13 October 2014
I was listening to a podcast in which the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated that he was under the impression that the discipline of ergonomics arose when the baby boomers started growing old and began feeling aches and pains. Of course, I had to immediately research the origin of the term, and it turns out Tyson’s impression is incorrect. (To be fair, Tyson wasn’t stating it as fact and expressed his own skepticism as to whether or not it was true.)
It seems the term ergonomics was coined in 1949 by British psychologist K. F. Hywel Murrell (1908–84). That same year Murrell as several colleagues founded the Ergonomics Research Society. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of the term in a published work is from the 1 April 1950 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, when that journal made mention of the society that Murrell had founded. The word is modeled after economics, but uses the Greek ἔργον, or ergon, meaning work, as the root.
So the term comes much too early to be the result of aging baby boomers, the first of whom were only toddlers when the term and the discipline came into existence.
Source:
“ergonomics, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.