Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1504498
10 Reliable Plant Anniversary Edition | www . reliableplant.com MAINTENANCE is is one of the earliest uses of the term, making road contractors early adopters of this terminology. ree months later, in August of 1914, New York 's Engineering Record published an editorial titled "Preventive Maintenance." They discussed the differences bet ween repair, early intervention and preventive maintenance. is is far from an accidental combination of words and was a mature discussion about preventive maintenance. e editors used two examples of successful maintenance systems: transatlantic steamships and the Manhattan Elevated Railroad. ey recommended that similar preventive methods be adopted in road maintenance. is is an early example of one industry's maintenance system learning from other industries. Of course, the concept of preventing deteri- oration before things get bad is quite old. Works about road maintenance written before 1914 show that the concept and practice of preventive maintenance, if not the exact phrase, had been in existence for at least a century before these 1914 publications. For example, in April 1904, in the Electrical Age journal, an engineer named A.C. Cormack published the results of a long study of several thousand motor failure modes and causes. One of the most common causes, accounting for 22-34% of failures, was "Maintenance – Defective Attention." In other words, a lack of preventive maintenance. However, Cormack does not use the phrase we use today. Cormack's results had also been previously published in 1903 in another journal — Page's Magazine. In the same volume of Page's Magazine, Fredrick W. Taylor, one of the founders of Scientific Management, summarizes parts of his seminal work, "Shop Management." A key sentence describes the benefit of using a planning system. "In maintaining methods and appliances, notices should be placed in the 'tickler' in advance, to come out at proper intervals throughout the year for the inspection of each element of the system, and the inspection and overhauling of all standards, as well as the examination and repairs at stated intervals of parts of machines, boilers, engines, belts, etc., likely to wear out or give trouble, thus preventing breakdowns and delays." (Note: A "tickler" is a large notebook with a pocket for each day of the year.) Taylor was describing a preventive main- tenance system; he just didn't use the phrase we use today. Google's Ngram shows that the word "effi- ciency" had a large increase in the frequency of use between 1905 and 1930, due in part to the dominance of the scientific management movement promoted by Taylor and his peers. ese movements lead to today's lean and six-sigma methods and, indeed, the entire field of industrial engineering. Meanwhile, the phrase "preventive maintenance" enjoyed occasional use by main- tenance specialists until 1938, when it became a common term. Today, new phrases such as "maintenance reliability" and "reliability engineering" are becoming more popular at the expense of "preventive maintenance." NOTE A word of caution is needed regarding Google Books, HathiTrust and database publication dates. For example, Google Books will return search hits from a journal called Mechanical World and Engi- neering Record, volume 133, in 1881 for "preventive maintenance." However, volume 133 covered the year 1953, which better matches the modern font style presented in the Google snippet. is journal has not been digitized yet, so it is difficult to examine in detail. Errors in recording the original publication year in Google Books and HathiTrust are common. erefore, all examples contained in this article are from fully digitized sources where the journal title page and complete article are available. Chart 1. Historical Data Representing the Increase in Popularity of the Term "Efficiency" from 1890 to 1950. Chart 2. Historical Data Representing the Increase in Popularity of the Term "Preventive Maintenance" from 1890 to 1950.