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6 Circle the “odd one out” in the following groups
1 2 3 4 5
a) Fossil power plant Moving Primary Increase Protection
b) Nuclear power plant Programmable Various Intensity Control
c) Refinery Limited Digital Decrease Symbol
d) Branded product Integrated Manufacturing Extend Alarm
Text 2
1 Read and translate the text:
Brief history of Industrial Instrumentation
By Jim Pinto
Trace the roots of all significant business segments, and you will find key people and
innovations. This has always been a hotbed of new products-improved sensors, displays,
recorders, control elements, valves, actuators, and other widgets and gismos. But the markets
are relatively small, specialized, and fragmented, and it is rare that any significant volume
results directly from individual products.
Many industrial companies were based on innovative developments for niche applications.
Customers were usually local and users who provided the opportunity to test new ideas,
usually targeting specific unmet needs. The successful startups expanded their products and
markets beyond initially narrow applications and geographies, depending on the real value of
the innovation, and also whether or not the founder was able to grow the company beyond the
initial entrepreneurial stages.
Since automation is such a fragmented business, all the larger companies are mostly a
conglomeration of products and services; each product segment generates only modest
volume, but lumped together they form sizeable businesses.
Major segments
Perhaps the exception to the small-company innovation rule was the distributed control
system (DCS), a well-managed mix of several innovations developed in the 1970s by a team
of engineers within Honeywell. This achieved $100 million in sales in process control
markets within just a couple of years. The segment has since expanded to several billions of
dollars, and it has morphed into a variety of different shapes, sizes, and form-factors for
process, discrete, and batch systems.
The other major product segment to achieve significance, also in the 1970s, was the
programmable logic controller (PLC). This breakthrough innovation was the brainchild of
inventor Dick Morley, who worked for a small development company, Bedford Associates,
and was associated with Modicon (now part of Schneider). Also involved was Odo Struger of
Allen-Bradley, now Rockwell Automation, which became the PLC leader in the U.S. through
good marketing and development of strong distribution channels.
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