The early stages in the development of the IEC laser performance standard

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) held its first meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1974, hosted then by the VDE, because VDE had served as secretariat of another technical committee which had issued an early electrical safety standard for laser products, but it dealt only with electrical safety issues. —The USNC-IEC informed the IEC Central Office that the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) had just issued a first edition of ANSI Z136.1-1973, Safe Use of Lasers and the US could take on the Chair and Secretariat of a new TC on “Laser Equipment.” Mr. George M. Wilkening, the Chair of the ANSI Z136 Committee, agreed to chair the new IEC TC76 and the —US Bureau of Radiological Health (BRH) offered to serve as the Secretariat. In the second meeting, held in Amsterdam in 1976, Henry Rechen of the BRH, began serving as the first secretariat of TC76. A major decision of the Amsterdam meeting was to base a first draft of a new IEC standard (IEC 825) on the just-published US Federal Regulation (21CFR1040) on basic system safety requirements for manufacturers. A second major decision of the was to include a section on user guidelines, since most countries - other than the US and UK had no user safety standards, and to base them on the US ANSI Z136 guidelines for the “Safe Use of Lasers.” In the third meeting, held in Washington, DC in 1977, the definitions of each class (I, II, III and IV) and the details of each manufacturing requirement were discussed in detail. Since the US Federal regulation contained very detailed legal wording, there was criticism of many of the elaborate phrases in English. These discussions and a great deal of language editing continued in minute detail during the next meetings held in Moscow, USSR in 1979 and den Haag, NL in 1980. By 1982, the meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, there was a greater sense of agreement on many points along with updated concepts based upon changes and corrections introduced by BRH and ANSI in the US standards and guidelines as greater experience was gleaned from the US experience. Some stalemates remained until the final draft for voting was issued after a 1983 meeting in Zurich, Switzerland. The torch of the TC Chair was passed to Dr. Bengt Klemen (Sweden) after the Zurich meeting and the first edition of IEC 825 was issued in 1985. Dr. Jerry Glen (US) then replaced Robert Landry of CDRH as Secretariat.