“Never before have mechanics and manufacturers, and in general has the world of industry, made use of gages and gaging systems as it is doing now. And there is a small wonder for this state of affairs, for these useful tools in all their different phases have proven to the satisfaction of the greatest mechanical economists of today that they are instruments that work for the reduction of cost of production, the perfect efficiency of products, and the education of, and increasingly the skill of, the productive worker,” wrote Joseph Vincent Woodworth in “Gages and Gaging Systems,” 1908.
This statement was printed 100 years after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Even as the statement is repeated today, more than 110 years after Woodworth inked the words in 1908, it is truer than ever, though perhaps not as grandiose.