Walter A. Shewhart

Born in New Canton, Illinois to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before being awarded his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1917. He married Edna Elizabeth Hart, daughter of William Nathaniel and Isabelle "Ibie" Lippencott Hart on August 4, 1914 in Pike County, Illinois.

After graduation from Berkeley, Shewhart became an assistant at the University of Illinois. From 1917 to 1918, he was the head of the department of physics at the Wisconsin Normal School (now University of Wisconsin–La Crosse). In 1918, he joined Western Electric, which manufactures hardware for the Bell Telephone Company. He later joined the newly founded Bell Labs in 1925 and worked there until his retirement in 1956.

From the late 1930s onwards, Shewhart's interests expanded out from industrial quality to wider concerns in science and statistical inference. The title of his second book, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939), asks the question: "What can statistical practice, and science in general, learn from the experience of industrial quality control?"

Shewhart's approach to statistics was radically different from that of many of his contemporaries. He possessed a strong operationalist outlook, largely absorbed from the writings of pragmatist philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis, and this influenced his statistical practice. In particular, he had read Lewis' Mind and the World Order many times. Though he lectured in England in 1932 under the sponsorship of Karl Pearson (another committed operationalist) his ideas attracted little enthusiasm within the English statistical tradition. The British Standards nominally based on his work, in fact, diverge on serious philosophical and methodological issues from his practice.

His more conventional work led him to formulate the statistical idea of tolerance intervals and to propose his data presentation rules, which are listed below:

Data have no meaning apart from their context.

Data contain both signal and noise. To be able to extract information, one must separate the signal from the noise within the data.

Shewhart visited India in 1947–1948 under the sponsorship of P. C. Mahalanobis of the Indian Statistical Institute. He toured the country, held conferences and stimulated interest in statistical quality control among Indian industrialists.

He died at Troy Hills, New Jersey in 1967.

Bell Telephone’s engineers had been working to improve the reliability of their transmission systems. In order to impress government regulators of this natural monopoly with the high quality of their service, Shewhart's first assignment was to improve the voice clarity of the carbon transmitters in the company's telephone handsets. Later he applied his statistical methods to the final installation of central station switching systems, then to factory production. When Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company Inspection Engineering Department at the Hawthorne Works in 1918, industrial quality was limited to inspecting finished products and removing defective items. That all changed on May 16, 1924. Shewhart's boss, George D. Edwards, recalled: "Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a schematic control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control." Shewhart's work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality.

Shewhart framed the problem in terms of assignable-cause and chance-cause variation and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. Shewhart stressed that bringing a production process into a state of statistical control, where there is only chance-cause variation, and keeping it in control, is necessary to predict future output and to manage a process economically. Dr. Shewhart created the basis for the control chart and the concept of a state of statistical control by carefully designed experiments. While Dr. Shewhart drew from pure mathematical statistical theories, he understood data from physical processes never produce a "normal distribution curve" (a Gaussian distribution, also commonly called a "bell curve"). He discovered that observed variation in manufacturing data did not always behave the same way as data in nature (Brownian motion of particles). Dr. Shewhart concluded that while every process displays variation, some processes display controlled variation that is natural to the process, while others display uncontrolled variation that is not present in the process causal system at all times.

Shewhart worked to advance the thinking at Bell Telephone Laboratories from their foundation in 1925 until his retirement in 1956, publishing a series of papers in the Bell System Technical Journal.

His work was summarized in his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931).

Shewhart's charts were adopted by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) in 1933 and advocated to improve production during World War II in American War Standards Z1.1–1941, Z1.2-1941 and Z1.3-1942.