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Engineering Education, Origins and History of

In standard accounts, the history of American engineering education began with the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802. This was the first institution to offer formal instruction in civil and military engineering in North America. Through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engineering education became increasingly widespread and professional, as this entry describes.

Early Education

If the ruins left by ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations are considered, then informal means of engineering education existed in the Americas long before colonists crossed the Atlantic. The pyramids at Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza provide evidence of early forms of engineering education in at least two ways. First, the ruins by their very structure imply a pattern of scientific organization and a familiarity with basic mathematical sciences. Central to pyramid construction were applications of principles derived from geometry and physics. Second, the structures suggest a pattern of social organization necessary for transmitting scientific or practical knowledge. A means of passing this knowledge from one group (i.e., organizers) to another (i.e., managers and laborers) required an informal process of teaching and learning engineering concepts.

Formal institutions of higher learning first appeared in the “new world” in Latin America during the sixteenth century and then in North America during the seventeenth century, but these institutions largely ignored the practical and engineering sciences. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North American colonial colleges followed the classical curriculum that required studies in Latin, Greek, rhetoric, logic, and other language-related areas, with slight attention to mathematics and science. The science courses offered to students were often dated and not aligned with practical interests.

Systematic attention to engineering education, as at West Point, began to appear in the early to mid-nineteenth century within a dynamic social and cultural milieu. Developments in American society after the Revolutionary War and into the antebellum period included wars with England and Mexico, a fundamental transformation in the economy from agrarianism to industrialization, patterns of migration from rural to urban areas, and westward expansion. Wars with European and Latin American forces prompted calls for greater attention to military engineering. The founding of military academies soon followed with the establishment of the Virginia Military Institute (1839), the Citadel (1843), and the U.S. Naval Academy (1845).

Change Produces Needs

The transformation of the economy, meanwhile, resulted in a dramatic shift from agriculture to industry. At the start of the nineteenth century, there were only a handful of American factories; by 1850, there were over 140,000 producing more than a billion dollars worth of goods. The technical and technological needs of factory operation created a demand for graduates of engineering education. Rapid industrialization facilitated the process of rapid urbanization. In 1800, there were fifteen Americans in rural life to every one city dweller. By 1850, the ratio was approximately five to one.

With an increased concentration of labor in urban centers came the establishment of mechanic institutes. These organizations, such as the Franklin Institute (1824) in Philadelphia, developed curricula centered on practical and useful knowledge. Westward migration increased the need for those knowledgeable in the practical sciences. Large-scale land surveys funded by local, state, and federal governments as well as the construction of rail lines often required trained engineers and contributed to the expansion of formal engineering instruction.

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