Robert Vinçotte (Antwerp, 1844-Schaarbeek, 1904) was a Belgian engineer who laid the basis for industrial workplace safety in his native country. He was involved in the founding of the two companies that would dominate the Belgian reliability certification market during the Twentieth Century.

Life and Work

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 Louvain and Liège, became first a professor in Antwerp, then Ghent, 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"^[1] The description might be hagiographic, yet it certainly corresponds with reports about his son Robert, who would also make a career in inspection, albeit of a very different kind.

Robert Vinçotte also attended school in Liège and graduated with a brilliant record 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). As an additional recognition of his intellectual capabilities, he was alotted a post as a mathematics teacher at the Atheneum^[2] of Brussels, a great honour in those days. While teaching, Vinçotte deepened his explorations of a growing problem: the explosion of steam boilers. Since the conception, invention, and development of this device by such men as Denis Papin, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt, it had often manifested its capabilities for disaster. The most striking example of such disasters is perhaps the Sultana tragedy that happened in the United States. Before 1859, English insurance agencies had conducted a rough study of boiler explosions, and their conclusions were cause for worry. This drove one of them, the "Boiler Insurance and Steam Power Company", to create an inspection service for the boilers they insured. The result of these inspections was a 75 percent decrease in accidents.

Vinçotte's research area was noted with interest: 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.^[3]

Vinçotte went on to point out that, whereas in Great Britain 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 would aptly name the "Association pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur" ("Association for the Surveillance of Steam Boilers"), the history of which is nearly inextricable from that of its first director, Robert Vinçotte^[4]. Its purpose was twofold: to prevent steam boilers 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. In the introductory letter Vinçotte and Urban sent to factory owners, they made sure to stress the non-profit nature of their enterprise:

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.^[5]

The Association quickly grew, and 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^[6]. 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 managed to combine 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). His work in the field served to elucidate many practical aspects of his theory, and it was this drive that sent Vinçotte abroad the next years, to Düsseldorf and the United States, to follow the latest innovations in steam engine technology. Meanwhile he would exert an increasing influence on policymaking: already 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. His main interest was the safety measures for steam boilers of the burgeoning American industry. The result of this trip was a compilation of rules for calculating the reliability 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 in 1885. However, he was not the only beneficiary of the success of the Association: in 1887, a budget surplus allowed every one of its employees a life insurance, a fund that could also be accessed upon retirement.

Competition and Further Developments

But the Association (henceforth AV) was not to have the field for itself much longer. 1890 brought the foundation of what would, in the course of time, become a major competitor for AV: the "Association des Industriels de Belgique" (henceforth: AIB). The founder of AIB was Henri Adan, director of the Royale Belge insurance company, and his main aim was very similar to that of Urban more than fifteen years earlier: to unite all factory owners in a non-profit organisation that would be funded by its members only. In return for their money, the factories of the members would be regularly inspected by the engineers that staffed AIB. That Robert Vinçotte was closely involved in the nascent association as a counselor is not as much of a paradox as it seems: from the beginning, AIB's aims were a lot broader than those of AV, and the former did not put as much of an emphasis on steam boiler inspections as the latter.

The market opportunities for both companies would be significantly augmented by the Belgian government, which by the end of the century (1899 and 1900, respectively) introduced two new pieces of legislation that obliged employers to make their working spaces healthier and safer for their employees^[7]. Again, the technical advice for the law came from Robert Vinçotte ^[8]. It would be one of the last major realizations before his death in 1904.

Robert Vinçotte died in 1904 after returning from a study trip to Italy, 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. In that same year, AIB was given its second golden medal for its participation at the world exhibition in Paris. 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.

Notes

^ Quoted in Jaumotte, page 11. Translation: ..."the personification of duty and austere duty. His inspections were performed in the most meticulous way".
^ In Belgium, the term "Atheneum" refers to a secondary school organised by the state, in opposition to those schools linked to Catholicism
^ Quoted in Lecocq, page 2. Translation: "Steam boiler explosions are one of the regrettable aspects of our industrial environment. Disastrous because of the damage and unemployment they cause, hateful because they show human life as less expensive than preventive spending, they are, together with the other dangers of work, one of the most biggest causes of disaffected workers".
^ Cf. the comments of Vinçotte's son Richard, who writes in the booklet that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Association that "[l]'histoire de trente premières années de l'Association se confond avec celle de Robert Vinçotte qui le personifait et s'était complètement identifié avec elle". Page 15. Translation: "the history of the thirty first years of the Association is entangled with that of Robert Vinçotte who personified it and had completely identified with it".
^ Quoted in Lecocq, page 4. Translation: "Founded for a philanthropic purpose, the Association has excluded the notion of making profit; the resources of the Association will be entirely devoted to giving the most complete service possible.
^ Lecocq, page 10
^ Thus, whereas in 1890 Henri Adan could still praise Belgium for partaking in a "mouvement international qui permet à l'initiative privée de l'industriel, de faire le bien sans qu'une loi coercitive lui prescrive ce devoir et le rende odieux" ("an international movement that allows for the private initiative of the entrepreneur to do good without any one coercive law prescribing it and thus making it odious"; quoted in de Brouwer, pages 8-11), this laissez-faire viewpoint would be undermined by Vinçotte's own actions less than a decade later
^ De Jaer, M.J. [Speech Given at the Funeral of Robert Vinçotte]. In Robert Vinçotte.

