This site contains information about the career of Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr as a commercial builder and construction innovator from 1895 through about 1910.

This era of Gilbreth's life and career remains little-explored, with the vast amount of focus given to his more famous achievements as a management consultant and efficiency engineer from about 1911 through his death in 1924. Visitors familiar with this exhaustively-documented era may be surprised at the depth and significance of Gilbreth's first career, which is usually noted only where it was a precursor to the later efforts and often minimized and misrepresented even in carefully-researched writing.

Many of the most famous elements and relationships of Gilbreth's later life are insignificant in this “construction era.” He did not meet Frederick W. Taylor until some twelve years as a solo builder, and Taylor's systems and processes were only implemented in two very late construction projects. Lillian Gilbreth, while an essential part of the duo in the joint consulting era of 1911-1924 and one of the most significant women in the world during her own career from 1925 through the 1960s, figures little in the construction era as well. And while Frank Gilbreth was obsessed with efficiency from his first days as an apprentice bricklayer, his focus was entirely on construction and construction-industry applications until Taylor's influence about 1908 caused him to consider the wider field of “efficiency engineering” for which he is best known.

In other words, this site represents a very different history of Frank B. Gilbreth, and visitors should not approach this material with the idea that it fits comfortably into the century of academic narrative focused on Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's extraordinary partnership and achievements in the last thirteen years of his life. Frankly—if I may essay the slight pun—be prepared to be astonished, and the more familiarity you might have with the conventional history of the Gilbreths, the more likely it is you will be.

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• Note that “FBG” is the generic and collective name for all of Frank Gilbreth's construction companies and subsidiaries. It does not refer to Gilbreth as an individual.