A history of the CQI

A profession in its own right

The story of the Institute of Quality Assurance is, as we should expect, closely associated with the development of inspection as a profession in its own right. The traditional craftsman of past centuries needed no inspection. He made his work to his own quality standards, to satisfy both himself and his customers. Everything was made to ‘fit’, and nobody thought of specifying tolerances.

The craftsman usually worked either in his own house or in that of his master. During the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the invention of machinery, and factors such as the need to be near water power, caused buildings to be set aside solely for manufacturing, and so the factory system came into being.

Until the late 1890s a manufacturer or contractor usually made complete units, or at least complete sub-assemblies. These either worked and so were accepted, or did not work and so were rejected by the customer. But gradually two factors contributed to a change.

1. Advances in engineering demanded production to greater and greater dimensional accuracy.
2. The increasing tendency to manufacture components separately, and then assemble later in another department or even in another factory, led to the appointment of inspectors to check each stage of production. But without tolerances, nobody was certain what was acceptable and arguments were inevitable. Hence in the early years of the 20th century tolerances gradually came into use.

The impact of the First World War

The rate at which the professional inspector established himself was greatly accelerated by the World War from 1914 to 1918. In peace time the Woolwich Royal Arsenal’s Inspection Department had consisted of only a few technical officers, attached to the regular Army, plus a small chemical department, but during the war it was rapidly augmented by civilian personnel. Some of these were fit, energetic and knowledgeable, but others, although willing, were, in the words of a report at the time, long past their physical prime.

The Government established a Ministry of Munitions, in order to co-ordinate the production of armaments. Mr G.C. Sanderson joined our Institution only three weeks after it was founded in 1919, and before he died in 1976 he described some of the difficulties to me. During the war he was an inspector for the Ministry of Munitions, and he said that gauges and other inspection equipment were in such short supply that it was often impossible to check components. On several occasions he remembers that, when shells were assembled, the fuses were found to be too large to go in, and so were left out! Presumably some German thought it was his lucky day when a shell fell near him and failed to explode.

Further difficulties arose because methods of inspection were not standardised, and varied from place to place. In an attempt to correct this, a conference of all inspectors was called in Sheffield, and Mr Sanderson said this achieved considerable improvement.