The Human Factor

from The Scout Report

Inspired by “…the courage, industry and intelligence required of the American working man”, two colleagues from the Harvard Business School (Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres) sent out a call to leading businesses in order to develop a visual collection that could be used in the classroom.

During the 1930s, they received over 2,100 photographs that documented “the human factor” embodied in the interactions between worker and machine. Recently, the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School created this online exhibition to showcase a selection of these remarkable images. Visitors should begin by reading the introductory essay; they should then proceed to the exhibition, which is divided into nine sections. Each section begins with a short preface, and then continues on to a sampling of images,
which include workers monitoring massive wheels of Swiss cheese in 1933 and a photograph of women assembling parts for Philco radios in 1926. Each photograph can be viewed in great detail, and it is worth noting that the site also contains an exemplary bibliography.