Table Of ContentEngineering Rules
Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology, and Politics
Richard R. John, Series Editor
Engineering Rules
Global Standard Setting since 1880
JoAnne Yates
Craig N. Murphy
Johns Hopkins University Press
BALTIMORE
This book was brought to publication through the generous
assistance of the Robert L. Warren Endowment.
© 2019 JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy
All rights reserved. Published 2019
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
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Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Yates, JoAnne, 1951– , author. | Murphy, Craig, author.
Title: Engineering rules : global standard setting since 1880 / JoAnne Yates,
Craig N. Murphy.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019 | Series: Hagley
Library studies in business, technology, and politics | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018036808 | ISBN 9781421428895 (hardcover : acid- free paper) |
ISBN 9781421428901 (electronic) | ISBN 142142889X (hardcover : acid- free paper) |
ISBN 1421428903 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Standards, Engineering— History.
Classification: LCC TA368 .Y37 2019 | DDC 620.002/18— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018036808
A cata log rec ord for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-5 16-6 936 or specialsales@press . jhu . edu.
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waste, whenever pos si ble.
contents
Acknowl edgments vii
Acronyms xi
Introduction 1
I THE FIRST WAVE 17
1 Engineering Professionalization and Private Standard Setting
for Industry before 1900 19
2 Organ izing Private Standard Setting within and across Borders,
1900 to World War I 52
3 A Community and a Movement, World War I to
the Great Depression 81
II THE SECOND WAVE 127
4 Decline and Revival of the Movement, the 1930s to the 1950s 129
5 Standards for a Global Market, the 1960s to the 1980s 158
6 US Participation in International RFI/EMC Standardization,
World War II to the 1980s 199
III THE THIRD WAVE 239
7 Computer Networking Ushers in a New Era in Standard Setting,
the 1980s to the 2000s 241
vi Contents
8 Development of the W3C WebCrypto API Standard,
2012 to 2017 269
9 Voluntary Standards for Quality Management and
Social Responsibility since the 1980s 293
Conclusion 333
Essay on Primary Sources 339
Notes 343
Index 409
acknowle dgments
We began our research on voluntary standard setting more than a de cade ago
and started to focus on this book in 2012, a fter we had published a short vol-
ume on the International Organ ization for Standardization (ISO) and after
JoAnne had completed a five- year administrative assignment. Over those
years, we have been helped by dozens of people and many institutions— our
funders, those who have provided us with information, our research assis-
tants, and t hose who gave us feedback on the work in pro gress.
Both of us are deeply grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Be-
havioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford for its incomparable support of JoAnne
as a fellow and Craig as a visiting scholar during the 2012–2013 academic
year. Craig also thanks the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
for a productive year (2008–2009) as a fellow, working on both the ISO book
and the research for this book. Both of us thank our respective home insti-
tutions, Sloan School of Management at Mas sa chu setts Institute of Technol-
ogy, and Wellesley College, for their research support.
This book would have been impossible without the gracious help of the
many p eople who gave us access to, and helped us understand, the many ma-
terials on which we relied. Tricia Soto and Amanda Thomas at the CASBS
library helped us identify and obtain nineteenth- and early twentieth- century
published sources through the Stanford University Libraries. Béatrice Frey
graciously gave us access to the early rec ords of the ISO and its pred ec es sors
and the files of the secretary- general’s office. Stacy Leistner gave us similar help
with the rec ords of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and
its pre de ces sors. Many people at the International Electrotechnical Com-
mission (IEC), including Gabriela Ehrlich, Guillaine Fournet, and especially
Claire Marchand, helped us with IEC rec ords. Pierre Sebellin at the IEC
helped us with materials for Comité international spécial des perturbations
viii Acknowl edgments
radioélectriques (CISPR) that w ere held by the IEC. Heather Heywood pro-
vided expert help at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
Archives. Wang Ping of the Chinese National Institute of Standardization
was extremely helpful with materials about China. Peter Anthony, archivist
at Deutsches Institut für Normung, and Alice Tepper- Marlin at Social Ac-
countability International also went out of their way to help with documents
and photo graphs.
