Document dn2MOyEkNOeD0eXy7Q76Kamjb

THE INDUSTRIAL SAFETY MOVEMENT In the first decade of the 20th Century, two great industries, railroads and steel, be gan the first large-scale organized safety programs. From this period comes one of the great and histone documents of safety In 1908, Judge Elbert Gary, president of United States Steel Coiporation, wrote "The United States Steel Corporation ex pects its subsidiary companies to make every effort practicable to prevent injury to its employees Expenditures necessary for such purposes will be authorized Nothing which will add to the protection of the workmen should be neglected " The Association of Iron and Steel Elec trical Engineers, organized soon after this announcement, devoted considerable atten tion to safety problems in its industry Birth of NSC Then m 1911, the year m which the Wis consin Act was passed, a request came from the Association of Iron and Steel Electrical Engineers to cull a general industrial safety conference on a national scale The result was the First Cooperative Safety Congress, which met in 1912 m Milwaukee This gathering called for another meeting m New York the following year, and at that meet ing the National Council for Industrial Safety was organized Shortly afterward, the or ganization's name was changed to the Na tional Safety Council, and its program was broadened to include all aspects of accident prevention Yet it must be remembered that the Council was the creation of industry and that its activities have always been heavily concentrated on industrial safety. In a sense, the pioneers who met in Mil waukee and New York were fanatics, ex tremists They were a handful--a few pro fessional safety men, a few management leaders, some public officials, and some in surance men Either through their own vision, or because they worked for some of the minority of farsighted companies, these men were dedicated to a full-scale attack upon a problem which most people thought either unimportant or unsolvable. These men were fanatics only u their de termination and in the purpose and direc tion m which they worked They designed and built the organizational structure of the safety movement as we know it today. Accident prevention discoveries From tentative, hesitant beginnings, indus try moved on to make a senes of discovenes. It found that engineering could prevent acci dents It found that employees could be reached through education and brought to a greater awareness of the accident problem and of methods of combating it It found, by trial and error, that a body of safety rules could be established and enforced. In thus discovering the "Three E's of Safety"--Engineenng, Education, and En forcement--industry found the means to make a drastic improvement in accident rates Few Teform movements in all history have been able to make impressive gams so Ftp. 1-5. The Work men's Compensation Service Bureau gave "approval only of the principle" of this protective clothing In their "Universal Safe ty Standards," dated 1913 IS