What Is the American Standards Association?

The American Standards Association, usually abbreviated ASA, was the national coordinating body for voluntary technical standards in the United States between 1928 and 1966, and the direct institutional ancestor of the American National Standards Institute. It did not write standards itself. Instead it accredited the engineering societies, trade associations, and government agencies that did, verified that their procedures gave affected parties a fair hearing, and then published the result as an American Standard. That role, coordination rather than authorship, has defined the organization through each of its later names.

The body began in 1918 as the American Engineering Standards Committee, founded by five engineering societies, including the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, together with three federal departments. It was reorganized and renamed the American Standards Association in 1928, became the United States of America Standards Institute in 1966, and adopted its present name, ANSI, in 1969, a sequence documented in the ANSI centennial history. Standards issued under each name carry the corresponding designation prefix, so a document may appear as ASA, USAS, or ANSI depending on the year it was approved.

Structure and the Consensus Method

ASA operated through sectional committees, each assigned a subject area and each administered by a sponsor organization drawn from the relevant profession or industry. A committee had to include producers, users, and general interest representatives, and approval required substantial agreement rather than a simple majority, with unresolved objections recorded and addressed. This due-process model, described in ANSI's historical overview of its first ninety years, is what allows a privately administered standard to function as a de facto national reference and to be cited in regulation, procurement contracts, and insurance requirements without being government-issued.

Technical Output

The catalog ASA accumulated spans safety codes, dimensional standards, and information technology. Its safety work included the National Electrical Safety Code and codes for pressure piping, industrial eye protection, and machine guarding, several of which were later adopted into federal occupational safety regulation. Its dimensional and materials standards covered screw threads, pipe fittings, paper sizes, and photographic film speed, the last of which entered common speech as the ASA film rating. In computing, the association's X3 sectional committee produced ASA X3.4-1963, the first edition of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The 128-code, seven-bit character set that came out of that committee, recognized as an IEEE Milestone for its role in machine-independent data exchange, remains the base layer of modern text encoding through its incorporation into Unicode.

International Role

ASA served as the United States member body of the International Organization for Standardization from that organization's formation in 1947, and it administered the U.S. National Committee of the International Electrotechnical Commission, which affiliated with the association in 1931. That dual role gave American technical committees a route into international standardization and gave ISO and IEC a single national counterpart to work through, an arrangement ANSI continues today. Pressure to widen participation beyond producer interests, to respond faster to consumer concerns, and to strengthen the U.S. position abroad drove the 1966 reorganization that ended the ASA name.

Applications

The work of the American Standards Association has continuing relevance in fields including:

• Electrical safety and utility practice, through the National Electrical Safety Code lineage
• Computing and telecommunications, through ASCII and its successors
• Mechanical and manufacturing engineering, through thread, fastener, and piping standards
• Occupational safety regulation, where consensus standards are incorporated by reference
• Photography and imaging, through film sensitivity ratings later harmonized as ISO speeds