`Brockton Massachusetts steam boiler explosion`

It was a shoe factory down here in Brockton, Massachusetts — a boiler blew up, kapow, around 1905 or so — and the ASME decided we're getting tired of this. The first research contract ever led by the US government was in 1836 or so. Some steamboat on the Ohio River blew up, and Congress actually appropriated some money for someone to go and figure out why these boilers were blowing up and killing people. So pressurized boilers — the Barlow formula, sigma equals PR over T, pressure radius over thickness — those types of equations were around. The boiler and pressure vessel code is the world code today. Mainland China doesn't use it because they don't want to spend sixteen thousand dollars to purchase a code; they basically have their own codes that copy it, and they don't care about copyrights.