Edward G. Brisch

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Edward Gustave Brisch (8 January 1901[1] – 9 April 1960), was a Polish consulting engineer and industrial coding expert. He was the designer of the Brisch Classification, widely known and used in building and engineering. He became a British citizen in the 1940s.

Edward G Brisch photographed in the 1940s (studio unknown)

Biography

Born in

Ursus tractor factory, and was then appointed Works Manager of Citroën's Warsaw branch. He remained there until 1932 before taking on the role of Engineer in charge of Development of National Production at the Polish State Engineering Works (PZInż), specializing in armoured vehicles.[2] By now married, in 1934 he established an engineering consultancy in Warsaw, transferring soon afterwards to Paris,[1]
where he did some work for the British Army’s armoured vehicle operations.

Returning to Poland in summer 1939 to visit his family, trapped there by the

British India to Liverpool, a total of some 25,000 miles (40,000 km).[1] Cripps' intervention had probably saved his life.[3] He kept a record in Polish of this long and hazardous journey, of which the first seven pages have survived. They can now be read online in English translation.[4]

He arrived in England with a lung ailment, contracted in Burma, and underwent an immediate

Owens-Illinois Glass Company, the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company, General Electric in Cleveland and the Underwood Company of New York.[6]

In 1957, Brisch moved his family from Oxshott in Surrey to settle in Toledo. Never robust following his lung surgery, he died of pneumonia in Toledo on 9 April 1960. His widow and three children moved back to Surrey in the same year.[3]

The Brisch Classification

Brisch was a member of numerous British and American technical and management societies and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He wrote several technical papers in his field.

His great innovation was the development of a flexible machine-card inventory classification system, which was adopted by major companies in the US and Europe. His work drew some inspiration from the Universal Decimal Classification, used for classifying documents.[7] The uniqueness of the idea lies in the nomination of a primary code (typically within nine main headings 00-80) attached to every ‘part’, based on its essential features (shape and dimension). A further, secondary, code (based on 81 two-digit numbers, representing concepts, which are divided, and can be used in any conjunction) is then bonded to the parent, determined by its process features (e.g. machining operation). Evolving with the advances of computing and digitisation, the system has spread roots in contemporary situations requiring complicated inventory management.[8][9]

The system had wide applicability. In 1955 Brisch published a paper on his classification in the newly established journal of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, ASLIB Proceedings.[10] Sir Frank Francis, director and principal librarian at the British Museum, in the brief memoir that he contributed to The Times at Brisch's death, recalled frequent discussions on "expanding the methods [Brisch] had successfully developed for industry to the classification of documents and books. In the course of these discussions he elaborated a classification for music designed to make possible precise reference to documents illustrating many different aspects of a particular subject."[1]

Publications

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e Francis (1960)
  2. ^ a b c Brisch and Geoghegan (1957) p. 571
  3. ^ a b c d Brisch (2018) introduction
  4. ^ Brisch (2018) diary text
  5. ^ New York Times (10 April 1960) p. 86
  6. ^ Brisch (2018) at end, citing obituary
  7. ^ Brisch (1948)
  8. ^ Business Dictionary Archived 2019-06-21 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ Business Professor
  10. ^ Brisch (1955)

References

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