The History of Time and Motion Studies

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 23, 2026

In 1832 the English mathematician Charles Babbage advised factory observers. If an observer stands before a pin-maker with a watch in hand, he wrote, the workman will almost certainly increase his speed. The estimate will be too large. Measuring work already changed the work.

Time study as a named technique began in a Philadelphia machine shop. Frederick W. Taylor wrote that in 1883 it occurred to him to time each element of a job with a stop watch. Motion study followed from Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who traded the watch for a camera and a clock. Earlier still, a French engineer, Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, observed pin-makers at L'Aigle in 1739 and wrote down the pace and pay of every operation. The throughline is an instrument race. Each new tool made timing more exact and less visible. Each time, the people being timed asked who owned the number.

For the technique as it is practiced today, read our guide to time and motion study. This article tells how it came to be.

Timeline at a Glance

The Pin Tables (1739-1870s)

Observers count a pin-maker's day and warn about the watch

Picture a pin workshop at L'Aigle in Normandy. At the heading block, six workers strike the heads onto pins, about twenty pins a minute each, one blow every half second. Perronet, a French road official and engineer, recorded the pace and the piece rate of each stage. Jean-Louis Peaucelle, writing in the Annales des Mines, says Perronet observed the process in 1739 and let it be published unchanged in the Encyclopédie twenty-five years later. His aim was a cost: what the pins cost the maker to produce, and so what the maker earned on them. It was a costing exercise written from the employer's point of view.

Babbage turned such observations into a method. His 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures gave a questionnaire for observing a factory: who pays for tools, how many times the operation repeats per hour, how many failures per thousand. Beside it he set a table of the time and cost of each process of English pin-making, and a second table deduced from Perronet's statement about French pin-making of about seventy years earlier. The dates differ by source. Babbage places Perronet's French figures about 1760, while Peaucelle dates the observation to 1739 and the publication to the Encyclopédie years later.

Babbage also wrote down an early warning about observing people at work. Instead of standing over a worker, he suggested asking what output counts as a fair day's work, or counting strokes while the worker was unconscious that any person is observing him. He quoted the French physicist Coulomb, who urged that workers be observed at different times of day because a few minutes of watching could badly mislead. For the Egyptian attendance records that came earlier still, and for the wider Taylor story, see our history of scientific management, and for the pin factory itself see the history of the division of labor.

What it means for teams today: the first lesson of work measurement is also the oldest. If people know they are being timed, the number reflects the timing. Ask what a fair day looks like, and observe more than once.

The Stopwatch Years (1878-1910)

A foreman times each element and sums the quickest

In 1883 the foreman of the Midvale Steel machine shop in Philadelphia began timing jobs with a stop watch. Taylor wrote that he came into the machine-shop of the Midvale Steel Company in 1878. In his 1903 paper Shop Management he dated the key idea to 1883: it seemed simpler to time with a stop watch each of the elements of the work than to search old time records and guess at the proper time and price. He would then add up the quickest time for each element to find the quickest time for the whole job. (He dated a separate series, his metal-cutting experiments, to 1881.) After about a year of doing the timing himself, he set up a time-study and rate-fixing department, which gave out piece rates.

The method rested on a question. What counts as a full day's work for a first-class worker, year in and year out? In the Bethlehem pig-iron work that Taylor described in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), a young observer noted with a stop-watch the proper time for all of the motions the men made. From such studies came a rest rule: a worker handling 92-pound pigs can only be under load 43 per cent of the day. For shoveling, Taylor reported thousands of stop-watch observations of how fast a laborer could push a shovel into a pile, and of the swing and throw over given distances and heights. The pig-iron figures and their critics are covered in our history of scientific management.

The stopwatch also needed a staff. Even a simple time study, Taylor wrote, requires the cooperation of two men, one doing the work while the other times him, so a busy worker lacks the time to develop such laws alone. The organization he described at Bethlehem grew sets of specialists: men who did the time study, teachers, tool-room men and clerks who planned the work. He told managers that they were starting a new art or trade, that its difficulties are underestimated at first, and that the full benefits took several years.

The method spread through people who built data libraries. Sanford E. Thompson, according to Horace Drury's 1915 history, began in 1896 a study of the time needed for building-trade work, completing eight trades in six years. Drury says Thompson split jobs into very small elements and recorded by stopwatch the seconds needed to dump a wheelbarrow, walk a foot or drive a nail, so that a contractor could estimate costs far better. Taylor called Thompson "perhaps the most experienced man in motion and time study in this country". The problem it created was already visible in Taylor's own argument, that solving such questions belongs in the hands of the management and not the worker.

