Alphonse Chapanis, a Founder of Ergonomics -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Alphonse Chapanis, a Founder of Ergonomics

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died October 4

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Date Posted: October 15, 2002 1:20:57 EDT

Alphonse Chapanis, a founder of ergonomics, a branch of engineering that considers product and workplace design from the physical point of view of the actual user, died on Oct. 4 in Baltimore. He was 85.

Dr. Chapanis, a Johns Hopkins University professor who received a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1943, began his career in the Army, where he was assigned to investigate a string of mysterious runway crashes of B-17 bombers.

He discovered that the accidents were the result of poor cockpit design: the bomber's instrument panel had identical side-by-side toggles, one to control the flaps and the other to operate the landing gear. Weary pilots sometimes flipped the wrong toggle during landing, retracting the wheels and causing a crash.

Later in the war, he studied the effects of high altitude on psychology and physiology.

Dr. Chapanis joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1946. Three years later, he and two colleagues at the university, Wendell Garner and Clifford Morgan, published the first ergonomics textbook, "Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design."

As a professor of psychology and industrial engineering, and during the years after his retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1982, Dr. Chapanis worked with industry to make new technologies simpler to use and work environments and systems safer and more efficient.

One of his most notable projects was his work as a consultant on the development of the keypad for push-button telephones. He tested six configurations of buttons, one with two vertical rows of five keys, one with two horizontal rows of five keys, and four three-by-three arrangements with the 10th key placed either above, below or to either side of the square. The configuration that was chosen has remained the standard, even with the miniaturization of phones brought on by mobile technology.

Dr. Chapanis was also a consultant on the development of teleconferencing and voice mail, and helped improve oil exploration techniques and commercial shipping operations.

Alphonse Chapanis was born in Meriden, Conn., on March 17, 1917. He is survived by his wife, Vivian, of Towson, Md.; two children, Roger, of Seattle, and Linda Chapanis Fox of Honolulu; four stepchildren; and seven grandchildren.

In his 1999 autobiography, "The Chapanis Chronicles," he reviewed his career and provided a history of his field, which has been known as psychophysical systems research, engineering psychology, human factors, human engineering and, finally, ergonomics. He also revealed his cold war intelligence-gathering on government-sponsored trips to Europe, where he reported on the Soviet space program.

He also shed light on the attitudes of some corporate executives in the years before huge product-liability judgments. He described a meeting in a private showroom with Lynn A. Townsend, the chairman of Chrysler.

"I was looking at a sporty model that had a steering column with a sharply pointed tip extending an inch or two beyond the steering wheel," he wrote. "Townsend asked me what I thought about it. My exact, or very nearly exact, words were: `Mr. Townsend, do you know what you've designed here? You've designed a spear aimed at the driver's heart.' I also remember distinctly his cynical reply, `Doc, it'll sell.' "

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