There is not enough written about the history of maintenance. Occasionally, the introduction of a maintenance management book may contain a few pages about history. Too often, these are nearly misleading.
You may read that Toyota invented preventive maintenance in the 1960s, or that the US military invented preventive maintenance during the Second World War. You may read that the first PMs were checklists used by aviation ground crews. You may read that when plant equipment was simpler, parts were easy to get or could be locally fabricated. You may read that repairs were quick and didn't affect the bottom line that much, so managers didn't spend much time thinking about them. This is all wrong!
Maintenance and reliability are much older than that, much more complex and interdisciplinary, and central to some major issues in our past.
I am a maintenance and reliability engineer, not a writer or historian, and limited to English. I write about maintenance history purely for the love of it, with no profit motive. My articles will include links to primary sources…so you can read for yourself what our professional forerunners were up against.
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Historians might not recognize the modern names of maintenance management tools that were used long ago.
In 1627, an English amphibious landing group was denied logistics support when a leaky ship turned back to port. The politically-connected commander demanded answers, partially to cover his poor command decisions. The investigation revealed that deferred maintenance had also canceled the concurrent fault-finding inspection that was intended to discover hidden defects in the hull. These were normally discovered and repaired after the protective coating was removed. The commander became hated and was eventually murdered by one of his officers...who was very popular and immortalized as a character in The Three Musketeers.
In 1638, the Royal Navy had a ship that leaked badly as soon as it sailed away from the shipyard. The root cause investigation found that the problem was "ye negligence." The shipyard had to add quality control checks as a corrective action.
In 1702, a promotional pamphlet for a mine pump described a design FMEA by discussing potential failure mechanisms and the design features meant to deal with them.
Maintenance of warships hobbled Britain's response to the American Revolution, due to a lack of spare parts and backlogs that overloaded their repair facilities. Wars in Poland had disrupted their supply chain, especially for masts and spars.
In 1773, Britain's Parliament sponsored a design review of the Royal Navy's ships, because the Honorable East India Company built and operated a larger fleet more reliably. The East India Company reduced its ship loss rate from 1.7% to 0.6% over several decades.
In 1805 The Royal Navy's famous Horatio Nelson defeated a French fleet at Trafalgar, likely saving Britain from invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte. 85% of Nelson's task force had major repairs in the prior year, a targeted get-well program. Overall, 30% of the Royal Navy had major repairs in 1804. Britain was in a war against aggressive dry rot as well as against Bonaparte. The Royal Navy struggled to keep enough quality timber in their dockyards, but France had a well-managed inventory that could satisfy several years of need.
In 1817, the British Parliament held hearings about the causes of boiler explosions. A Welsh mine engineer gave testimony about best practices in boiler maintenance.
US President Andrew Jackson gave a speech in 1833 about the importance of boiler reliability and proposed laws to ensure boiler safety. In 1837, the US Congress started to investigate the problem. Britain imposed boiler laws about 50 years later. Starting in 1852, Boiler inspections were a major responsibility of the organization that eventually became the US Coast Guard. In 1860, the New York Times wrote an editorial about boiler explosions, discussing failure mechanisms collected by insurance companies from over 1500 accidents. The New York Times decided that boiler explosions were never really accidents, because: "...boiler explosions are certainly in most, and probably in all cases, the result of malconstruction or maltreatment, and of nothing else, and that the usual immediate cause is the un-checked deterioration of the boiler in service."
The Royal Navy would investigate boiler failures starting in 1873, and the US Navy would benchmark their findings in 1877. The lessons would find their way into the first ASME boiler trial requirements in 1884.
Meanwhile, boiler explosions were virtually unknown in France, due to national laws from 1823 about periodic inspections and safety valve testing. The regulations were reprinted in Philadelphia in 1831. American and British engineers were aware of the role of the French government in assuring boiler safety, but they struggled with the concept and implementation of government regulation in factories and railroads.
In the 1800s, British engineers imitated French and Belgian methods of road maintenance. In the 1880s, Americans adopted these systems by forming a political alliance between farmers and hobbyists obsessed with a modern invention: bicyclists. A continuous chain of written references connects British country road maintenance in 1767 to Texas road maintenance programs in 1921.
One of the major figures in the 1870s in American road construction and maintenance was the commanding general in the 1989 Academy-award-winning movie Glory. In 1876 he wrote about the conceptual difference between repairing something and taking action to prevent the repair in the first place...but he never used the term "preventive maintenance" because it hadn't been coined yet. An engineer officer on a Union steam ship participating in the same battle would invent the field of tribology (lubrication), found the engineering school at Cornell, and serve as the first president of ASME.
In 1873, Montreal's city water works included instructions about best practices in lubrication in their plant manual.
The classic movie The Sound of Music was a true story. In reality, the father was a WW1 submarine ace. He knew a lot about torpedo maintenance...and married the torpedo inventor's rich daughter after training at the first torpedo factory. In the late 1800s, torpedoes required significant periodic maintenance. Requirements for weekly, monthly, and quarterly PMs were included in technical manuals delivered with the weapon. The maintenance requirements for torpedoes were so taxing that navies considered the maintenance and logistics requirements when deciding which design to purchase. One Royal Navy specialist wrote they must be "jealously guarded from rust, and constantly examined." The spare parts requirements were "almost ludicrous in its exactitude."
When railroads were first operating commercially, designers assumed that the tracks would last indefinitely. By 1850, they knew they would have to replace the entire rail system at some point, even if they had kept up with repairs of individual faults. By setting money aside to prepare for this, railroads developed new accounting methods for depreciation.
As rail traffic became more frequent in the late 1880s, rail signals became automated. At first, they were mechanical devices but soon took advantage of electricity. A failed signal would cause a wreck, a matter of life and death with huge property loss. By 1915, a commuter railroad in New Jersey would calculate its signal reliability to be 99.995% based on 204 formal, written failure reports out of 4,200,000 scheduled signal movements. In the article, they discussed how failure reporting and defect elimination were used.
In 1909, a telephone repair journal Telephony used the words "preventive maintenance" to describe the defect elimination method described by a contributing author, "Little Things and How to Find Them." Within 5 years, a road repair journal also used the phrase but credited a civil engineer with expertise in asphalt with coining the term.
In 1915, the city of Milwaukee operated a fleet of 685 streetcars. They used a method of visual tagging to ensure car defects were identified and resolved to keep the outage rate under 6%. In the same year, Chicago's Elevated Railroad repair shop kept a visual failure tag board of car repairs by subsystem to track repeat defects.
In 1917, a Swedish immigrant to the US would partner with General Electric's chief engineer of power and mining to describe maintenance management methods for hydroelectric plants that can be easily recognized as Total Productive Maintenance.
A commuter railroad trade group met in Chicago in 1906 to hear about boiler failure root causes from an insurance perspective. Within 6 months, one of their members proposed an industry standard for failure reporting and introduced component-level visual failure reports and a FRACAS system. The proposal resulted in further discussions about industry-standardized failure reporting in 1907, 1913, 1914, and 1920.
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Karl Burnett
General Electric
Anderson SC
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