An Enduring Quest

Ferd Leimkuhler

Description

The process of industrialization that began over two hundred years ago is continuing to change the way people work and live, and doing it very rapidly, in places like China and India. At the forefront of this movement is the profession of industrial engineering that develops and applies the technology that drives industrialization. This book describes how industrial engineering evolved over the past two centuries developing methods and principles for the planning, design, and control of production and service systems. The story focuses on the growth of the discipline at Purdue University where it helped shape the university itself and made substantial contributions to the industrialization of America and the world. The story includes colorful and creative people like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth of Cheaper by the Dozen fame. Lillian was the first lady of American engineering as well a founder of Purdue's Industrial Engineering.
Preface by the Author

Foreword by Steven C. Beering

Foreword by Gerald Nadler

Chapter One: An Enduring Quest

Chapter Two: Practical Mechanics

Chapter Three: Scientific Management

Chapter Four: Industrial Engineering

Chapter Five: Operations Research

Chapter Six: Manufacturing

Chapter Seven: Human Factors

Chapter Eight: Systems Engineering

Chapter Nine: Professional Practice

Chapter Ten: New Directions

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Industrial Engineering
• Sciences et techniques
• Technology
• Engineering

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781557539182
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

An Enduring Quest
The Story of Purdue Industrial Engineers
A N E NDURING Q UEST
The Story of Purdue Industrial Engineers
Ferd Leimkuhler
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
The images on pages 39, 52-58, 66, 68, 70, 84-87, 96, and 161 are printed courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections. Other images are printed courtesy of the Purdue University School of Industrial Engineering on pages 112-115 and pages 215-223, J. T. Black on the cover and pages 82 and 86, SCRAN Ltd. on page 25, James Solberg on page 127 and 128, Natalie Leimkuhler on page 155, Takao Mundel on page 165, and Anne Pritsker on page 195. The centerpiece of color photographs are printed courtesy of Patrick Whalen, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Indiana University Archives. The cover design is by Natalie Powell.
Copyright 2009 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leimkuhler, Ferdinand F.
An enduring quest : the story of Purdue industrial engineers / Ferd Leimkuhler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55753-544-3
1. Industrial engineering--United States. 2. Industrial engineers--United States. 3. Purdue University. I. Purdue University. II. Title.
T55.7.L54 2009 670.973--dc22
2009002270
C ONTENTS
Preface by the Author
Foreword by Steven C. Beering
Foreword by Gerald Nadler
Chapter One An Enduring Quest
Chapter Two Practical Mechanics
Chapter Three Scientific Management
Chapter Four Industrial Engineering
Chapter Five Operations Research
Chapter Six Manufacturing
Chapter Seven Human Factors
Chapter Eight Systems Engineering
Chapter Nine Professional Practice
Chapter Ten New Directions
Bibliography
Index
Color Plates
Author’s Preface
While aimed at engineers and students interested in the field, the author hopes this book will help others understand how the industrialization of America came about and helped changed the world. Because of its profound effect on our everyday life, this technology is much too important to be left to engineers alone. Everyone needs to participate in a free and open discussion of how technology is used, and I hope this book will contribute to such a conversation.
Writing the book was a way of saying thanks to my many students and colleagues, and to my teachers, Howard Ellis, Rob Roy, George Hawkins, Philip Morse, and Moshe Barash. I am very grateful to people at Purdue who helped in this effort, especially Charlotte Erdmann, Dianna Gilroy, Dan Folta, Sammie Morris, and Nagabhushana Prabhu. Special thanks go to my wife, Natalie, for her encouragement and patience, daughters Meg and Jeanne, and above all to my son Tom who was chief critic, editor, and muse.
Ferd Leimkuhler Berkeley, 2009
Foreword by Steven C. Beering
It was nearly forty years ago when I first met Sam Regenstrief. He was an enterprising small-town manufacturer of dishwashers who proposed that we approach the management of health care in the same way that he produced the working parts of dishwashers. On the surface, his suggestion seemed preposterous. He was persistent, however, and even offered to fund a building to house an outpatient clinic and a center for healthcare research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In due course we assembled a number of very bright young Purdue industrial engineers who, together with a cadre of committed internal medicine professors, created the Regenstrief Institute and Clinic and revolutionized our handling of outpatients and their records. As a classically educated physician and medical school dean, I knew about individual patient care, but had not appreciated the powerful influence of industrial engineering. Today we employ interdisciplinary approaches in medicine and basic science and we are proud of the contributions of systems research to hospital management and health care delivery.
