What industrial engineering is today and aspires to be in future is determined by what has gone before. Industrial engineering had its roots in the Industrial Revolution (1750); it was nourished by individuals who sought to advance organization and management principles at any early date; it emerged as a separate discipline and was formulized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and achieved maturity after World War II.
The Industrial Revolution resulted from the advent of new inventions, especially in the textile industry, then steam engine, advances in metal cutting and production of machine tools. These led to factories with large number of workers. With growth in the size of industries, came the beginning of management and management thinking.
The application of scientific method of analysis, experimentation and practical demonstration had been extended to the production of machine tools, more complicated processes, and better products. Now it was being extended to man’s thinking on organization and management principle and method.
Scientific Management as a professional approach was yet to come, waiting on the works of pioneers in the field. Historians of science and technology might argue as to the beginning of Industrial Engineering. The generally accepted beginning relate to the work done by F.W.Taylor, who was concerned primarily with concepts productivity, even though he did not refer to those terms.
Prior to Taylor’s work, however, there were others, whose writings referred to concepts that ultimately became associated with industrial engineering, whose impact on Taylor is difficult to assess. One of the earliest is of these is Adam Smith’s treatise the wealth of nation, published in 1776.
The concepts Adam Smith expressed concerning the proper division of labor, while not original, nevertheless became an important factor in the unfolding of the impending industrial revolution. The writings of Adam Smith and those of both his students and contemporaries was important milestone in the development of the factory system and of the Industrial revolution which it created. Adam Smith was an economist not an engineer, and as a result, his writings came from this perspective.
As a result of the developments in the field of industrial engineering, in 1908, the first separate departments of industrial engineering were established at Pennsylvania state University and at Syracause University.
The first PhD. granted to Ralph M.Barnes by Cornell University, in the U.S.A. in the field of industrial Engineering was the result of research done in the area of motion study.
Most of the leaders of the early work in industrial engineering focused their activities on the motion study and related areas of the individual work place to make it more productive.
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