Brief History of Safety

Of course, the need for safety has always been with us. One of the earliest written references to safety is from the Code of Hammurabi, around 1750 BCE. His code stated that if a house was built and it fell due to poor construction, killing the owner, then the builder himself would be put to death. The flrst laws covering compensation for injuries were codified in the Middle Ages. The Great Fire of London in 1667 resulted in the first English fire insurance laws to be aeated. 

Some of the first maritime safety regulations, came about around 1255 in Venice, stated that a ship s draught could not be exceeded and must be verified by visual inspection. The Comitd Maritime International, established in Antwerp in 1897, codified the need for ongoing maritime regulations by bringing together numerous maritime law associations. 

Around the 1920s, private companies started to create formalized safety programs. The early 1930s was the beginning of the implementation of accident prevention programs across the United States. By the end of the decade, the American National Standards Institute had published hundreds of industrial manuals. 

Most of the current safety techniques and concepts we use today were bom at the end of the World War II. Operations research led the way, suggesting that the scientific method could be applied to the safety profession. In fact, operations research gave some legitimacy to the use of quantitative analysis in predicting accidents. One of the earliest concept definitions for systan safety (looking at safety from a system perspective) first appeared at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences in New York City in January 1946. The Organization of 

Because of the loss of thousands of aircraft and pilots during the same time frame, the U.S. Air Force started to pull together the concepts of system safety and, in April 1962, published BSD Exhibit 62-41, System Safety Engineering Military Specification for the Development of Air Eorce Ballistic Missiles.  

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