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Who
are the
ASME Founders?
Alexander Lyman Holley
John Edson Sweet
Robert Henry Thurston
Henry Rossiter Worthington
"Heroes
of Engineering" — a special online comic book feature
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ASME was founded
in 1880 "to promote the art, science and practice of mechanical engineering
and the allied arts and sciences." Industrialist Alexander Lyman Holley
(1832-1882) established objectives recognizable today:
- the collection
and diffusion of knowledge
- the advantages
of personal acquaintance among the members
- the educational
value of writing papers and debating them
- the significance
of a high quality of leadership
| "The
Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia was responsible for
a national quickening in mechanical matters and for a growing sense
of latent power. The big central Corliss engine of Machinery Hall
was a splendid object lesson and this Exposition was signalized by
the single valve automatic engine with flywheel governor designed
by John C. Hoadley, by Professor Sweet's design of the Straight-Line
engine, and by a series of boiler tests by Charles E. Emery, Charles
T. Porter and Joseph Belknap. These all marked epochs in the engineering
history of the United States. Moreover, in the fifteen years since
the Civil War the enormous increase in size and productivity of industrial
plants had just begun. The Land Grant colleges had their graduates
of a dozen years practising their profession and by the natural processes
of promotion the products of the older schools of engineering had
attained positions of trust and influence."
—
Frederick Remsen Hutton, Sc.D., A History of the American Society
of Mechanical Engineers from 1880 to 1915 (New York: ASME, 1915)
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With the
vision of leaders, such as industrialist Alexander Lyman Holley and educator
Robert Henry Thurston (1839-1903), ASME provided a voice nationally and
internationally for mechanical engineers. Mechanical
engineers practiced in industries such as railroad transportation, machine
tools, steel making, and pumping. Precision machining, mass production,
and commercial transportation opened the nation and then the world to
American enterprise. Engineers such as Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse,
Henry Ford, George Babcock, Francis Pratt, George Melville, and Elmer
Ambrose Sperry shaped ASME as they did the world. Twentieth-century ASME
leaders, such as Henry Robinson Towne, Fredrick W. Taylor, Frederick Halsey,
Henry L. Gantt, James M. Dodge, and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, pioneered
management practices that brought worldwide reform and innovation to labor-management
relations. (See more biographies.)
The Events
of 1880
Key organizers
along with Holley were Henry Rossiter
Worthington (1817-1880) and John
Edson Sweet (1832-1916). Holley chaired
the first meeting, which was held in the New York editorial offices of
the American Machinist on February 16 with thirty in attendance. On April
7 a formal organizational meeting was held at Stevens Institute of Technology,
Hoboken, New Jersey, with about eighty engineers — industrialists,
educators, technical journalists, designers, shipbuilders, military engineers,
and inventors. The first annual meeting was held in early November 1880,
also at Stevens. Robert H. Thurston,
professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute and later Cornell,
was the first president of ASME. Erasmus D. Leavitt (1836-1916) was the
second, followed by key founder John Sweet. (See also the ASME
president's roster.)
| "Thirty
of the most prominent men in American mechanical industry attended
that first meeting of ASME founders in the New York editorial offices
of American Machinist on 16 February 1880. They chose as chairman
the brilliant consultant to the American Bessemer Steel Association,
Alexander Lyman Holley, and characteristically, he provided a focus
for the gathering, outlining both the intellectual boundaries of the
mechanical engineering profession and the advantages to be derived
from association. All the steps necessary to establish a new engineering
society were taken at that meeting. It generated a membership list,
committees to nominate officers and to draft by-laws, and scheduled
a formal organizational meeting for 7 April in the Stevens Institute
auditorium to ratify these measures."
—Bruce
Sinclair, U.S. historian, A Centennial History of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1980), pg. 22
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The latter
half of the 19th century witnessed the widespread establishment schools
and institutions in engineering. Engineers of the day moved easily among
the concerns of civil, industrial, mechanical and mining engineering,
with less distinction among them. Many groups were seeking to create organizations
of specialized professional standing. But prior to ASME, for mechanical
engineers in the United States, none were devoted to machine design, power
generation, and industrial processes, to a degree that was capable of
projecting a broader national or international role to advance technical
knowledge and systematically facilitate a flow of information from research
to practical application.
The Institution
of Chartered Mechanical Engineers had been successfully established in
England, 33 years earlier in 1847. In the United States, the American
Society of Civil Engineers had been active since 1852, and the American
Institute of Mining Engineers had been organized in 1871. Holley had been
vice-president of one and president of the other.
Industry
Steam
power then drove the technology of the day: locomotives, ships, factory
machinery, and mine equipment. The Corliss engine and the Babcock & Wilcox
water-tube boiler were in their heyday. The first real US central power
plant — Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York City —
ushered in the era of great electric utilities in 1882. The internal combustion
was not far from application. Conglomerates such as US Steel were formed.
