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26 OCTOBER 2017 MATERIALS PERFORMANCE NACE INTERNATIONAL: VOL. 56, NO. 10 FEATURE ARTICLE Attendees at the inaugural NACE annual conference in 1945 enjoy the first of many annual banquets. Joint Electrolysis Committee meeting in Chicago in September 1951. Association Growth Over the Decades The first officers to lead the fledgling organization were President R.A. Brannon, Vice President F.J. McElhatton, Secretary- Treasurer O.C. Mudd, and Directors G. Gor- field, G.R. Olson, R. Pope, W.F. Rogers, and L.R. Shephard. In 1945, with 268 members, NACE was officially incorporated under Texas law as a not-for-profit technical asso- ciation. In 1946, the Houston Section was the first section formed and association membership grew to 801. The South Cen- tral and Western Regions were established in 1946, followed by the Southeast and North Central Regions in 1947. By the end of the 1940s, NACE had five regions, 17 sec- tions, and more than 1,700 members. NACE also began broadening its scope during its formative years, expanding beyond a purely CP and pipeline focus to include the oil and gas production, chemi- cal processing, and refining industries, as well as other methods of corrosion control such as protective coatings and linings, chemical treatment, and materials selec- tion and design. This, along with increasing public knowledge and concern about the costly and damaging effects of corrosion, served to fuel impressive membership growth throughout subsequent years. Today, the association (renamed NACE International in 1993) has four areas and 80 sections in North America, four interna- tional areas with 61 sections, and a total of more than 36,000 members from 140 coun- tries. In addition to NACE headquarters in Houston, Texas, there are now staff offices in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; San Diego, California; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Shanghai, China. Technical Committees The need to develop corrosion control technologies and document them for use in industry was the primary force driving NACE's formation. Two technical commit- tees were established in 1944 to make head- way in the areas of condensate well corro- sion and galvanic anode testing. These committees soon merged into the newly established NACE Technical Practices Committee (TPC) under the leadership of R.B. Mears. The TPC grew rapidly—by 1949 it com- prised 13 subcommittees encompassing all methods of corrosion control and preven- tion. The number grew to 19 subcommit- tees before a reorganization in 1954 com- bined them into several group committees. The evolution of the TPC is documented in L. Perrigo's book, A History of the NACE Technical Practices Committee and Techni- cal Committees, which was released in 1993 to coincide with NACE's 50th Anniversary. The TPC generated numerous technical reports in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1966, the Board of Directors approved the association's next step toward becoming a standards-writing organization to docu- ment emerging corrosion control technolo- gies and how they should be used. By 1969, NACE completed and issued two standards: TM0169, "Laboratory Corrosion Testing of Metals for the Process Industries," and RP0169, "Control of External Corrosion on Underground or Submerged Metallic Piping Systems." In 1970, the TPC held its first Technical Committee Week (later renamed Fall Committee Week) in Dallas, Texas, which attracted 260 members in 50 techni- cal groups that held 146 meetings, two TPC training sessions, as well as other gather- ings and events. The TPC underwent a significant reor- ganization in 2000 that was designed to speed up standards development, reduce the number of administrative meetings, simplify information exchange, and make it easier to develop joint standards across NACE subcommittees and other associa- tions. The TPC was renamed the Technical Coordination Committee (TCC), and tech- nical committees were organized by Spe- cific Technology Groups (STGs), Task Groups (TGs), and Technology Exchange Groups (TEGs).Today there are more than 345 technical committees comprised of 3,400 members.