Engineering

Engineering. Engineering as a profession has been linked historically to large‐scale organizations such as the military, or to the design, construction, and management of large‐scale projects.

European Background and American Beginnings

. Political and economic conditions sufficient to support an engineering profession, as opposed to isolated individuals, emerged in early modern Europe. By 1700 the expansion of French military power and the changing technological demands produced by the introduction of gunpowder had led to the creation of a corps of engineers in the French army. In the eighteenth century the French government created a special corps of road and bridge engineers and of mining engineers, with separate schools to systematize their training. In Britain, by contrast, state intervention and the military were less important to the emergence of professional engineering. There, a rapidly expanding industrial economy had provided sufficient large‐scale projects (roads, harbors, canals) by the 1770s to support a significant number of full‐time technical experts. These engineers, unlike their French counterparts, were neither formally trained nor dependent on the the state for employment; accordingly, they had much less faith in the value of scientific theory and mathematics for their work.

Because of engineering's dependence on large‐scale organizations and large‐scale projects, the profession hardly existed in colonial America where neither of these prerequisites was present. When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, American armies had neither trained military engineers nor a reservoir of civilian engineers, forcing their dependence on French‐trained ones.

Recognizing the need for military engineers, Congress created a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers in 1794 and a military academy at West Point in 1802 to train them. Modeled after French precedents (especially the école polytechnique), West Point served as a conduit for the transmission to America of the dominant French engineering tradition involving the use of an elite, disciplined corps of scientifically trained engineers employed by the state. Early America, however, was profoundly antimilitary and antielitist. The Army Corps of Engineers and West Point survived only by adapting to American values. West Point's admissions policy was not as elitist and its engineering training not as mathematically rigorous as France's école polytechnique, and West Point early emphasized civilian engineering as much as military. Moreover, West Point for several decades produced more engineers than the country's miniscule military required, enabling the academy to contribute toward alleviating civilian engineering shortages.

The Antebellum Era: A Profession Takes Shape

. Even in modified form, the French engineering tradition did not gain complete dominance in the early national period. American suspicion of elites, the frontier environment in which much early engineering was carried out, and a rapidly expanding economic environment provided fertile ground for the emergence of a profession modeled more along British lines, that is, based on practical, on‐the‐job training; suspicious of theory; and more dependent on the civilian economy than on government patronage. Large‐scale transportation projects between 1815 and 1850 provided the foundations for the emergence of an engineering profession in America. The most influential was the Erie Canal, begun in 1817. Drawing from British precedents, the state of New York appointed as chief engineers three men ( Canvass White, Benjamin Wright, and James Geddes) without formal engineering education but with some technical skills, assuming that intelligent men could teach themselves what was necessary on the job. They, in turn, trained their survey crew chiefs as assistant engineers. By the completion of the canal in 1825, nearly seventy Americans had gained on‐the‐job training in engineering. Many left the Erie for similar projects elsewhere, taking the British‐influenced system of engineering training with them.

Engineers trained in ways analogous to those used on the Erie Canal dominated American civil engineering until well after the Civil War. Mid‐nineteenth‐century American machine and locomotive shops developed similar methods for training mechanical engineers, and the American mining industry did the same for mining captains, the forerunners of mining engineers. Like job‐trained civil engineers, job‐trained American mechanical and mining engineers profoundly distrusted their academically trained counterparts and were skeptical of heavy reliance on theory and mathematics. They preferred, instead, using empirical methods based on established practices.

By the 1840s, American engineers had developed a distinct engineering style, adapted to American conditions and different from its European antecedents. Whereas British and French engineering were characterized by expensive, durable, and aesthetically appealing special‐order products, American engineering was recognized for its ability to produce large quantities of routine, standardized designs cheaply and quickly. This American engineering tradition was further reinforced in the early twentieth century, when American mechanical engineers introduced mass production techniques into the emerging automotive industry and later into other industries as well.

Although most nineteenth‐century American engineers were trained on the job, by the mid–nineteenth century engineering had begun to find a place in American colleges. In the 1830s and 1840s several dozen American schools introduced engineering coursework, and some, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offered multiyear engineering curricula. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 further institutionalized engineering training by supporting collegiate‐level education in the “mechanic arts” (usually interpreted as engineering) in each state.

