Who actually invented EOQ

Harris 1913: the original

Harris was a 30-year-old electrical engineer at Westinghouse when he published "How Many Parts to Make at Once" in the February 1913 issue of Factory: The Magazine of Management. The article spans two short pages plus a chart and contains the full derivation we still use^[2]. He filed no patent and the article was lost to the operations literature for decades.

Andler 1929: the German parallel

Kurt Andler’s Rationalisierung der Fabrikation und optimale Losgroesse derived the same formula in German industrial-engineering literature. To this day the formula is called die Andlersche Losgroessenformel in German-language texts^[3].

Wilson 1934: the popularisation

R.H. Wilson, a consultant at the Stanford Research Institute, published "A Scientific Routine for Stock Control" in HBR in 1934. The article reached a much wider audience than Harris’s trade-magazine note. Wilson did not cite Harris (the article is otherwise a clean derivation), and the formula became the "Wilson formula" in English-language practitioner texts for the next 56 years.

Erlenkotter 1990: setting the record

Donald Erlenkotter, then at UCLA, traced the citation chain in "Ford Whitman Harris and the Economic Order Quantity Model," Operations Research 38(6), pp. 937 to 946. He located the original 1913 Harris piece, established priority, and gave Harris back the attribution^[4].

Why the misattribution persisted

Trade-magazine articles do not show up in academic citation networks. By the time operations research became a discipline in the 1940s and 1950s, Wilson’s HBR piece was the canonical reference because it was the only one anyone could find. Citation lock-in held for half a century until Erlenkotter went looking.