Henry Dreyfuss

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Henry Dreyfuss

One of the Hudsons given a streamlined casing of Henry Dreyfuss' design to haul the 20th Century Limited.

Henry Dreyfuss (March 2, 1904 – October 5, 1972) was an American industrial designer.

Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn, New York. As one of the celebrity industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s, Dreyfuss dramatically improved the look, feel, and usability of dozens of consumer products. As opposed to Raymond Loewy and other contemporaries, Dreyfuss was not a stylist: he applied common sense and a scientific approach to design problems. His work both popularized the field for public consumption, and made significant contributions to the underlying fields of ergonomics, anthropometrics, and human factors.

Until 1920 Dreyfuss studied as an apprentice to theatrical designer Norman Bel Geddes, his later competitor, and opened his own office in 1929 for theatrical and industrial design activities. It was an immediate and long-lasting commercial success. As of 2005 his firm continues to operate as Henry Dreyfuss Associates with major corporate clients.

Significant original Dreyfuss designs include:

the "Western Electric 302" tabletop telephone for Bell Laboratories (1930, produced 1937-1950)
the "Hoover Model 150" vacuum cleaner (1936)
the classic Westclox "Big Ben" alarm clock (1939)[1]
the New York Central Railroad's streamlined "Twentieth Century Limited" locomotive (1938)
the popular "Democracity" model city of the future at the New York World's Fair of 1939
the styled John Deere Model A and Model B tractors (1938)
the "500" desk telephone (1949), the Bell System standard for 45 years
the "Princess" telephone (1959)
the spherical "Model 82 Constellation" vacuum cleaner for Hoover (1954) which floated on an air cushion of its own exhaust.
the "Trimline" desk telephone (1965)

In 1955 Dreyfuss wrote "Designing for People", a good-humored autobiography which remains a classic of the field and features his "Joe" and "Josephine" simplified anthropometric charts. In 1960 he published "The Measure of Man," an ergonomic reference.

Dreyfuss was the first President of the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA).

On Oct. 5, 1972, at their home in South Pasadena, California, Dreyfuss and his wife, Doris Marks, who was terminally ill, committed suicide. They were found in a car, killed by self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning. Earlier that year, Marks had been diagnosed with liver cancer, and they apparently decided to kill themselves before her pain became unbearable.