What it means for teams today: time the elements, not the person. A task standard built from small, documented steps can be reviewed and challenged. A single total handed down from above cannot.

The Gilbreth Years (1907-1924)

The camera replaces the watch, and a partnership splits

Picture a brick wall under construction on Frank Gilbreth's system, with adjustable scaffolds so the bricklayer need not bend, and low-paid helpers laying bricks top-side up in packets of eighteen. Drury describes it in 1915: the eighteen motions formerly thought necessary to place a brick were reduced to four and a half, and in one case to two. Gilbreth's men, he reports, went from about 1,000 bricks a day to 2,700. Taylor, writing in 1911, gives the same story as eighteen motions per brick to five. The two accounts differ by half a motion.

Gilbreth met Taylor in 1907 and became a supporter of his time study, according to the ASME biography. In his 1911 book Motion Study he wrote that the aim of motion study is to find and perpetuate the scheme of perfection. He set three stages: discover and classify the best practice, deduce the laws, and apply them. But the Gilbreths broke with Taylor in 1914, feeling that his stopwatch approach was about reducing process times while they were after the motions behind those times. Taylor timed a task; the Gilbreths asked why it needed so many movements.

Their instruments went further than the watch. In the micromotion method, described in the Gilbreths' 1917 book Applied Motion Study, a motion picture camera, a clock that records a different time in each picture, and a cross-sectioned background record the worker. The same book adds the chronocyclegraph, in which tiny electric-light bulbs are fastened to the fingers so a photograph traces the path of the motion. It grants that "excellent work had been done with stop watches", but advocates micromotion "in all work demanding precision". The method was iterative: divide a job into the smallest practicable units, time them, subject them again to motion study, and repeat until further savings no longer justified the effort. Drury, in 1915, called micromotion more brilliant than widely applicable, a thing with more attention in magazines than in workshops.

The Gilbreths also built a vocabulary. Their 1920 book Motion Study for the Handicapped lists sixteen distinct elements of a motion cycle: search, find, select, grasp, position, assemble, use, dissemble, inspect, transport loaded, position for next operation, release load, transport empty, wait (unavoidable), wait (avoidable) and rest. The same book elsewhere speaks of seventeen elements. Purdue's industrial engineering school notes that the term therbligs is nearly Gilbreth spelled in reverse, though its pages disagree on whether Lillian or both of them coined it. In December 1921 the Gilbreths prepared a paper on process charts for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a way of drawing a whole process with symbols for operations, inspections and transports. Frank died on June 14, 1924, while traveling from his home in Montclair to New York City.

What it means for teams today: time tells you how long, and motion tells you why. If a process is slow, count the steps before you time them. Process maps are the Gilbreths' descendants.

The Stopwatch on Trial (1911-1915)

Workers walk out and Congress bars the watch in arsenals

This era overlaps the Gilbreth years, because the objection to the watch began as soon as the watch became famous. At the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, the premium system began with a stopwatch analysis. Drury describes the arithmetic: the measured time was increased by two-thirds, so a 30-minute job was allowed 50 minutes, and a worker earned half a minute of extra pay for every minute saved. A man who took longer still got his regular day rate. Opponents, Drury records, charged that the system sped men up to an abnormal pace, and that being timed by a stop watch was humiliating.

General Crozier of the Army wrote in 1912 that opponents had virtually concentrated their attack upon the time-study and premium features, alleging that they reduced the worker to a machine or beast of burden. In June 1913 a majority of Watertown employees and then their union asked to abandon the "stop-watch" system. The House special committee that investigated held hearings from October 4, 1911, to February 12, 1912, a story we tell in the history of scientific management.

The legal result was narrow. On March 3, 1915, the House forced the Senate to accept provisions barring funds for the stop watch (or other time-measuring device) and the paying of bonuses on government work, effective July 1, 1915. Drury describes the effect as ending this phase of scientific management in the government arsenals. His description of the bills behind it reaches beyond the stop watch itself, to "other time-measuring device".

What it means for teams today: the argument was never only about the watch. It was about speed, pay and dignity. If you introduce a timing method, publish how the standard is built and what happens to someone who misses it.

The Predetermined Time Years (1926-2020)

Tables replace the stopwatch, and unions are asked to trust them

Film cameras went into production areas across the United States, aimed at workers' hands, fingers, eyes, bodies, legs and feet. The footage was for Maynard, Schwab and Stegemerten, who decoded basic hand, finger, gaze, body, leg and foot movements from it, and published Methods-Time Measurement with McGraw-Hill in 1948.

