Lillian M. Gilbreth (1878 to 1972) General Electric Lillian Gilbreth was an inventor, author, industrial engineer and mother of twelve children. An industrial engineer for General Electric, Ms. Gilbreth worked on improving the design of kitchen appliances and patented the electric food mixer, shelves inside refrigerator doors, and perhaps most famously, a trash can with a foot-pedal lid opener. Lillian Gilbreth is best known, however, for her work with her husband, Frank Gilbreth, on Time and Motion Studies. The Gilbreth's pioneering work in ergonomics, which is essentially fitting the workplace to the worker, focused on work simplification and industrial efficiency, factors affecting efficiency and how to improve them. From these studies, they developed a number of tools including flow process charts, Therblig Analysis, micro-motion studies using motion pictures, and more. Ms. Gilbreth was one of the first scientists to recognize the adverse effects of stress and lack of sleep on workers, and was a pioneer in making the environment easier to navigate for the physically handicapped. After the death of her husband in 1924, Lillian continued their studies and turned her attention to the household worker, increasing the efficiency of household appliances and applying business methods to home economics. Ms. Gilbreth served as a consultant to numerous firms in America and abroad, and collaborated on several books and articles. She wrote four books on her own and taught industrial engineering at Purdue, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers and the Newark College of Engineering. The Gilbreth's family life was famously chronicled by two of the Gilbreth children, Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, in the books and subsequent movies, Cheaper by the Dozen (1949) and Belles on Their Toes (1950.) Lillian Moller Gilbreth died in 1972 at the age of 94.