Manufacturing standards and testing?

Funny you should ask, I've done some research on this subject only recently. Apparently, the idea of imposing a set of industry standards for the manufacture of bicycles was first mooted in Britain by the Earl of Somerset (Liberal MP for Maidstone East) during a Parliamentary broadcast session (one of the very first Chrystal-Ether Radio Broadcasts of the nascent BBC, which back then had the rather clumsy monicker the Wireless Telegraph Dispatch Emporium (WTDE) in April 1910 after the four-year-old step neice of one of his constituents was badly injured riding her Ipswich-built Cosworth Flying Gate through Longleat safari park (which had been established just three months earlier by Douglas Powell, the grand nephew of Lord Baden Powell, on his return from active service in the Boer War (an experience which had left him enamoured of the flora, and particulary the fauna, of Kenya's Red Centre, which was at the time known as Maku Maku). Although he'd lost his left wrist in battle, Douglas and his pygmy wife, Zwani, had hand-reared a clutch of tiger cubs, an ostrich, three pandas and a 16-strong brood of Zimbabwean rhino, which were paraded in front of the Lady Mayoress of Longleat at the opening of a local nursery, much to the dismay of a young Winston Churchill, who was apparently courting her cousin, Annabel Maudson, at the time. Churchill's monocle, as reported by the Essex Comet, fell into the goblet of porter he was drinking from (it now hangs behind the bar at the Cricketers Arms in Somer Street Dudley) when one of the park's ring-tailed vultures escaped and emitted a "bloodcurdling squak of the damned that would have set Lucifer's table afire" [sic] [Shropshire Gazette] after being startled by a Ford T with nitrous backfiring on an adjacent back alley that had been tagged by the third earl of Baconshop on Ash Wednesday a mere 11 hours after the corner shop opened that sold blackberry sherbert, which was called gobstoppers back then. I hope that answers your question!