Industrial research laboratories, such as those at General Electric, duPont,
and Eastman Kodak, proliferated.
Standards
Where ASME has made an undeniable difference in the quality of life is
in its standards setting activities. The standardization of screw threads,
long debated at the Franklin Institute beginning in 1864, set the stage
for the need for a national standards setting body and it became central
to ASME's work, beginning in 1884 with ASME's first Performance Test Code,
the Code for the Conduct of Trials of Steam Boilers, and now numbering
more than 600. (See also the Codes
and Standards chronology.)
The Society
is best known, however, for improving the safety of equipment, especially
boilers. From 1870 to 1910, at least 10,000 boiler explosions in North
America were recorded. By 1910 the rate jumped to 1,300 to 1,400 a year.
Some were spectacular accidents that aroused public outcries for remedial
action. A Boiler Code Committee was formed in 1911 that led to the Boiler
Code being published in 1914-15 and later incorporated in laws of most
US states and territories and Canadian provinces. (March
12, 1915, the Boiler Code became an official document of ASME.) By
the mid-1990s, ASME Codes and Standards
were used in nearly 60 countries.
Education
Mechanical engineers primarily practiced in industries such as railroad
transportation, machine tools, steel making, and pumping. In 1880 there
were 85 engineering colleges throughout the United States, most of them
offering a full mechanical engineering curriculum with the degree of M.E.
These early years of the society witnessed a transformation of engineering
education from a vocational to a professional curriculum, which has continued
to develop dramatically: ASME's focus on lifelong learning has found fruition
in Professional Development activities begun in 1975 and the establishment
of the Continuing Education Institute
in 2001. ASME's Virtual Campus, launched in 2001, offers online graduate-level
courses for engineers and technical professionals in cooperation with
leading universities.
Research
ASME formed its research activities in 1909, in areas such as steam tables,
the properties of gases, the properties of metals, the effect of temperature
on strength of materials, fluid meters, orifice coefficients, etc. Interest
continued culminating in the creation of the Center
for Research and Technology Development in the mid-1980s.
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"The
Society has been one of the country's most important agencies in
the creation of industrial standards, for example, in such vital
areas as nuclear power generation, petroleum refining, and machine
manufacturing. Thus, its work over the years, as one of a number
of collaborating organizations that frame standards, provides a
valuable way to study the methods by which the private sector sought
to integrate self-interest with larger national concerns. Scientific
management was also spawned under ASME's roof and among professional
societies it has played a leading role in efforts to apply engineering
skills in the solution of a broad array of economic and social problems.
Perhaps most significant of all, the Society's history helps to
reveal the outlines and consequences of a complex technological
information-processing system. It is an article of faith that Americans
are inventive people. But besides machines, they also created a
welter of interrelated institutions to translate technical knowledge
into industrial practice, and that may have been one of the country's
most successful inventions."
—Bruce
Sinclair, U.S. historian, A Centennial History of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1980), preface
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ASME as
an Organization
The diversity
of mechanical engineering can be seen in ASME's technical divisions and
institutes. Today's structure of technical divisions was established in
1920, when eight were founded: Aerospace, Fuels, Management, Materials,
Materials Handling Engineering, Power, Production Engineering, and Rail
Transportation. Two more were formed the next year: Internal Combustion
Engine and Textile Industries. Today's many interests are multidisciplinary
and global. (See also ASME's
Communities and Groups.)
ASME has
become one of the largest publishers of technical material in the world.
In 1880, ASME published Transactions, and the Journal in
1909, which became Mechanical Engineering magazine in 1919. ASME
News began in 1981 for nontechnical news. ASME Press began in 1988.
On the electronic front, ASME's first all-electronic proceeding was published
in 1996 for the Design Conference. ASMENET was launched in 1994 as an
experimental electronic network, and soon grew into full online services
as ASME.org. Today, ASME has a full complement of online products and
services. (See also ASME Publications.)
In the 1970s,
planning and goals conferences rededicated its leadership role in public
affairs. Rapid expansion of its international network began at that
time, with agreements of cooperation, correspondents, and eventually chapters
by 1990. By the mid-1990s, nearly 8 percent of ASME's membership was located
outside North America, in more than 120 countries.
Today, ASME
is a 120,000-member professional organization focused on the technical,
educational and research issues of the engineering and technology community.
ASME conducts one of the world's largest technical publishing operations,
holds numerous technical conferences worldwide, and offers hundreds of
professional development courses each year. ASME sets internationally
recognized industrial and manufacturing codes and standards than enhance
public welfare and safety.
ASME's
mission and vision
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