System Safety, Maintainability, and Maintenance for Engineers

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.1201/9781003365204-1

1.1 Safety, Maintainability, and Maintenance History

This section presents an overview of historical developments in safety, maintainability, and maintenance, separately.

1.1.1 Safety

The history of the safety field may be traced back to the Code of Hammurabi (2000 BC) developed by a Babylonian ruler named Hammurabi. In modern times, in 1868, a patent was awarded for the first barrier safeguard in the United States [1]. In 1893, the Railway Safety Act was passed by the U.S. Congress, and in 1912, the cooperative Safety Congress met in Milwaukee, Illinois [1, 2].

In 1931, the first commercially available book entitled Industrial Accident Prevention was published [3]. In 1947, a paper entitled “Engineering ...