ABSTRACT
My first introduction to the idea occurred in 1970, when I was a member of the organizing committee for the symposium on “Loss Prevention in the Process Industries” held in Newcastle, United Kingdom, the following year. (This was the first of the regular triennial European loss-prevention symposia, though it was not numbered, and the 1974 symposium in Holland was called the first.) Among the papers offered for the symposium was Bell’s now-classic and often-quoted paper on the manufacture of nitroglycerin described in Section 3.2.3. A small, well-mixed, continuous reactor containing about a kilogram of raw materials and product replaced the traditional batch reactor containing about a ton. In another paper (Section 9.5), Pickles solved a difficult control problem (controlling a temperature to within 1°C), not by adding complex control equipment, but by finding another temperature that showed greater variation and so did not have to be controlled so accurately. The chairman of the committee, my former ICI colleague, T. A. Kantyka, remarked that it was far better to avoid the need for complex safety or control systems, as Bell and Pickles had done, than to install them.
