User:Laatzitten/Vinçotte (company)

Vinçotte is a Belgian accredited certification organisation, that currently (according to itself) controls 75% of the Belgian safety and prevention market. The company is the result of a fusion between two similar companies in which the same man, Robert Vinçotte was involved. Said fusion occured in 1989.

=History= An overview of Vinçotte's history is bound to discourse on the two competing associations that fused in 1989. These two associations are the Association Vinçotte and the Association des Industriels Belges.

Association Vinçotte
In 1872, Maurice Urban, a director of the National Railway Company of Belgium, asked Robert Vinçotte, a young engineer, to help found an organisation to control steam boilers in factories. The "Association pour la surveillance des chaudières à vapeur" was born. its principal aims were twofold: the inspection of steam boilers to prevent explosions was coupled with an advocacy of a more economic use of power.

The association grew rapidly, because of, among other reasons, the increasing legal pressure on factory owners to make their workplaces safer for their employees. Thus, in 1876 the association was able to report that it had almost doubled its number of inspection visits in only two years. Said legal pressure resulted mainly in the 1899 and 1900 laws on security and prevention. Robert Vinçotte was heavily involved in the drafting of these laws, mainly due to the fact that by then, he had a huge experience in the relatively new area of reliability engineering. Not only had he led the association (which by then had been renamed in honour of its director to Association Vincotte, henceforth AV) for more than 25 years by then, but he had also made an important study visit to the United States in 1881, the result of which was a series of basic mathematical rules for the reliability of steam boilers.