Engineering in Twentieth Century America

. By the early twentieth century, the attitudes, values, and working methods of engineering permeated American business management and American thought more generally. The broader influence was especially evident in the scientific management movement initiated by Frederick W. Taylor, and in the later writings of the economist Thorstein Veblen, who saw the disinterested, production‐oriented ethic of engineers as a model for the larger society.

By this period, too, the growing scale and complexity of technology had begun to require American engineers to lean more heavily and regularly on mathematics and theory to supplement the empirical methods pioneered by early, job‐trained engineers. This contributed to a steady expansion in the use of college‐educated engineers between 1880 and 1920, by which time they had clearly displaced job‐trained engineers in importance. Despite the growing use of mathematics and scientific methods in engineering, however, the engineering and scientific communities in America initially remained wholly distinct. Unlike its counterparts in many European countries, American engineering, having developed independently, did not look to the scientific community for recognition or approval. American engineering evolved its own institutions and reward system, which placed a high value on project‐specific accomplishments and downplayed broad‐based theoretical achievements.

Only around 1900 did American engineering and science begin to converge. Faced with increasingly complex technical problems, especially in the newly emerging electrical and chemical industries, American engineering began to move away from its British antecedents and draw more heavily on mathematics and theory—though often in ways sharply different from those of scientists. This convergence was further encouraged by the growth of large corporations, which, through industrial research laboratories employing both engineers and scientists, sought to institutionalize and control the pace of technological change. The convergence became especially noticeable after World War II. Jealous of the leadership role given physicists and chemists in cutting‐edge research projects during the war and lured by increased government support for basic scientific research after the war, American engineering schools and colleges began to place increased emphasis on scientific approaches to engineering work.

The scientization of American engineering in the twentieth century was accompanied by other, equally significant changes, especially in work autonomy. Through much of the nineteenth century, American engineers functioned as independent professionals; heroic engineer‐entrepreneurs like the bridge‐builders James Eads and John Roebling dominated the profession. They and their peers worked as independent, outside experts brought in to solve particular technical problems or construct specific projects. By the late nineteenth century the independent engineering consultant's dominant role in the profession was in decline. American economic expansion and the growing scale and capabilities of technology had combined to create large corporations with large capital investments. To protect their investments, these corporations increasingly relied on staff engineers, rather than on outside consultants.

The emergence of large corporate organizations in America in the late nineteenth century and of large governmental agencies after World War II changed the nature of engineering in other ways. As engineers grew more dependent for employment on large organizations, engineering work was increasingly subjected to bureaucratic controls, and individual engineers became increasingly anonymous. By the mid–twentieth century, the typical engineer played only a small, specialized role in a project's development. The design of an automobile or aircraft and of the facilities necessary to manufacture it, for example, required hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers, each working on specific tasks.

The growing specialization of engineering work and the engineer's loss of independence in the workplace, however, were offset by engineers' increasingly central role in American life in the twentieth century. To secure needed technical expertise, corporations and government agencies employed engineers in larger numbers than ever before, making engineering the second largest profession (after public school teachers) in America. In addition, the engineer's role in management grew significantly. Technically oriented corporations came to regard engineers as a primary pool from which to draw their management personnel. As early as the 1920s, around 70 percent of all engineering graduates moved into managerial positions within fifteen years of graduation, and by midcentury a substantial proportion of the largest American corporations were headed by trained engineers. To supply a growing professional demand, engineering schools with many specialized subdivisions, including electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and computer engineering, had become increasingly important components of U.S. research universities as the twentieth century progressed.
See also Canals and Waterways; Dams and Hydraulic Engineering; Education: Collegiate Education, Education: The Rise of the University; Mathematics and Statistics; Military Service Academies; Professionalization.

Bibliography

Forest G. Hill , Roads, Rails and Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation, 1957.
Daniel Hovey Calhoun , The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflict, 1960.
Monte A. Calvert , The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830–1910, 1967.
Raymond H. Merritt , Engineering in American Society 1850–1875, 1969.
Edwin T. Layton Jr. , The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, 1971.
A. Michael McMahon , The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America, 1984.
Terry S. Reynolds, ed., The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture, 1991.
John Rae and and Rudi Volti , The Engineer in History, 1993.
Eda Kranakis , Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth‐Century France and America, 1997.

Terry S. Reynolds