History of Industrial Engineering

The origins of industrial engineering can be traced back to many different sources. Fredrick Winslow Taylor is most often considered as the father of industrial engineering even though all his ideas where not original. Some of the preceding influences may have been Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. All of their works provided classical liberal explanations for the successes and limitations of the Industrial Revolution.

Another major contributor to the field was Charles W. Babbage. a mathematics professor. One of his major contributions to the field was his book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers in 1832. In this book he discusses many different topics dealing with manufacturing, a few of which will be extremely familiar to an IE. Babbage discusses the idea of the learning curve, the division of task and how learning is affected, and the effect of learning on the generation of waste.

In the late nineteenth century more developments where being made that would lead to the formalization of industrial engineering. Henry R. Towne stressed the economic aspect of an engineer's job. Towne belonged to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) as did many other early American pioneers in this new field. The IE handbook says the, "ASME was the breeding ground for industrial engineering. Towne along with Fredrick A. Halsey worked on developing and presenting wage incentive plans to the ASME. It was out of these meetings that the Halsey plan of wage payment developed. The purpose was to increase the productivity of workers without negatively affecting the cost of production. The plan suggested that some of the gains be shared with the employees.. This is one early example of one profit sharing plan.

Henry L. Gantt belonged to the ASME and presented papers to the ASME on topics such as cost, selection of workers, training, good incentive plans, and scheduling of work. He is the originator of the Gantt chart, currently the most popular chart used in scheduling of work.

hat would Industrial Engineering be without mentioning Fredrick Winslow Taylor. Taylor is probably the best known of the pioneers in industrial engineering. His work, like others, covered topics such as the organization of work by management, worker selection, training, and additional compensation for those individuals that could meet the standard as developed by the company through his methods.

The Gilbreths are accredited with the development of time and motion studies. Frank Bunker Gilbreth and his wife Dr. Lillian M. Gilbreth worked on understanding fatigue, skill development, motion studies, as well as time studies. Lillian Gilbreth had a Ph.D. in psychology which helped in understanding the many people issues. One of the most significant things the Gilbrethss did was to classify the basic human motions into seventeen types, some effective and some non-effective. They labeled the table of classification therbligs. Effective therbligs are useful in accomplishing work and non-effective therbligs are not. Gilbreth concluded that the time to complete an effective therblig can be shortened but will be very hard to eliminate. On the other hand non-effective therbligs should be completely eliminated if possible.