“The Concept of Efficiency: An Historical Analysis”, 2009 ():
This article examines efficiency both as a concept in contemporary engineering use and as a historical artifact. The concept of efficiency expresses a specific form of rationality, used in attempts to control a changing situation by bringing it into conformity with a vision of how the world works.
Efficiency became an important technological value during the 19th and 20th centuries, as part of the construction of modern industrial society. It was integral in achieving the purposeful and measurable effects in an industrial modernity that championed rationality, foresight, and planning in the control and manipulation of the social and material worlds.
It remains an important post-industrial value, particularly in continuing concern about waste and wise resource management. Efficiency may be used in two different ways, as a general term, usually of approval, indicating a job well and economically done; and as a specific technical assessment, growing out of the experience of industrialization and tied to measurements of performance in machines and the thermodynamics of energy.
Efficiency in general use may be quantified; in engineering traditions, it is quantified, almost without exception.
Introduction
The Scope of Efficiency
Historical Background: Enduring Nuances
A Vocabulary of Efficiency: Important Contemporary Distinctions
Efficiency as a Design Value in Engineering
Critiques of Efficiency
Conclusion
…3.2.1 Motion control in machines: Industrial efficiency has its roots in technical practices of motion control in machines. It is closely linked to physical and mechanical measurements, developed from the 18th through the mid-19th centuries to help quantify the performance of machines, and stemming from a tradition of analyzing machines and their effects in terms of motion. This tradition gave rise to a variety of devices both to contain and direct motion in machines and to assess and measure that motion, although the term “efficiency” was not in common use until well into the 19th century. Mechanics and engineers used instead a variety of terms, such as “mechanical effect” and “mechanical power”.
Mechanical traditions have long linked efficiency to how things move. Efficiency in machine performance came to emphasize a mechanical discipline that used physical structures to eliminate extraneous and wasteful motions, and to control and direct productive motion along predetermined paths. British engineer John Smeaton, in a series of celebrated experiments on waterwheel efficiency in the 1750s, designed his model to minimize splashing and turbulence, and to eliminate disturbances that might keep the water from moving smoothly and directly through the system [1759; 1981, ppg35–57; 2008a].4 Gerard Joseph Christian, French machine theorist and director of the Conservatoire des arts et métiers during the Restoration, described the most perfect machine in terms of efficiency, as the one that produced “the greatest mechanical effect, while using the least amount of fuel”, only possible if all but a machine’s working parts were immobilized [1825, II pg374, III ppg18, 37; 1999]. In the mid-19th century, W. J. M. Rankine, at the University of Glasgow, found in efficiency a way to link the precise mathematical formulations of the energy concept with measurements of machine performance: the best or most efficient machines lost the least energy in useless and extraneous motion [1992; Wise & Smith 1989–199034ya]. The influential machine theorist Franz Reuleaux defined a machine in terms of motion control: a well-designed and effective machine allowed only predictable and controlled motions [1876].
Motion control offers a particularly potent illustration of the types of control affiliated with efficiency. It requires that disturbances be eliminated, that the machine or system be kept under detailed surveillance, and that only predicted motions be allowed. The most efficient machine is the most thoroughly controlled.