Henry Dreyfuss

Henry Dreyfuss

Was born March 2, 1904 in New York City and died on October 5, 1972. Henry was an American industrial designer renowned for the number and diversity of his ground-breaking designs for modern products.

At 17 Dreyfuss was designing sets for stage presentations at a Broadway motion-picture theatre. By 1927 he had been commissioned by a store to study its merchandise, assess its attractiveness, and make drawings indicating improvements that the manufacturers could make. He made the study but refused to undertake the design because he felt that the proper way to approach design was to work directly with the manufacturer from the start rather than to try to improve a design after the product had been made.

In 1929 Dreyfuss opened his first industrial design office and the following year he was designing for Bell Laboratories, which led to the design of a series of telephones, such as the ‘Princess’ phone. He had a very broad designing ability and designed a variety of products including refrigerators for General Electic, alarm clocks for Westclox and the J-3 vacuum for Hoover.

Many of his notable designs include:

• Hudson locomotive

• Round thermostat for Honeywell

• Tractors for John Deere

• Interior of:

• Super G Constellation aircraft

• Ocean liner Independence

Dreyfuss designs stress utility. He said that “when the point of contact between the product and people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.” His book The Measure of Man contains widespread data on the human body and its movements. He was an important early theorist in the field of what is now known as human-factors engineering, or ergonomics.