History of Maintenance Management

Preservation and repair are as old as sailing, but a written record of how this was managed has not always survived. One failure mechanism that has affected wooden vessels for centuries is shipworm – a mollusc that drills deep holes into the hull. 

Shipworm was common in the Mediterranean, so there is a long record of means to combat it. A shipwreck in Kyrenia has been dated to somewhere between 384 BC – 288 BC. The hull was covered with hammered lead sheathing to protect it from shipworm. Archaeological examination concluded that over its lifetime, the ship had received four major repairs, and in-service modification. The Kyrenia ship first sailed with no sheathing, but wooden sheathing was added. Later, lead sheathing was used. (Steffy p. 95)  Archeologists have also observed the use of oche on ship hulls in the Mediterranean and debate if the purpose was preservation of the hull. Several Greek and Roman ships with lead sheathing have been studied. By 1514, Spain was using lead sheathing. An Englishman who had served the Spanish crown sheathed a small English squadron with lead sheathing in 1553. (Wilkinson p. 132)  In 1624, Monson wrote in Monson’s Tracts that the Spanish and Portuguese used lead sheathing, but that it was “not durable” so not in use in England.

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1624 – Monson’s Tracts Describe Basic Asset Management 

In 1585 at the age of 16, William Monson ran away to sea as a privateer. Later, in the English Navy, he served during the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He was a ship captain, squadron commander, admiral, and eventually a member of parliament. Wikipedia quotes the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica in calling him the “first naval officer in the modern sense of the word.” Monson is most famous as an early historian of the Royal Navy. 

Monson’s Tracts are a collection of essays written between 1624 and his death in 1643. The essays were not printed until 1682 and were finally published in 1704. The Tracts contain detailed accounts of the Royal Navy’s battles, tactics, voyages, and expeditions.

Monson’s Tracts also recorded the management structure of the dockyards, duties of specific positions, and some repair management practices of the late 1620s to 1630s. Monson criticized graft, waste, and bad management that reduced the navy’s capabilities. 

1546 – Establishing the Royal Navy

In the 15th century, the English Royal Navy did not exist as a standing force. When needed, the Royal Navy was temporarily assembled using rented merchant ships. Henry VIII expanded England’s fleet from a handful of small converted merchant ships to a force of 30 purpose-built warships. He established government dockyards, the Admiralty, and the Navy Board. Starting in 1546, the Navy Board was a permanent part of the government. 

Warships owned by the government had no other purpose and suddenly gave the government a new kind of asset to manage. 

In 1873, the superintendent of the Montreal Water Works signed out a manual for his organization: 

“Rules and regulations for the employés [sic] in the department of the Montreal Water Works”

Thomas Savery patented a steam-powered pump in 1698. This was an important but imperfect step in the early development of steam engines. Savery’s pump was intended for dewatering mines, but it was more practical for other applications. Savery demonstrated the pump to the Royal Society of London in 1699. YouTube hosts several 3D animations and working scale models that are very interesting.

British writers often marvelled at the quality and longevity of Roman roads, wondering how modern engineers and governments could hope to imitate their success. The fascination with Roman roads continues, and an excellent overview by Richard Brushi is available on Medium.com.

How did railroads handle depreciation, repair, and fixed asset life-cycles in the mid 19th Century?

They were experienced in design, construction, project management and business.

They planned for maintenance and for repair.

They knew about wear mechanisms from aggressive operation and thought it was management’s role to contain this.

They shared data and used it. They gathered data from handwritten records, making spreadsheets, graphs, and KPIs by hand. 

Sir George Findlay was a prominent British railroad manager. He was the general manager of the London & Northwestern Railway, a major company that underwent nearly 20 years of expansion under his leadership. 

His 1895 book, The Working and Management of an English Railway, described an organization for railway track maintenance. The basic gang had four people responsible for 4 miles of track. Supervision and management included inspectors, a chief inspector, and a divisional civil engineer. Each division also had draftsmen, masons, and other special crafts at their disposal. 

Eric Lof was born and educated in Sweden, moved to the United States in 1902, and worked for the Western Electric and General Electric Companies. Eric Lof published a series of articles on hydroelectric plants in 1913 in the Engineering Magazine. The Engineering Magazine helped spread the concepts of planning, efficiency, and scientific management. The magazine, for example, published the first Gantt charts in 1910. 

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British engineer Robert Whitehead began his career producing textile weaving machinery in France. In 1856 he moved to the Adriatic coast to manufacture marine steam engines. He met Giovanni Luppis, an Austro-Hungarian navy officer, who had been developing a self-propelled coastal defense weapon that could be floated into an enemy fleet. Together, they failed to develop a practical weapon. Whitehead remained fixed on the idea of a submerged, self-propelled weapon. Working on his own for two years, Whitehead developed the modern torpedo. He sold his first units to the Austro-Hugarian Navy in 1867.

Maintenance does not mean the same thing to all people. Operations managers, maintenance supervisors, and reliability engineers can be heard struggling to come to a common understanding. 

Historical definitions of maintenance are quite different.  “Maintenance” was originally the crime of unlawful abuse of legal procedures and attempts to influence courts. The other historical definition is providing money for operating or living expenses.  As a term applied to machinery, maintenance is less than about 150 years old. Preventive maintenance as a literal phrase is even more recent. So who invented this phrase?

During World War Two, the Office of Special Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, compiled a manual on how to ruin a factory’s output without explosives.  Their main weapon was bad maintenance. 

The manual described ways that transportation and industrial workers could do their jobs but intentionally damage their plant and organization.  The main idea was to do their jobs poorly, in a way where bad workmanship was plausibly accidental.  Some of the targets were boilers, housekeeping, turbines, fusing, motors, tools, building heat, fuel storage, and lubricating oil systems.

Efficiency of 99.995% … in 1915

The Street Railway Journal, later renamed the Electric Railway Journal was published from 1884 until 1931.  The first 1884 volume described the reason for the journal’s existence, to serve the streetcar industry better than journals focusing on heavy rail. In 1884 it was most common for horses to pull street cars on fixed rails.  The importance of animal power was reflected in the articles about managing animals and many advertisements for grooming machines, traces, harnesses, and cures for horse colic.  A rarer method of motive power was a steam engine that drove an underground tow cable.  The second 1884 volume reported several experiments in using electric motors to power the cable instead of steam.