Origins Of Engineering & Beginning of Engineering Education

Beginning of Engineering Education

People who organized construction of the Great Pyramid, 5000 years ago, richly deserves to be called an engineer. (or ancient engineer). But the term has only been in general use for 200 years; -- since universities began training people to build things. First engineer workshops were done in armies. By the mid-1600s, artillery and fortifications had grown so complex that armies began training officers in math and mechanics. That gradually turned into civil engineering. In 1775, King Louis XV of France authorized Jean Perronet to set up a School of Bridges and Highways with a three-year program.

However most importent development in engineering are industrial revolutian and steem engines and after these many types of engineering appeared. Then,universities began to give engineering education to their students.The first schools of engineering was founded in France, in the middle of 18th century. Engineering education also began in America after Lawrence Grayson's history of engineering education.

Origins Of Engineering

In prehistoric times, men and women had to be ingenious in order to survive hunger, enemies, climate and, later, the tyrrany of distance. So there have always been 'engineers' around, many of whom were involved in activities we would not associate with engineering today but, rather, with hunting, farming, fishing, fighting, implement- and tool-making, transportation and many other things.

From around 3000 BC, the pace of development quickened. After simple tools came the development of wedges, wheels and levers, the use of animals to carry and draw loads and of fire to work metals, the digging of irrigation canals, and open-pit mining. Geographically, these and many other developments took place in and around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. Pyramids were erected in the Nile Valley.

The Greeks - the inventors - made significant contributions in the 1000 years that straddled the BC-AD divide. They produced the screw, the ratchet, the water wheel and the aeolipile, better known as Hero's turbine. The Romans - the improvers and adapters - did likewise, building fortifications, roads, aqueducts, water distribution systems and public buildings across the territories and cities they controlled. At the other end of the world, the Chinese have been credited with the development of the wheelbarrow, the rotary fan, the sternpost rudder that guided their bamboo rafts and, later, their junks. They also began making paper from vegetable fibres - and gunpowder.

Sources:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1107.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering#History

http://www.new-sng.com/history.cfm