Shewhart

Walter A. Shewhart
Walter A. Shewhart
Born	(1891-03-18)March 18, 1891 New Canton, Illinois, U.S.
Died	March 11, 1967(1967-03-11) (aged 75) Troy Hills, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	physics, engineering, statistics
Institutions	Western Electric
Alma mater	University of Illinois, University of California, Berkeley

Walter Andrew Shewhart (pronounced like "shoe-heart", March 18, 1891 – March 11, 1967) was an American physicist, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control and also related to the Shewhart cycle.

W. Edwards Deming said of him:

As a statistician, he was, like so many of the rest of us, self-taught, on a good background of physics and mathematics.

Born in New Canton, Illinois to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before being awarded his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1917. He married Edna Elizabeth Hart, daughter of William Nathaniel and Isabelle "Ibie" Lippencott Hart on August 4, 1914 in Pike County, Illinois.

Bell Telephone’s engineers had been working to improve the reliability of their transmission systems. In order to impress government regulators of this natural monopoly with the high quality of their service, Shewhart's first assignment was to improve the voice clarity of the carbon transmitters in the company's telephone handsets. Later he applied his statistical methods to the final installation of central station switching systems, then to factory production. When Dr. Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company Inspection Engineering Department at the Hawthorne Works in 1918, industrial quality was limited to inspecting finished products and removing defective items. That all changed on May 16, 1924. Dr. Shewhart's boss, George D. Edwards, recalled: "Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a schematic control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control." Shewhart's work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality.