Attitudes and aptitudes at the interface between the pipe manufacturer and the user

The title of this paper was selected by the organisers, presumably in the belief that mutual education and a sympathetic appreciation of each other’s “attitudes and aptitudes” between manufacturers and users are still fundamental to the objectives of this Symposium. The word “still” is-inserted. in. this opening sentence because there is no doubt that such collaboration and mutual education was absolutely.
essential to the earlier stages of plastics pipes and fittings manufacture and usage,

Few of us who were privileged to be directly associated with that work, via the innumerable meetings of BSI and ISO Committees, Sub-Committees, working parties, etc, throughout the 1960’s will ever forget the long struggles to discover and apply adequate means of specification and test or the downright horse-trading between the different national delegations to ISO Committee TC5/SC6, which went into eventual acceptance of. these recommendations by. the various national specifying authorities concerned.

Having been an obedient as well as a humble servant of the BPF Pipe Group since its formation, this invited author has therefore accepted this title for his paper with his customary docility, even though it has some awkward features, For example, the word “INTERFACE” is very familiar in its scientific and. engineering definitions but has only recently been adopted by the marketing professionals, apparently to describe the points or areas of contact between purveyors and: users, or — more desirably from their professional viewpoint — between the respective marketing and procurement directorates, agencies or officers involved. The word INTERFACE is not included at all in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1967) which however gives three definitions of APTITUDE 1. “fitness” 2. “natural propensity (for)’” and 3. “ability” ATTITUDE is also. defined — interalia — as “fitness” but alternatively — and more significantly from our point of view — as “settled behaviour as indicating opinion”