Walter Gyssling, chief engineer of the Steam Boiler Control Association, was very pleased when he presented his report of the results of 1877 to the members of the Association. In the last 5 years, none of the 1000 controlled steam boilers by the association exploded.

Deployed at the same time as the Association’s inspectors, individual government inspectors, were not even close to achieving such results. In Württemberg, where the Association for Controlling Steam Boilers was founded in 1875, the independent inspection for technical control achieves impressive results. In his first annual report from 1877, Heinrich Bellmer, an engineer of the Association based in Stuttgart, announced that he had eliminated as many as 172 defects in the last 12 months.