Now and Then

In March 2005, EIA/ECCB-954, "Electrical and Electronic Components and Products Hazardous-Substance-Free Standard and Requirements" was developed and released as a U.S. national standard.
In April 2005, the IECQ management committee agreed at its annual meeting in the United Kingdom to allow the United States National Authorized Institute to begin an international IECQ HSPM pilot program using the EIA/ECCB-954 standard.

In October 2005, following the IEC Conformity Assessment Board meetings in South Africa, it was agreed that the IECQ would release EIA/ECCB-954 as an international specification with the international document title QC 080000 IECQ HSPM.

The foundation for the deployment of this specification was a hundred and one years of International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) history:

On Sept. 15, 1904, delegates to the International Electrical Congress, held in St. Louis, adopted a report that included the following words:

"…steps should be taken to secure the cooperation of the technical societies of the world, by the appointment of a representative Commission to consider the question of the standardization of the nomenclature and ratings of electrical apparatus and machinery."

As a result, the IEC was officially founded in June 1906, in London, where its central office was set up.

By 1914, the IEC had formed four technical committees to deal with nomenclature, symbols, rating of electrical machinery and prime movers. The commission had also issued a first list of terms and definitions covering electrical machinery and apparatus, a list of international letter symbols for quantities and signs for names of units, an international standard for resistance for copper, a list of definitions in connection with hydraulic turbines, and a number of definitions and recommendations relating to rotating machines and transformers.

World War I interrupted the IEC work, which resumed in 1919, and by 1923, the number of technical committees had increased to 10. The IEC council decided to create the Committee of Action "to assist in giving effect to the decisions of the council, to second the efforts of the central office and to coordinate the work of the national committees and of the advisory committees."

In 1930, the IEC established the following electrical units:

• Hertz, for the unit of frequency
• Oersted, for the unit of magnetic field strength
• Gauss, for the unit of magnetic flux density
• Maxwell, for the unit of magnetic flux
• Gilbert, for the unit of magnetomotive force
• Var, for designating the unit of reactive power
• Weber, for the practical unit of magnetic flux

It was decided to extend the existing series of practical units into a comprehensive system of physical units, which became the "Giorgi system," named after Giovanni Giorgi (1871-1950) an Italian scientist and engineer. This system has been elaborated further and is now commonly known as the "Système international," or SI.

Between World War I and World War II, a number of new international organizations came into being, and the IEC recognized the need for cooperation to avoid overlapping efforts. In some cases, joint technical committees were formed such as the International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR).

In 1938, the IEC produced the first edition of the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV). The unification of electrotechnical terminology was one of the principal tasks allocated to the IEC by the St. Louis congress. In the early days, the Nomenclature Committee was engaged in pioneer work, as no comparable international technical vocabulary had yet been published and few national electrotechnical vocabularies existed. With its 2,000 terms in French, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Esperanto, and its definitions in French and English, the IEV could rightly be considered an outstanding achievement. It aroused wide interest among international technical organizations outside the electrotechnical field.

In September 1939, the IEC’s activity came to a standstill because of World War II and didn’t resume for another six years. In 1948, the IEC central office moved from London to Geneva, Switzerland.

Subsequently, the IEC expanded its efforts in the light-current field, which had constituted only a small part of the activity of the commission before 1939. Standards covering measurements, safety requirements and the testing and specification of components for radio receivers and televisions began to appear. At the same time, work on electroacoustics started, while CISPR developed standards on permissible limits for various frequency ranges used for radio broadcasting and measurement methods for interference.

From 1948 to 1980, the number of technical committees grew from 34 to 80 and began to include such new technologies as capacitors and resistors, semiconductor devices, electrical equipment in medical practice and maritime navigation and radiocommunication systems and equipment.

In 1974, the IEC created the Technical Committee 76 to address standards relating to lasers, with a particular focus on safety. This committee developed the four-class system for lasers that is the global reference. This system covers lasers used in business, entertainment, education, medicine, research and industry.

The last two decades of the 20th century saw the IEC continue to address new technologies as they emerged, creating new technical committees to prepare standards for lightning protection, fibre optics, ultrasonics, wind turbine systems and design automation.

In 1995, the IEC created the Lord Kelvin Award. A maximum of three recipients are recognized each year for their outstanding contributions to global electrotechnical standardization over a number of years.

Keeping pace with the rapid technological developments at the dawn of the 21st century, the IEC has most recently created new technical committees for fuel cell technologies; for methods to assess electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields associated with human exposure; and for avionics.

In 2005, the commission published the most recent edition of the IEC Multilingual Dictionary, which now contains 19,400 electrotechnical definitions in French and English and equivalent terms in 13 languages. Consolidated indexes are also available in English, French, German and Spanish.

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