ABSTRACT
Paul M. Fitts was a pioneer in the field of Human Factors Engineering, which he preferred to call Engineering Psychology. He was the first Director of the Psychology Branch of the AeroMedical Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is now called, after several metamorphoses, the Human Effectiveness Division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. He was a Founding Member of the Human Factors Society of America, now the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He was also a prominent Experimental Psychologist who saw only the fuzziest of boundaries between theoretical research and applied system development. His chapter “Engineering Psychology” in the prodigious Handbook of Experimental Psychology (edited by S.S. Stevens and published in 1951) was a landmark definition of the field and provided exposure of this new discipline to a generation of psychology graduate students. Regrettably, his career was cut short by his untimely death from a heart attack in 1965 at 52 years of age.
