LibGuides: Standards: Why Do Standards Matter?

Why Do Standards Matter?

Why Do Standards Matter?

Basically, standards are necessary for the effective operation and safety of many materials, products, methods, and services. Standards provide a measureable operation of compatibility for safety, efficacy, efficiency, mass production, and quality control. Below are two illustrations of the need for standards (from Through History With Standards published by the American Standards Association and reprinted in Speaking of Standards, Cahners Books, 1972).

What is a standard and why would you use it? Take a look on this page from the BSI British Standards.

As late as 1927, GREEN lights meant STOP in some US cities and GO in others. There were frequent traffic accidents when travellers visited other cities.

A fire broke out in 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland. Special trains rushed fire equipment from Washington, New York, and Philadelphia. The fire destroyed approximately 2,500 buildings and burned for more than 30 hours … all because the hoses from the other cities would not fit the Baltimore hydrants.

History of Standards

Engineering Rules by Joanne Yates; Craig N. Murphy Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.
ISBN: 9781421428901
Publication Date: 2019-06-11