The idea behind the method was to stop timing people at all. A predetermined time system assigns a time to each basic motion once, then adds the values for any job, so the analyst needs a table instead of a watch. The MTM Association says Asa Segur had earlier assigned time values to the Gilbreths' elements and published Motion Time Analysis in 1926, showing that the time required depends on the method used. The association places the founding of a US body in 1951 and the spread to Europe from 1955, with an international directorate formed in Paris in 1957; the German association followed in 1962 and was renamed in 2019. The tables were based on the capability of averagely skilled workers. (This account comes from the MTM Association itself, which is the trade body for the method.)

The tables removed the observer but not the argument. In the Journal of Methods-Time Measurement for 1954, Clifton Ellis wrote that few labor groups had been willing to give official blessing to MTM, though rank-and-file acceptance had been good. At his firm's Marion, Illinois capacitor plant, the Machinists' union had voted unanimously the previous August to accept MTM-based rate setting, after the company ran courses for supervisors and union representatives. He reported only two rate grievances in the first year, and said the discussions centered on factual information, not opinions. That is a house-journal success story, and it should be read as one, but it shows what the pitch to labor was: a standard that could be audited.

Today the work of designing production systems sits with industrial engineers. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says industrial engineers design, develop, and test integrated systems for managing industrial production processes, with about 365,100 jobs in 2025. The lean practice of writing down each step of a job is covered in standard work, and how output is counted at the national level is the subject of our history of productivity measurement.

What it means for teams today: a predetermined table can be fairer than a bad day of observation, and also harder to question. Keep the method documented and open to challenge.

The Quota Laws (2021-present)

Legislatures ask to see the number

Since 2022, a worker hired at a covered California warehouse distribution center must be given written details of each quota that applies to the job. Governor Newsom approved AB 701 on September 22, 2021, effective January 1, 2022. It defines a quota as a work standard that requires a specified productivity speed, requires written details at hiring, and says a quota may not prevent meal or rest breaks or bathroom use. It applies to employers with 100 or more workers at one distribution center or 1,000 or more across several.

New York followed. Governor Hochul signed the Warehouse Worker Protection Act on December 21, 2022. It covers employers with 100 or more employees at one center or 500 or more across centers, and requires a written description of each quota, any possible adverse action for missing it, and records of each worker's work speed data. Updated descriptions are due within two business days of a change.

Notice what these laws do not do. The 1915 rider restricted the tool, the stop watch. The 2020s laws leave the measuring in place and regulate the disclosure. Counting and quotas stay legal, and the worker gets to know what the number is. Our companion piece on the assembly line shows the same tension at Ford and Lordstown, and the history of the time clock shows how recording hours came first.

What it means for teams today: write the number down and give it to the person it applies to. If your team has a target, a worker should be able to say what it is, how it is measured and what follows when it is missed.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Time and Motion Studies

• Taylor dated his idea of timing each element of a job with a stop watch to 1883.
• Gilbreth's bricklaying cut motions per brick from 18 to about 4.5 in Drury's account and to 5 in Taylor's.
• The Gilbreths broke with Taylor in 1914.
• The 1915 provisions barred funds for the stop watch and bonuses on government work from July 1, 1915.
• Methods-Time Measurement was published by McGraw-Hill in 1948.
• California's AB 701 was approved on September 22, 2021 and took effect January 1, 2022.

The Pattern Behind the History

We call this the Instrument Race. It is our own synthesis of this timeline, not a published model.

1. Watching changes the work. Babbage warned of it in 1832, and Watertown's workers lived it in 1911.
2. Better instruments follow. The watch gave way to film, then to time tables, then to recorded work-speed data.
3. The number becomes a standard. A measurement turns into a rate, a bonus or a quota.
4. The measured ask for a voice. Petitions, a congressional rider and a union vote all bore on who sets the standard.
5. Law reaches the standard itself. The 1915 rider restricted a tool; the 2020s laws require the quota to be disclosed.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Measure the steps, not just the total. Small documented elements can be checked and changed by the people doing them.
• Ask why before how long. The Gilbreth question about motions often saves more than a faster pace.
• Say what the number is for. Write down who sees the data and what it can trigger.
• Treat invisible timing as a policy question. The less a worker sees of the clock, the more they need to see of the rules.
• Keep the standard open to revision. A table or target set once and never revisited becomes a grievance.

Our history of productivity places this technique among the larger eras, and the productivity timeline lists the dates side by side. The Hawthorne studies, which complicated the stopwatch view, are covered in the Hawthorne effect.

Time and motion study did not begin as a tool of control or as a tool of kindness. It began as a way to count, and every generation since has had to decide who gets to see the count and who gets to change it.