Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology, and Politics)

The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting. Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History ConferencePrivate, 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 st