Robert Vinçotte - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Robert Vinçotte was a Belgian

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

engineer

Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

who laid the basis for industrial workplace safety

Workplace safety

Workplace safety & health is a category of management responsibility in places of employment.To ensure the safety and health of workers, managers establish a focus on safety that can include elements such as:* management leadership and commitment...

in his native country. He was involved in the founding of the two companies that would dominate the Belgian inspection

Inspection

An inspection is, most generally, an organized examination or formal evaluation exercise. In engineering activities inspection involves the measurements, tests, and gauges applied to certain characteristics in regard to an object or activity...

and certification

Product certification

Product certification or product qualification is the process of verifying that a certain product has passed performance tests and quality assurance tests or qualification requirements stipulated in contracts, regulations, or specifications...

market during the twentieth century. He was also the brother of Thomas Vinçotte

Thomas Vinçotte

Baron Thomas Jules Vinçotte was a Belgian sculptor and medallist.- Life :Vinçotte was the son of Jean-Marie Vinçotte, born in Borgerhout and brother of the engineer Robert Vinçotte...

, a famous Belgian sculptor.

Early years

Vinçotte was born in Antwerp. His father was Jean-Marie Vinçotte, a man who started out as a communal teacher but eventually, through studies in Leuven

Catholic University of Leuven

The Catholic University of Leuven, or of Louvain, was the largest, oldest and most prominent university in Belgium. The university was founded in 1425 as the University of Leuven by John IV, Duke of Brabant and approved by a Papal bull by Pope Martin V.During France's occupation of Belgium in the...

and Liège, became first a professor in Antwerp, then Ghent

Ghent

Ghent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...

, 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"

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 of Brussels, a great honour in those days. While teaching, Vinçotte deepened his explorations of the explosion of steam boilers

Boiler (steam generator)

A boiler or steam generator is a device used to create steam by applying heat energy to water. Although the definitions are somewhat flexible, it can be said that older steam generators were commonly termed boilers and worked at low to medium pressure but, at pressures above this, it is more...

.

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:

Les explosions de chaudières sont l'un des côtés fâcheux de notre situation industrielle. Désastreuses par les dégâts et les chômages qu'elles occasionnent, odieuses en ce qu'elles montrent la vie humaine pesant moins dans la balance que les dépenses préventives, elles sont, avec les autres dangers du travail, l'une des causes le plus actives à la désaffection des ouvriers.

Vinçotte went on to point out that, whereas in Great Britain

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

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.

Director of the Association

In August that year, 13 captains of industry and engineers gathered and set up the provisional organisation that they named the "Association pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur" ("Association for the Surveillance of Steam Boilers"). Its purpose was to prevent steam boilers

Boiler (steam generator)

from exploding through safety inspection and to promote a more efficient use of power. In return for a membership fee, it would provide semiannual safety inspections and staff instruction. According to the introductory letter, the Association was non-profit.

Fondée dans un but philantropique, l'Association a exclu l'idée de faire des bénéfices; les ressources de l'Association seront entièrement consacrées à rendre le service aussi complet que possible.

The Association had near to five hundred members by the end of 1872. By 1910, it would inspect more boilers than the combined inspection organisations of Germany and France. However, this success was still far away at the time: in 1873, the Association only had three engineers at its disposal, one of whom was its director, Robert Vinçotte, himself. In that year, Vinçotte combined his function of director with inspecting 250 steam boilers (half of the number of steam boilers the Association had registered at the end of the previous year). Vinçotte went abroad the next years, to Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...

and the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, to follow the latest innovations in steam engine and vessel

Steam engine

A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid.Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separate from the combustion products. Non-combustion heat sources such as solar power, nuclear power or geothermal energy may be...

technology. In 1875, he pressed the Belgian government to make inspections such as his company performed obligatory by law, something that resulted in the revised police regulations of 1884.

Vinçotte's close cooperation with the state would continue in 1881 when he travelled to the United States again, this time on request of the Belgian government to bring back knowledge of the safety measures for steam boilers of the burgeoning American industry. The result was a compilation of rules for calculating the reliability

Reliability engineering

Reliability engineering is an engineering field, that deals with the study, evaluation, and life-cycle management of reliability: the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time. It is often measured as a probability of...

and strength of the key parts of steam boilers, later published in a textbook. Also in 1881, the Association announced that, after ten years, its amount of biannually inspected steam boilers had more than quadrupled, while only 0.17 percent of them had failed in the same period.

For these and his earlier contributions to Belgian industrial safety, Vinçotte was awarded the rank of Knight in the Order of Leopold II

Order of Leopold II

The Order of Leopold II is an order of Belgium and is named in honor of King Léopold II. The decoration was established on 24 August 1900 by Leopold II as king of the Congo Free State and was in 1908, upon Congo being handed over to Belgium, incorporated into the Belgian awards system...

in 1885.

In 1887, a budget surplus allowed every one of its employees a life insurance, a fund that could also be accessed upon retirement.

Death

Robert Vinçotte died in 1904 after returning from a study trip to Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, and would be replaced as a director of AV in 1909 by his son, whose first name was the same as his. He is buried in Schaarbeek

Schaarbeek

Schaerbeek or Schaarbeek is one of the nineteen municipalities located in the Brussels-Capital Region of Belgium. The first mention of the name was Scarenbecca, recorded in a document from the Bishop of Cambrai in 1120...

. In that same year, AIB was given its second golden medal for its participation at the world exhibition in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. As a tribute, the "Association pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur" would be rebaptised in 1922 as "Association Vinçotte pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur", as it had already been known for some time abroad.

External links

Vinçotte is the result of the fusion (in 1989) between the two competing organisations (Association Vinçotte and Association des Industriels Belges) Robert Vinçotte was involved in.
CEOC is the International Confederation of Inspection and Certification Organisations, and wholly embodies the international approach to security that Robert Vinçotte practiced in his own lifetime.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Early years

Director of the Association

Death

See also

External links