TABLE OF CONTENTS In the greater scheme of things, maintenance has not been around very long. This was primarily because there was nothing to maintain for such a long, long time. A quick glance at Figure 1-1 will illustrate that relative to the time elapsed since the creation of Earth, the practice of maintenance has been with us for an infinitesimal amount of time. When starting from the beginning of the Paleozoic Era and equating time to a 12-hour clock, real maintenance has only been around for about 18 milliseconds. With such a short period of existence, it stands to reason that there are still many lessons to learn on the quest for perfection in the practice of maintenance.
Even though the first tools were used by hominids (human and human-like life forms; i.e., Australopithecus, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens), maintenance was slow to evolve. This is likely due to an extremely low level of intelligence in the earliest hominids. Figure 1-2 provides a depiction of Australopithecus decide for yourself if you think he could embrace the concepts of planned, proactive preventive and predictive maintenance technologies. It was not until the coming of the metal ages the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and following the evolution of the wheel as it progressed from your basic log to a solid disk and then into the spoked wheel (with metal hubs to fit onto an axle) that any true form...
