1970 · Manual Dexterity Pegboard · Work 860 of 1,871
A small office in Athens at midday, on a plain wooden table a flat wooden box twenty-two centimetres long with a frame of pale reddish figured plywood, its lid slid half open, on top a matt grey steel plate with fifteen cut-out shapes in three rows, crosses, steps, hooks and angles, some already filled with matching small metal blocks, in the open compartment a heap of further angular metal pieces, the slender hands of a woman in the dark blue sleeves of a cotton blouse setting a small metal cross into its opening, at the edge a man's hand in a grey suit sleeve holding a stopwatch turned away, light through slatted blinds.
What it was used for
The Purdue Pegboard is a pegboard for testing manual dexterity, made for selecting job applicants. The journal Occupational Medicine states that the Purdue Pegboard was designed in 1948 by Joseph Tiffin at Purdue University to evaluate manual dexterity in prospective candidates for assembly line work, and was only later adopted in rehabilitation, neuropsychological assessment and occupational medicine. The maker's manual names personnel selection as its purpose and requires that the test be administered to all applicants according to the standardised procedure. The layout: a board with 2 rows of 25 holes, 50 pins, 40 washers; 4 subtests - right hand, left hand, both hands, 30 seconds each, plus an assembly test of 1 minute in which one unit consists of a pin, a washer, a collar and another washer.
What was new
It was not the first test of its kind; older, for instance, is the finger dexterity test that Johnson O'Connor gave to nearly all of General Electric's 3,000 employees in a testing programme begun in 1922. What characterises it is that it captures, besides fingertip dexterity, gross hand and arm movement as well in one device - the Buros Center distinguishes exactly these 2 abilities - by means of the fourth subtest, which demands a four-part assembly under time pressure rather than mere pin-moving. The barb is that in semiconductor assembly this very quality was not measured but read off origin and sex: Rachel Grossman quotes a Malaysian promotional brochure claiming that the manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over and that nobody could be better qualified by nature and inheritance for a bench-assembly line. Vivian Lin notes that with mechanisation the production target was no longer tied to a person's dexterity but to the machine.
What the sources leave open: No use of the Purdue Pegboard or any other dexterity test in hiring for semiconductor assembly is documented; the sources searched name an eye test, x-rays, a medical examination and a pregnancy test, but no dexterity test. The year of origin is unsharp: 1948 in Occupational Medicine, the 1940s in the maker's manual, and a publication span starting in 1941 at the Buros Center.