We w ere able to provide an in- depth and detailed look at the development
of the postwar global standard- setting system and at the work of par tic u lar
standard- setting committees only because of the extraordinary help we
received in gaining access to the files of individual standard setters. We are
grateful to Lars and Lolo Sturén for letting us use their f ather’s papers. Terry
Snyder, librarian of Haverford College, alerted us to the existence of the Mur-
ray Freeman Papers and helped us gain early access to them.
Our access to the materials that made chapter 6 on EMC standardization
pos si ble started with Sheldon Hochheiser, then at the IEEE History Center,
who referred us to Dan Hoolihan and Don Heirman, experts in electro-
magnetic compatibility (EMC) who were working to compile historical
documents of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE)
EMC Society. Without Don and Dan, we could not have written this case
study. After he had scanned some of the documents for his EMC history
proj ect with IEEE, Dan sent JoAnne the Leonard Thomas Papers he had
obtained from Thomas’s family after his death. He also put us in touch
with Ralph Showers, who died before we could interview him but whose
daughters, Janet Showers Patterson and V irginia Showers White, generously
gave us access to the Showers Papers, in an apartment in a se nior living cen-
ter and in the attic and basement of the f amily home, and found photos of
him for illustrations. In the revision stage, Janet was enormously helpful
in sharing personal f amily documents to provide a fuller picture of her f ather.
Don Heirman gave JoAnne early electronic access to the documents he was
scanning for the Heirman Papers at the Purdue Archives. Our colleague
Leslie Berlin at CASBS and her colleague Henry Lowood, both of the Silicon
Valley Archives, pointed us t owards the MacQuivey Papers in the Stanford
University Special Collections. We also thank Erik Rau of Hagley Museum
and Library for providing a home for the Showers and Thomas Papers.
For chapters 7 and 8, we very much appreciate the access to the Web Cryp-
tography Working Group that Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consor-
tium (W3C), gave to JoAnne. In the summer of 2012, he responded to JoAnne’s
Acknowl edgments ix
request by giving her full access as an invited expert to the recently started
working group. He also read the draft chapter for us and provided corrections
and comments (any remaining errors are, of course, our own). We also thank
working group chair Virginie Galindo for welcoming JoAnne to the group
and W3C staff contacts Harry Halpin and Wendy Seltzer for explaining tech-
nical and pro cess issues to her throughout the proj ect and Wendy for provid-
ing aid at the final stages of manuscript writing and preparation, including
giving us permission to use her photo graph of Virginie. We thank all the
members of the working group who allowed JoAnne to interview them and
who graciously provided permissions to quote from t hese interviews. Maria
Auday of W3C also helped us obtain a photo graph of Tim Berners- Lee.
In addition to t hose contributing to chapters 6, 7, and 8, we thank the
many other standardizers we met during the course of our work, who were
generous with their time, explanations, and contacts, including the follow-
ing: Scott Cooper from ANSI, Trond Arne Undheim from Oracle, Pekka Iso-
somppi from Nokia, Russ Housley from the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), and Andy Updegrove, an attorney who established many standards
consortia. In addition, scholars who have worked on standards w ere very
supportive and encouraging of this proj ect; JoAnne particularly appreciates
Marc Levinson’s willingness to respond to queries for detailed information
on container standardization not spelled out in his book The Box.
We are also grateful to our research assistants over the years: Yulia Pol-
torak, who read and summarized articles on standardization, Veronica Jar-
don, who worked on the color tele vi sion case, and Hilary Robinson, who did
research in the ITU archives and interviewed ITU leaders, all from MIT; Naa
Ammah- Tagoe, who helped us with French language sources, and Honor
McGee, who worked on the social responsibility cases, both at the Radcliffe
Institute; Maria Nassén at Wellesley College, who conducted interviews in
Sweden and helped us with Swedish- language sources. Fi nally, we thank
Michael Wahlen at MIT, for working with us during the summer of 2017 to
prepare the first complete manuscript for submission.
We have presented papers on this work to a variety of audiences and re-
ceived useful comments from them that have helped sharpen our ideas. We
presented this work at an early stage to our very interdisciplinary set of col-
leagues at CASBS and received encouragement and feedback. In addition, our
CASBS colleague Deborah Tannen suggested the working title we used for
many years, Standards B earers. We also thank our audiences at pre sen ta-
tions in the following conferences and seminars: the Radcliffe Institute’s
