History

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 395.

Engineering

Engineering is the science, discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or inventions.

The concept of engineering has existed since ancient times as humans devised fundamental inventions such as the pulley, lever, and wheel. The term engineering itself has a much more recent etymology, deriving from the word engineer, which itself dates back to 1325, when an engineer (literally, one who operates an engine) originally referred to a constructor of military engines.

Later, as the design of civilian structures such as bridges and buildings matured as a technical discipline, the term Civil engineering entered the lexicon as a way to distinguish between those specializing in the construction of such non-military projects and those involved in the older discipline of military engineering.

The first electrical engineer is considered to be William Gilbert, with his 1600 publication of De Magnete, who was the originator of the term "electricity". Electrical Engineering can trace its origins in the experiments of Alessandro Volta in the 1800s, the experiments of Michael Faraday, Georg Ohm and others and the invention of the electric motor in 1872.

The work of James Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz in the late 19th century gave rise to the field of Electronics. The later inventions of the vacuum tube and the transistor further accelerated the development of Electronics to such an extent that electrical and electronics engineers currently outnumber their colleagues of any other Engineering specialty.

The first steam engine was built in 1698 by mechanical engineer Thomas Savery. The development of this device gave rise to the industrial revolution in the coming decades, allowing for the beginnings of mass production. The inventions of Thomas Savery and the Scottish engineer James Watt gave rise to modern Mechanical Engineering. The development of specialized machines and their maintenance tools during the industrial revolution led to the rapid growth of Mechanical Engineering both in its birthplace Britain and abroad.

Chemical Engineering developed in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution. Industrial scale manufacturing demanded new materials and new processes and by 1880 the need for large scale production of chemicals was such that a new industry was created. The role of the chemical engineer was the design of these chemical plants and processes.

Aeronautical Engineering deals with aircraft design while Aerospace Engineering is a more modern term. Its origins can be traced back to the aviation pioneers around the turn of the century from the 19th century to the 20th. Early knowledge of aeronautical engineering was largely empirical with some concepts and skills imported from other branches of engineering.

Only a decade after the successful flights by the Wright brothers, the 1920s saw extensive development of aeronautical engineering through development of World War I military aircraft.