HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

As we have already known about the steam engine and how it was the beginning of a new era in manufacturing industries. The very first steam engines were utilized in mines to pull out the water and to drive machine tools. These applications involved a single steam engine that was used to drive multiple machines using a complicated system of transmission shafts and leather belts (called transmission belts).

•    Discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 followed by the invention of first DC motor with commutator (reverser) in 1834 by Thomas Davenport were the turning points for the industry. Nevertheless, it was not until 1866 that the electric motor became widely used. This was after Werner von Siemens invented the dynamo that provided a simple way of generating electrical current in large quantities. The electric motor replaced the steam engine as a driving component.
•     In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the first assembly line production system for the famous Model T. This resulted in much higher productivity, as production time for a car fell from 750 to just 93 hours. Higher productivity enabled the Ford Company to pay its workers a daily wage of 5 dollars for 8 hours of work in 1913. The price for a Model T fell to around 600 dollars.
•   In 1873 a patent was granted for a fully automatic machine for manufacturing screws that used cam disks to store the individual program sequences. In 1837 Joseph Henry invented an electromagnetic switch that was called a relay. They were initially used for signal amplification in Morse stations. Later they were used for building electrical controllers. These types of controller, where the relays are hard wired together, were called hard wired programmed controllers, a name still used today.
•   In 1959 Joseph Engelberger presented the prototype for an industrial robot that was used by General Motors in automobile production from 1961. This robot still had hydraulic drives; it was not until later that industrial robots were fitted exclusively with electric motors.
•   And in 1968 a team from the American company Allen Bradley under the leadership of Odo Struger developed the first programmable logic controller (PLC).

Significance    

                          The first commercially successful glass bottle blowing machine was an automatic model introduced in 1905. The machine, operated by a two man crew working 12 hour shifts, could produce 17,280 bottles in 24 hours, compared to 2,880 bottles made by a crew of six men and boys working in a shop for a day. The cost of making bottles by machine was 10 to 12 cents per gross compared to $1.80 per gross by the manual glassblowers and helpers.
There are many more examples of how utilization of automation have benefited the industries.