References

All references are to texts written in French

de Brouwer, J. "Allocution de Baron J. de Brouwer". Association des Industriels de Belgique a.s.b.l.: 1890-1940. Brussels: AIB, 1940.
Lecocq, L. "Historique de l'Association Vinçotte". Unpublished document in the archives of Vinçotte Belgium.
Litt, Baudouin. "30 ans de politique de prévention en Belgique: Le rôle du Service Externe pour les Contrôles Techniques sur le lieu de travail (S.E.C.T.) dans la politique de prévention". Powerpoint Presentation. Vilvoorde: Vinçotte Academy, 2005.
Jaumotte, André. "Quelques réflexions sur le contrôle, la sécurité et la fiabilité". Association Vinçotte Centième anniversaire: Allocutions prononcées au cours de la séance académique du 7 juin 1973 / Vereniging Vinçotte Honderdjarig bestaan: Toespraken gehouden tijdens de akademische zitting van 7 juni 1973. Linkebeek: Association/Vereniging Vinçotte, 1973.
"Note sur l'AIB: Historique". Bulletin Annuel d'Assocation des Industriels de Belgique 75 (1965). 9.
"Rapport presenté par le conseil d'administration à l'assemblée Générale du 2 février 1876". Brussels: Association pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur, 1876.
Van Overmeire, Marc. "Association Vinçotte: Historique". Powerpoint Presentation. Vilvoorde: Vinçotte Academy, 2004.
Various authors. Robert Vinçotte. Liège: Association des Ingénieurs sortis de l'Ecole de Liège, 1904.
Verschoren, Philippe. "Histoire de Vinçotte jusqu'à 2004". Document property of Vinçotte International.
Vinçotte, Richard. Cinquantième Anniversaire de la Fondation de l'Association Vinçotte pour la Surveillance des Chaudières à Vapeur. Brussels: Ch. De Bruycker, 1922.

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.

[1] Quoted in Jaumotte, page 11. Translation: ..."the personification of duty and austere duty. His inspections were performed in the most meticulous way".

[2] In Belgium, the term "Atheneum" refers to a secondary school organised by the state, in opposition to those schools linked to Catholicism

[3] Quoted in Lecocq, page 2. Translation: "Steam boiler explosions are one of the regrettable aspects of our industrial environment. Disastrous because of the damage and unemployment they cause, hateful because they show human life as less expensive than preventive spending, they are, together with the other dangers of work, one of the most biggest causes of disaffected workers".

[4] Cf. the comments of Vinçotte's son Richard, who writes in the booklet that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Association that "[l]'histoire de trente premières années de l'Association se confond avec celle de Robert Vinçotte qui le personifait et s'était complètement identifié avec elle". Page 15. Translation: "the history of the thirty first years of the Association is entangled with that of Robert Vinçotte who personified it and had completely identified with it".

[5] Quoted in Lecocq, page 4. Translation: "Founded for a philanthropic purpose, the Association has excluded the notion of making profit; the resources of the Association will be entirely devoted to giving the most complete service possible.

[6] Lecocq, page 10

[7] Thus, whereas in 1890 Henri Adan could still praise Belgium for partaking in a "mouvement international qui permet à l'initiative privée de l'industriel, de faire le bien sans qu'une loi coercitive lui prescrive ce devoir et le rende odieux" ("an international movement that allows for the private initiative of the entrepreneur to do good without any one coercive law prescribing it and thus making it odious"; quoted in de Brouwer, pages 8-11), this laissez-faire viewpoint would be undermined by Vinçotte's own actions less than a decade later

[8] De Jaer, M.J. [Speech Given at the Funeral of Robert Vinçotte]. In Robert Vinçotte.

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