IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 137

Chicago, 1871; Boston, 1872; Wilmington, 1886; Vancouver, 1886; Seattle,
1889; Milwaukee, 1892; and Baltimore, 1904. Responding to these fires,
property owners looked to insurance
companies to help them reduce their
losses. In turn, insurance companies
turned to engineers to reduce risk.
The most successful of the early risk
engineers was MIT-educated William
Henry Merrill. In 1895, Merrill created the
National Board of Fire Underwriters to test
electrical appliances and building materials.
He raised US$3,000 and wrote reports on
some 75 objects. In 1901, he incorporated
his firm as Underwriters Laboratory (UL).
By 1905, it had a budget of US$300,000.
A decade later, some 50 million products
carried were certified as being properly
designed to minimize fire risk.
The experience of William Merrill
and UL was not the story that Art wanted me to discuss. Art was not prepared
that I would uncover a story that showed
how engineers shaped and controlled
consumer markets without designing
products or manufacturing goods.
Instead, he had hoped that I would write
about J.J. Carty, the chief engineer of
AT&T at the start of the 20th century.
Carty famously argued that "telephone
engineering is classed as a branch of
electrical engineering, although it will
be shown that telephone engineering
comprehends important elements not at
all electrical in their character."

Carty viewed the telephone as a tool
of commerce more than a consumer
product. He concluded that the telephone
infrastructure needed to support business
and needed to grow with business.
Hence, he spent a great deal of time
studying how business operated in a
neighborhood, how it was likely to grow,
and how it would make demands on
communications infrastructure. When
Carty spoke of "elements not at all electrical in their character" in telephone
engineering, he was talking about the
economic analysis behind the design of
switchboards and trunk lines.
In the end, Art was right. The story of
the early telephone engineers does help
us understand some of the aspects of
consumer electronics engineering. Telephone companies were some of the first
institutions to deal with large customer
bases. However, the story of flashlights
better suggests the route that consumer
electronics engineering is traveling, for
it better illustrates how different forces
shape the consumer market and how
engineering expertise can be applied at
different points in the market.

engineering and plant management. The
verb "to program" was taken from industrial management, where it meant to establish
a goal, schedule, and allocation of resources and workers for a factory.
The podcast series is intended to help
listeners understand their work in a
broader context and also to appreciate
how their contributions are changing the
world. We think of it as a podcast on
critical thinking for technologists and
technical thinking for managers. It is
done in conjunction with Tamara Carleton, who is an industrial designer who
lives in Silicon Valley.
The podcast is called "How We Manage Stuff." It is available on iTunes at
http://itunes.managestuff.net. If you use
an Android device, you can get it from
http://pocketcast.managestuff.net with the
Pocket Casts app. If you do not want to
deal with operating system specifics, you
can just go to http://managestuff.net.
The first series was released on 2 June
and deals with the overarching themes
of the series including the burning
question "Why might a Twinkie be an
example of 3-D printing?"

A New PodcAst series

ABoUt tHe AUtHor

In parallel with this column, I am running a
new podcast series that is exploring the
relationship between software development
and management. These two fields interact
in in the way that they do because software
engineering has its origin in industrial

David Alan Grier can be reached at
grier@computer.org. He is the author of
When Computers Were Human and has a
new iTunes podcast on the interaction
between technology and management.

To sum up, the CE marking is a
product's "passport" to the European
Economic Area, as its compliance with
European product regulations is presumed. It does not, however, mean that
the producer does not have to be prepared for the legal defense of its products; there is still the possibility that

noncompliance is alleged by a market
surveillance authority. Additionally, CE
marking and product (non)compliance
have some competition law aspects that
might be exploited by competitors.

IP Corner (continued from page 126)
Additionally, the "wrong" CE marking
as mentioned above also provides competitors with the possibility of objecting to
that conduct under competition law. The
CE Directives themselves contain provisions that prohibit the use of a sign
similar to the CE marking as it might
confuse consumers.

october 2015

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

137

http://itunes.managestuff.net http://pocketcast.managestuff.net http://www.managestuff.net

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015