ABSTRACT
Statistics in quality control. In 1924, the Western Electric plant, which manufactured telephone parts for the Bell System, sent a problem to the Bell Telephone Laboratories. From this problem, Walter Shewhart developed the control chart and a complete theory of quality control in manufacturing based on statistics and probability: It was not based on any principles of management or engineering. Statistics provided an objective method of separating variations in a characteristic which were due to chance causes from those variations due to assignable causes which could be eliminated.
