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Opening Excerpt from Sinclair on ASME History
| "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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