Dr. Shewhart's principal question was how AT&T, Western Electric's parent company, could be assured that their wires, telephone poles, and indeed, their telephones would function as desired. They were particularly interested in consistency. Each phone needed to be the same, which is to say, predictable and “perfect”. Inspired by a philosopher, C.I. Lewis, Dr. Shewhart published his work publicly with the encouragement of a newly-minted PhD that had worked a summer there, a man named W. Edwards Deming.

Dr. Deming was a fan of the technique, known as statistical process control (SPC), but he worked as a statistical sampler for the federal government, the Department of Agriculture and the Census. He encouraged teaching of SPC during World War II to build up dependable materiel, with admirable, historic results. Over 31,000 production managers had been trained.

After the war, U.S. producers abandoned the practice, to Deming's open disgust. He went to Japan under MacArthur as a census taker after the war. When he saw the devastation, he asked if Japanese government and business leaders were interested in learning the methods. They were. They mastered it. For example, when faced with the need to meet a 4% error rate to meet the requirements of a U.S. customer, a Japanese firm famously delivered the product in two groups, the 96% perfect products and the 4% defective ones, wondering aloud why the Americans oddly wanted the defective units.

The world balance of economic power shifted.