ABSTRACT

Origin of modern quality control. In 1924 officials at the Western Electric Company; manufacturer for the Bell Telephone System, had a problem at their Hawthorne plant in the Chicago area. They sent it to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Walter A. Shewhart, a physicist, originated and developed the quality control chart based on the principles of probability and statistics. Shewhart expanded the concept and applicable techniques, and described them in detail in a definitive work. 1 At about the same time and in the same organization, Dodge and Romig developed another approach to the control of quality. While Shewhart's techniques and charts were for process control using samples from the production line, Dodge and Romig used sampling inspection for accepting or rejecting lots of manufactured products. 2

These techniques were applied in a few factories during the 1930s, but it was the huge military program of World War II that gave quality control its opportunity: The War Production Board's Office of Production Research and Development sponsored classes in quality control all over the country which were attended by thousands of inspectors, foremen, engineers, and others. At the War's end it was clear that quality control could be applied just as easily to peace-time production as it had been applied to war-time production. The rest is history:

Right after the War, in 1946, the American Society for Quality Control was founded, and has grown so rapidly that today it has over 43,000 members, mostly in the manufacturing industries. After the War, quality control experts Deming and Juran were invited to Japan to instruct managers, scientists, and engineers on how to apply quality control principles and techniques. How well they learned is reflected in the strong economic position Japan now has both at home and abroad.