Detail

26 March 2012: Edgar Dietrich

Before 1980

Statistical procedures had already been applied before I started to encounter them. Here I would like to refer to the lecture of professor Masing that he gave on the occasion of the Q-DAS user meeting on November 26, 2003. Unfortunately, this was his last public lecture before his death. The subject of his last public presentation was “Statistics as a Fundament of a Quality Method Based Way of Thinking and Acting“. I would like to recommend this lecture to anyone interested in the history of statistical procedures.

Principles of statistical procedures

In the middle of the 1990s the following books covered this topic in Germany:

• “Formeln und Tabellen der angewandten mathematischen Statistik“ (formulas and tables for applied mathematical statistics) by Graf, Henning, Stange, Wilrich, Springer Verlag
• “Statistische Verfahren für Technische Messreihen“ (statistical procedures for technical measurement series) by Dr. John, Carl Hanser Verlag
• “Statistical Methods for Quality Assurance“ by Rinne, Mittag, Carl Hanser Verlag

These books were quite theoretical and initially hard to understand for readers from practice.

When dealing with statistical procedures in industrial production, you have to mention the American physicist Walter Shewhart. While working at Bell Telephone Company he developed statistical procedures for the evaluation of quality-related processes and applied them in practice. Thus he is considered to be the “father of SPC” (Statistical Process Control)...