Dr. Ferd Leimkuhler, pioneering professor of industrial engineering, has chronicled the remarkable history of this discipline at Purdue University and in America. His encyclopedic account is fascinating both in breadth and detail. He carefully describes the profound contributions of industrial engineering to the resolution of many major societal problems over the past fifty years. We can now earnestly hope that the lessons learned will be applied to addressing global crises in the environment, energy, and the world economy. Fundamental to our collective future welfare will be a re-emphasis of education at all levels. We have the knowledge, the skills, and the means to succeed.
Steven C. Beering, President Emeritus, Purdue University
Foreword by Gerald Nadler
I was introduced to Purdue in July sixty-five years ago, in 1943. The US Navy V-12 program assigned me there from the mechanical engineering (ME) program I had started at the University of Cincinnati. Little did I know how that transfer would so dramatically affect my life. The ME bachelor’s degree I received two years later would have been rather uneventful if it hadn’t given me the opportunity to take Marvin Mundel’s motion and time study course as an elective in my last semester. It opened my eyes to the wonderful perspectives of industrial engineering and led me to pursue graduate studies in that burgeoning field.
The early maturation period for the IE profession was a most exciting time to enter the IE graduate program at Purdue. My fellow graduate students at one time or another (Janet Armstrong, Irving Lazarus, Robert Lehrer, Donald Malcolm, and Harold Smalley, to name a few I remember) were equally engaged in assuring that the profession would become a major program at Purdue and in the engineering world at large.
The faculty members (Harold Amrine, Robert Fields, Lillian Gilbreth, Marvin Mundel, Halsey Owen, and Wally Richardson) also made us feel we were pioneers in the emerging formalization of industrial engineering educational programs as a foundation for the IE profession. Lillian Gilbreth was a great inspiration to all of us as we discussed what IE should be. We were early enthusiasts when the American Institute of Industrial Engineers was founded in 1948. That Purdue set up its IE program a few years after I and my fellow graduate students moved on made me proud that we had perhaps helped put a foundation under what has now become a premier school of industrial engineering.
I watched with pleasure as Harold Amrine led Purdue’s IE program through adolescence and was especially delighted when Ferd Leimkuhler’s long period of leadership brought the program to its outstanding adulthood. He is to be highly complimented on the history he has prepared. It is particularly valuable because of his explanation of the larger societal context that led to the profession of IE as well as its trajectory at Purdue. Anyone in the field in addition to those with some association with Purdue will benefit from the insights in this book.
Gerald Nadler
1
An Enduring Quest
The political upheaval of the American Revolution in 1776 coincided with a wave of manufacturing innovation in Great Britain that crossed the ocean and became a major factor in the growth of the new nation. In the two centuries after its founding, America went from being an essentially agrarian society to being an unrivaled industrial powerhouse. At the forefront of this change were industrial engineers who created the large-scale production and service systems that are basic to modern society.
Today a new era of innovation is underway that is transforming American industry, making it more flexible, decentralized, and knowledge intensive. The present dependence on materials, energy, labor, and capital is giving way to the development of new ways to exploit information and knowledge resources. Industrial engineers are helping to meet this challenge through their experience in designing large-scale systems for global production of goods and services and their unique interest in the interaction of humans and technology.
This book describes how industrial engineering evolved over the past two centuries by telling the story of its growth at Purdue University, where it helped shape the University itself and made essential contributions to the field. The term “industrial engineering” came into popular use around 1900 and was first used to describe a course at Purdue in 1908, a professorship in 1919, graduate degrees in 1937, and bachelor’s degrees in 1955. When first taught in 1879, it was called “practical mechanics,” and later, “general engineering,” before these programs were merged into the School of Industrial Engineering we know today.
The events that led up to Purdue opening its doors in 1874 started a century earlier in Great Britain with a manufacturing revolution that began at the time of the American Revolution. In 1776, Adam Smith made an epic study, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , in which he said that the increase in manufacturing productivity in factories was due to a combination of new work methods and machine tools. Two outstanding inventors at the time were Henry Maudslay in England and Eli Whitney in America. Maudslay’s amazingly accurate lathe became the model for developing the English system of precision manufacturing that enabled Britain to excel in bringing steam power to factories, railroads, and ships.
Whitney invented the cotton gin and a multitooled milling machine, but his greater accomplishment was conceiving the American system of mass production in which the work of a ma