The journal Quality Engineering was founded in 1988, with Frank Caplan as the founding editor. With the publication of Volume 20, Number 1 of Quality Engineering we are celebrating the journal's 20th anniversary. Over these twenty years, seventeen under Frank's editorship, the publication has established itself as a key journal in the field of quality--providing valuable and useful information to literally thousands of quality professionals throughout the world. As we enter into this anniversary year for the journal, we think it important to look back and describe how Quality Engineering came about. To discuss why there was a perceived need for a new journal and why Quality Engineering was founded requires us to look back to the years before 1988. Indeed, we need to go much further back--to the beginning of the American Society for Quality Control, and even before. In 1944, at the height of World War II and the rollout of numerous statistical quality control courses sponsored by the War Production Board to assist the war effort, the Buffalo (NY) Society of Quality Control Engineers (BSQCE) in cooperation with the University of Buffalo began to publish a new journal called Industrial Quality Control (IQC). The first editor was Dr. Martin A. Brumbaugh, a Professor of Statistics at the University of Buffalo and Vice President of the BSQCE. The objectives of IQC were to "collect, analyze, and disseminate information concerning quality control applied to industry." As the editor of IQC, Brumbaugh used the journal to promote quality control and it quickly attained a national circulation. Over the years IQC became a source of the applications of quality tools, including statistical ones, for use by the practitioners of those tools.
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