Flow Chart Symbols

History

The first structured method for document process flow, the "flow process chart", was introduced by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth to members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 1921 in the presentation "Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to do Work". The Gilbreths' tools quickly found their way into industrial engineering curricula. In the early 1930s, an industrial engineer, Allan H. Mogensen began training business people in the use of some of the tools of industrial engineering at his Work Simplification Conferences in Lake Placid, New York.

A 1944 graduate of Mogensen's class, Art Spinanger, took the tools back to Procter and Gamble where he developed their Deliberate Methods Change Program. Another 1944 graduate, Ben S. Graham, Director of Formcraft Engineering at Standard Register Industrial, adapted the flow process chart to information processing with his development of the multi-flow process chart to display multiple documents and their relationships. In 1947, ASME adopted a symbol set derived from Gilbreth's original work as the "ASME Standard: Operation and Flow Process Charts".

Douglas Hartree in 1949 explained that Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann had developed a flowchart (originally, diagram) to plan computer programs. His contemporary account is endorsed by IBM engineers and by Goldstine's personal recollections. The original programming flowcharts of Goldstine and von Neumann can be seen in their unpublished report, "Planning and coding of problems for an electronic computing instrument, Part II, Volume 1" (1947), which is reproduced in von Neumann's collected works.

Flowcharts became a popular means for describing computer algorithms. The popularity of flowcharts decreased in the 1970s when interactive computer terminals and third-generation programming languages became common tools for computer programming. Algorithms can be expressed much more concisely as source code in such languages. Often pseudo-code is used, which uses the common idioms of such languages without strictly adhering to the details of a particular one.

Nowadays flowcharts are still used for describing computer algorithms. Modern techniques such as UML activity diagrams and Drakon-charts can be considered to be extensions of the flowchart.