupidity incorporated."
    "Look at that boob—the doctor with No. 3 on his cap. Watch what he's going to do now. Walk all the way around the operating table. Now see him reach way over there for that instrument? And then he decides that he doesn't want that one after all. He wants this one. He should call the instrument's names, and that nurse—No. 6, she's his caddy —should hand it to him. That's what she's there for. And look at his left hand—dangling there at his side. Why doesn't he use it? He could work twice as fast."
    The result of the moving picture was that the surgeons involved managed to reduce their ether time by fifteen per cent. Dad was far from satisfied. He explained that he needed to take moving pictures of five or six operations, all of the same type, so that he could sort out the good motions from the wasted motions. The trouble was that most patients refused to be photographed, and hospitals were afraid of law suits.
    "Never mind, dear," Mother told him. "I'm sure the opportunity will come along eventually for you to get all the pictures that you want."
    Dad said that he didn't like to wait - , that when he started a project, he hated to put it aside and pick it up again piecemeal whenever he found a patient, hospital, and doctor who didn't object to photographs. Then an idea hit him, and he snapped his fingers.
    "I know," he said. "I've got it. Dr. Burton has been after me to have the kids' tonsils out. He says they really have to come out. We'll rig up an operating room in the laboratory here, and take pictures of Burton."
    "It seems sort of heartless to use the children as guinea pigs," Mother said doubtfully.
    "It does for a fact. And I won't do it unless Burton says it's perfectly all right. If taking pictures is going to make him nervous or anything, we'll have the tonsils taken out without the motion study."
    "Somehow or other I can't imagine Dr. Burton being nervous," Mother said.
    "Me either. I'm going to call him. And you know what? I felt a little guilty about this whole deal. So, as conscience balm, I'm going to let the old butcher take mine out, too."
    "I feel a little guilty about the whole deal, too," said Mother. "Only thank goodness I had mine taken out when I was a girl."
    Dr. Burton agreed to do the job in front of a movie camera. "I'll save you for the last, Old Pioneer," he told Dad. "The best for the last. Since the first day I laid eyes on your great, big, beautiful tonsils, I knew I wouldn't be content until I got my hands on them."
    "Stop drooling and put away your scalpel, you old flatterer you," said Dad. "I intend to be the last. I'll have mine out after the kids get better."
    Dr.