[SystemSafety] Historical Questions

[Drew Rae]

*Sigh*
This sort of thing was happening throughout the 19th century. There would be a major accident, followed by some sort of public morality movement. In the UK, the movements were often led by local religious leaders, who would write articles to newspapers, publish their sermons as pamphlets etc. Originally these were non-state committees or societies of learned men, but they led to the formation of inspectorates with powers to inspect, approve, and then later to investigate. It happened industry by industry, in a number of countries. Steamboats in the US was just one example - there were separate bodies for threshing machines, gunpowder (later explosives) factories, railways, locomotives (the type that drove on roads) etc. 

But that’s not the question I was asking. 

None of the licensing or investigation talked about risk assessment - they were all focussed on specific mechanisms for dealing with specific hazards. The only people talking about risk back then were insurance companies, and they weren’t strongly involved in accident prevention. 

Today, both legislation and accident reports routinely talk about risk assessment as a practice for managing safety. That didn’t happen prior to the 19th century. I’m not certain for sure it happened prior to the 1950s. The formation of the inspectorates puts an early bound, the invention of quantitative risk assessment (as a safety practice, not an insurance calculation) puts a later bound. What I want to know is when it started happening. 

Drew




> On 9 Mar. 2017, at 3:27 pm, Peter Bernard Ladkin <ladkin at causalis.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 2017-03-09 06:16 , Peter Bernard Ladkin wrote:
>> 
>> On 2017-03-09 05:59 , DREW Rae wrote:
>>> Formal investigation for the purpose of safety, and formal regulation of safety through
>>> Inspectorates is a 19th century invention. 
>> 
>> Maybe, but what's your trigger? What constitutes "formal"? What constitutes "regulation"? You seem
>> to suggest: state involvement. So, at some point a state decides "we are going to adjudicate
>> accident-events formally". 
> 
> According to this article, written by a historian at Colorado State Uni, it was 1838 in the US:
> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-01-31/the-horrific-accident-that-created-the-regulatory-state
> 
> 
> PBL
> 
> Prof. i.R. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
> MoreInCommon
> Je suis Charlie
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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