1.1 The history and tradition of inspection, quality control and quality assurance up to c1970
It is difficult to try to pin down the origins of quality control or quality assurance. One would first have to identify the start of what we might call 'quality' before deciding when it progressed to organized systems for ensuring this quality was maintained - the control element. Similarly, quality assurance was the next step of designing quality into manufacturing processes. Also, before supporting processes for delivering products 'right first time', quality had individual breakthroughs through the course of history.
Quality control as a practice has been around ever since man has been making things. There is even a school of thought that evolution itself is a form of quality control. One favoured term is 'survival of the fittest.' Charles Darwin summarised what might be a mantra for the CQI's quality professionals:
'As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.'
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
A difficulty in charting the course of quality control over the years is to separate developments in quality control from changes in production efficiency. This efficiency has been driven by a market need for more or cheaper product. Quality control has evolved as the need for increased quantities of goods, reductions in cost to satisfy a new market or the market expectation for quality has increased.
For the purpose of this article we will not attempt to identify the point of the 'big bang' for the respective births of quality control and quality assurance. Instead, we confine ourselves to presenting some edited highlights of organized control and management of quality-in-action through history. These will be presented chronologically.
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