http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/60751137

Color psychlogy and color therapy : a factual study of the influence of color on human life

From the Dust Jacket: Faber Birren is not a theorist but a practical craftsman. Unlike most of us, Faber Birren is willing to learn from anybody. He has learned from the most diverse people, from people who contradict each other, from people who denounce each other, from the occultists and mystics as well as from the biologists and agnostic scientists. It is in this book. Faber Birren does not try to explain away the inexplicable. He says very well: "Explanations of psychological and psychical phenomena are not always easy-and indeed unnecessary. There are in man many strange and inexplicable mysteries regarding color." Faber Birren makes his living by prescribing color. He prescribes it to government, to education, to the armed forces, to architecture, to industry and commerce. The public was not buying nearly enough billiard tables for basement rumpus rooms. Birren found that American women would not have the green-topped billiard tables in their homes. Look at the price of this stock on the market; it all happened when Birren had the firm change the color of the table covering to a soft purplish tone. In the Southern textile mills of Marshall Field & Company, Birren reduced fatigue by giving workers light green end-walls. He relieved monotony for telephone girls by introducing yellow into the decoration of exchanges. He reduced accidents by devising a new color scheme. The advent of fluorescent lights brought Birren many new accounts, because special color treatment was needed to spar employees eyestrain and keep objects from looking ghastly. As million of inexperienced men and women entered industrial jobs in World War II, the accident rate rose rapidly. Birren surveyed scores of plants, often two in one day, and at night dictated his suggestions. The plants then rushed in paint gangs to put his advice into effect, and the accident toll began to fall. By using Birren's safety color code, according to the U.S. Army, some government plants during the war cut their accident frequencies from 46.14 to 5.58 per thousand. He laid out color specifications for almost everything found in or on a naval shore establishment, even to altering the color scheme of the helmet worn by men who work on ships and docks. In three years the Navy lowered its accident frequency from 6.4 to 4.6-a drop of twenty-eight per cent. Birren's color code for safety has become internationally accepted in countries as remote from each other as England, Japan, Italy, Argentina, Uruguay. His work has been acknowledged and recommended by the Council on Industrial Health of the American Medical Association. In 1955 the U.S. State Department sent him to an international congress in Rome on work productivity, safety and industrial health. He went as the only-and world's leading-authority on color.

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