|
Robert Vinçotte (Antwerp, 1844-Schaarbeek, 1904) was a Belgian engineer who laid the basis for industrial workplace safety in his native country. He was involved in the founding of the two companies that would dominate the Belgian inspection and certification market during the twentieth century. He was also the brother of Thomas Vinçotte, a famous Belgian sculptor. ==Early years== Vinçotte was born in Antwerp. His father was Jean-Henri Vinçotte (1807-1890), a man who started out as a communal teacher but eventually, through studies in Leuven and Liège, became first a professor in Antwerp, then Ghent, and ended his career as a high school inspector (a function that was brand new and very prestigious at the time). Vinçotte Sr. was a highly respected man, once described as "la personnification du devoir et du devoir austère. Ses inspections étaient conduites de la façon la plus consciencieuse"〔Quoted in Jaumotte, page 11. Translation: ..."the personification of duty and austere duty. His inspections were performed in the most meticulous way".〕 Robert Vinçotte also attended school in Liège and in 1865, gaining the titles of "ingénieur honoraire des mines" (honorary mining engineer) and "docteur en sciences physiques et mathématiques" (doctor in physical and mathematical sciences). In addition, he was allotted a post as a mathematics teacher at the Atheneum〔In Belgium, the term "Atheneum" refers to a secondary school organised by the state, in opposition to those schools linked to Catholicism〕 of Brussels, a great honour in those days. While teaching, Vinçotte deepened his explorations of the explosion of steam boilers. In 1872 Maurice Urban, a director of the National Railway Company of Belgium, asked him to take charge of a new organisation, which would be created for the purpose of inspecting steam boilers in factories. At the time, Vinçotte expressed the problem the new association (and the whole of the industrialized world) faced as follows:
Vinçotte went on to point out that, whereas in Great Britain there was on average one explosion for every 6000 boilers in service, for Belgium this rate was one in 1000 to 1200. He identified the main causes for this discrepancy as construction or design errors, coupled with bad maintenance, and concluded that regular inspections, as they were being performed in Britain, could decrease the number of boiler explosions in Belgium with at least 75 percent. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Vinçotte」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|