Operations Research was not born during the Industrial Revolution, nor during the work of Taylor or Gilberht. It would be like saying that the integral calculus was born with Descartes. The Operations Research was born during War World II. After 1939, the Nazi Germany seemed unstoppable. With impeccable efficiency the Germans conquered  most of continental Europe, the Wehrmach, and the Luftwaffe dominated land and air, and England was on the list.

Military operations had invaluable logistical difficulty. If many soldiers were grouped in one area could be fenced and discharged, or if their distribution was sparse, they would have weak points that could be used by the enemy. Proximity to the resource centers, water, food, reinforcements , roads, etc., were decisive variables. Allies had to make decisions, important decisions that not only cost money, but lives. And the Allies knew it. So they called scientists from all areas of human knowledge to help planning tasks of Military Operations: biologists, chemists, physicists, sociologists, psychologists and mathematicians and others to apply scientific methodology or whatever, to make "Military Operations Research."  One of the first problems faced by the scientists was to extend the range of the radar to help the RAF (Royal Air Force), British Royal Air Force. The successes achieved in 1942 was made ​​common practice to distribute mathematicians and physicists in military planning teams, this year the methodology would be taken to the Naval force of its ally, the United States.

"[...] Military Operations analysts found themselves working in strange places and under different circumstances. In Burma there were mathematicians who discussed problems with British soldiers gunners. Risbourough In Princes, an insurance headquarters outside London, some chemical combination with fellow economists assessed the destructive capacity of a pump, consulted the general strategy of the tanks in the Italian campaign with biochemists, a famous British zoologist was the key man in the path of a bombing plan; official navy secretly put under statistical and entomologists, in connection with losses of submarines in the Pacific, the high command of the RAF and U.S. Air Force shared their headache on the issue of Romanian oil fields, golf French training, German factories ball bearings and propellers [...]" 1

Most of the techniques we know today as part of operations research were developed and used in military operations, from the Atlantic Battle  to the Pacific campaign, from the development of strategy and tactics of the soldiers on the ground, to the location of Germans submarines  in Atlantic waters.  The allies with the help of the Operations Research won the war.

After the war, the scientists could lead to civil life the methodology used during WWII, so in 1948 opened the first formal course in Operations Research at MIT, one year after an American mathematician (George Danzig) developed the Linear Programming technique, which became the spearhead for half a century of Operations Research, of course computational tool that had then been invaluable aid in the evolution of science, by the voluminous calculations involving the models.

Nowadays it is common practice and an indispensable tool when the complexity of bussiness decision making is big, but we must not forget that what is now easily studied in textbooks cost "blood, sweat and tears" , as Churchill said.

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1. Newman, James R. The World of Mathematics. Grijalbo. 1956.