Alphonse Chapanis

Alphonse Chapanis (1917 to 2002) was an American psychologist and industrial designer who is widely considered one of the fathers of ergonomics, also called human factors, the science of making design take account of human characteristics. He received a PhD in psychology from Yale University in 1943 and was active in improving aviation safety around the time of World War II. After a series of runway crashes of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, he found that the flap and landing gear controls were confused with each other, and proposed fitting a wheel to the landing gear lever and a triangle to the flaps lever so that pilots could tell them apart by touch alone; the shape coding of the landing gear lever is still regulated for civil aircraft. In 1949 he published the first textbook on ergonomics, Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design, and in the 1950s he worked with Bell Labs on experiments that led to the present layout of push-button telephone keys. His autobiography is The Chapanis Chronicles.