Industrial engineering
Industrial engineering

There is a general consensus among historians that the roots of the industrial engineering profession date back to the Industrial Revolution. The technologies that helped mechanize traditional manual operations in the textile industry including the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and perhaps most importantly the steam engine generated economies of scale that made mass production in centralized locations attractive for the first time. The concept of the production system had its genesis in the factories created by these innovations. It has also been suggested that perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was the first industrial engineer because there is evidence that he applied science to the analysis of human work by examining the rate at which a man could shovel dirt around the year 1500. Others also state that the industrial engineering profession grew from Charles Babbage’s study of factory operations and specifically his work on the manufacture of straight pins in 1832. However, it has been generally argued that these early efforts, while valuable, were merely observational and did not attempt to engineer the jobs studied or increase overall output.
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