IIW History 1948-1958

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At the following annual assembly held in Oxford in 1951, the working group \.Ya attached to the new Commission XV (Fundamentals of Design and Fabri– cation for ·welded Construction) and remained so for the 1952 and 1953 assemblies held at Gi:iteborg and Copenhagen. In the meantime, the technical conunittee ISO/TC II (Unification of Boiler Codes) had been set up within I SO, a large number of members of it being also members of the IIW working group. Since the work to be carried out was likely t o be considerable becau::e of questions put by I SO, the delegates thought that it would be preferable t o trans– form the working group into a separate Commission. This was agreed by the Governing Council of the IIW at Florence in 1954, when it was decided that the new Commission should be numbered XI. Neither its name nor its terms of reference were modified. On the other hand, the number of delegates and experts serving on it increased. The small working group, which only included one delegate from each of the following countries : - Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Jetherlands, orway, S"·eden and the United Kingdom became a full Commission. 2 . ORGANISATION. The initial working group was small enough to hold, between annual assem– blies, meetings at which all the delegates could be present to consider together all the points on the agenda. \i\Then it was changed into a Commission, the number of delegates became too large for its procedure to remain unchanged. Furthermore, the problems to be considered became increasingly complex and difficult and required a larger number of specialists. The following decisions were therefore taken at the Florence assembly : - Mr. KERKHOF, Chairman of the former group, was made Chairman of the Commission (Mr. W. P . KERKHOF - Netherlands). The working group had no Vice-Chairman; Dr. \i\T. B. CARLSON (United Kingdom) was appointed Vice-Chairman of the Commission. Two Sub-Commissions were set up : Sub-Commis~ion A under the Chairmanship of the British delegate, was made responsible for studying the design details of \velds, which were to be recom– mended to ISO ; Sub-Commission B, the Chairman of ·which at the time was the Swedish delegate, was made responsible for the study of allowable stresses. During the years which followed , these bvo Sub-Commissions completed a large part of their work; their membership being relatively small, they vvere able to invite to their meetings specialists not belonging to the Commission and this helped them to carry out their work satisfactorily; and it was easier to organise a small number of intermediary meetings of these Sub-Commissions than general meetings attended by all members of the Commission. The Commission was thus able to adopt as drafts, at the next annual assembly in Zurich in 1955, the reports of the t"lrn Sub-Commissions and it was decided the following year in Madrid to send the texts, which had been re\ ised in the meantime, to ISO/TC II as recommendations.

3 . WORK ACCOMPLISHED.

At the first intermediary meeting held in Paris in 1950, it was decided that some of the most useful \C\rork which could be unde1:taken would be an investig– ation of the possibilities of reaching international agreement on welded connexions and the preparation of a book containing drawings on this subject. At first it seemed that this t ask could be completed relatively quickly, but although, on the initiative of the Chairman of Sub-Commission A, Mr. E. P. S. GARDNER (United Kingdom), much work \\'as done by a large number of members of the