Karl Burnett — Active Contributor

Sir George Findlay was a prominent British railroad manager. He was the general manager of the London & Northwestern Railway, a major company that underwent nearly 20 years of expansion under his leadership. 

His 1895 book, The Working and Management of an English Railway, described an organization for railway track maintenance. The basic gang had four people responsible for 4 miles of track. Supervision and management included inspectors, a chief inspector, and a divisional civil engineer. Each division also had draftsmen, masons, and other special crafts at their disposal. 

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Eric Lof was born and educated in Sweden, moved to the United States in 1902, and worked for the Western Electric and General Electric Companies. Eric Lof published a series of articles on hydroelectric plants in 1913 in the Engineering Magazine. The Engineering Magazine helped spread the concepts of planning, efficiency, and scientific management. The magazine, for example, published the first Gantt charts in 1910. 

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British engineer Robert Whitehead began his career producing textile weaving machinery in France. In 1856 he moved to the Adriatic coast to manufacture marine steam engines. He met Giovanni Luppis, an Austro-Hungarian navy officer, who had been developing a self-propelled coastal defense weapon that could be floated into an enemy fleet. Together, they failed to develop a practical weapon. Whitehead remained fixed on the idea of a submerged, self-propelled weapon. Working on his own for two years, Whitehead developed the modern torpedo. He sold his first units to the Austro-Hugarian Navy in 1867.

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Maintenance does not mean the same thing to all people. Operations managers, maintenance supervisors, and reliability engineers can be heard struggling to come to a common understanding. 

Historical definitions of maintenance are quite different.  “Maintenance” was originally the crime of unlawful abuse of legal procedures and attempts to influence courts. The other historical definition is providing money for operating or living expenses.  As a term applied to machinery, maintenance is less than about 150 years old. Preventive maintenance as a literal phrase is even more recent. So who invented this phrase?

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During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives.  Their main weapon was bad maintenance. 

The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization.  The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental.  Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.

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Efficiency of 99.995% … in 1915

The Street Railway Journal, later renamed the Electric Railway Journal was published from 1884 until 1931.  The first 1884 volume described the reason for the journal’s existence, to serve the streetcar industry better than journals focusing on heavy rail. In 1884 it was most common for horses to pull street cars on fixed rails.  The importance of animal power was reflected in the articles about managing animals and many advertisements for grooming machines, traces, harnesses, and cures for horse colic.  A rarer method of motive power was a steam engine that drove an underground tow cable.  The second 1884 volume reported several experiments in using electric motors to power the cable instead of steam. 

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