Revolutionary America possessed no way to educate engineers. Mill-wrights and other craftsmen had solved most technical problems for colonists, but the continental army had to turn to Europeans for advice on fortifications and military engineering. After independence, early canal promoters and elected officials alike continued to rely on visiting civil engineers. The army found this situation intolerable and in 1802 established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to train artillery and engineering officers. Sylvanus Thayer, commandant after 1817, transformed West Point into the nation's first engineering school by copying the École Polytechnique in France.
Most Americans entered the engineering profession, however, by serving an apprenticeship. Thus John Jervis began as an axeman on the Erie Canal in 1817 and rose to division engineer in 1825. Only after 1825 did additional educational opportunities become available to Americans interested in engineering careers. Partial programs, ranging from individual courses in trigonometry and surveying to year-long certificate programs, appeared at many schools, including Washington College, Princeton, New York University, and Vanderbilt. Apprentice-ships then completed the training for many students. Partial programs differed in kind but not in spirit from the courses and lectures at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and similar voluntary associations in other American cities. In keeping with Jacksonian democratic rhetoric, these were self-help programs for working people encountering new technologies.
By the 1840s informal engineering education seemed inadequate for an expanding nation that linked political independence to technology. A few schools copied the French polytechnic model, which derived technical training from a common base in mathematics and science, delivered in separate schools outside existing colleges. The Rensselaer School, started as an artisans' institute in 1824, transformed itself into the first American polytechnic in 1850. By the time the school renamed itself Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1861, other polytechnics had appeared, including the Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania (1853) and Brooklyn Polytechnic (1854). All departed from liberal arts curricula to train men for careers in engineering and manufacturing.
Not all educators separated engineering from colleges. In 1847 Harvard and Yale launched undergraduate programs for engineering, albeit in separate schools out-side their main colleges. But after 1850 more private institutions and state universities developed engineering programs as regular courses of study. Midwestern colleges, including Wesleyan, Denison, and Allegheny, offered engineering under general science degrees, while the universities of Illinois, North Carolina, and Iowa, and the University of Rochester added engineering degrees. The crucial step in placing engineering inside American universities was the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided federal support (initially thirty thousand acres of federal land for every congressional representative) to en-courage the agricultural and mechanical arts. Land-grant colleges quickly became leading engineering schools, among them Pennsylvania State, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and midwestern state universities in Illinois, Indiana (Purdue), Ohio State, and Wisconsin. New York's land-grant school, Cornell, was the largest and best engineering college in the country by the 1870s.
Every approach to educating American engineers shared a desire to balance theory and practice. Even as academic education became more common after 1870, hands-on training remained. Universities, land-grant schools, and polytechnics all combined lecture courses, engineering drawing, surveying, and shop classes. The basic credential for faculty was engineering experience, not advanced degrees. Indeed, some mechanical engineers were so concerned about practice they created yet another educational alternative, the technical institute. Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1868) and Stevens Institute (1870) explicitly placed machine-shop apprenticeships ahead of studies of math and science. Even Cornell's mechanical engineering program emphasized shop work until the 1880s.
But the classroom finally prevailed over practical venues for training engineers. New technologies based on electricity and chemistry required more than a common-sense knowledge base. Equally important was the desire of leading American engineers to gain the social recognition accorded other emerging professional groups. A key step was presenting engineers as college-educated gentlemen, not narrow technical specialists. The formation of the American Society for Engineering Education in 1893 symbolized the shift of engineering education from the shop to the classroom.
Balancing theory and practice remained a fundamental issue, however. Cornell's Robert Thurston led those pressing to replace shop work with math and science along the lines of French polytechnics and German universities. Other faculty emphasized training practical problem solvers for American corporations, so the University of Cincinnati introduced a cooperative education program in 1907 in which students alternated semesters working in industry and attending classes. After World War I, hints of change appeared as European émigrés demonstrated the utility of sophisticated mathematical analyses. Ukrainian-born Stephon Timoshenko, first at Westing house and then at the University of Michigan and at Stanford, prepared textbooks placing the strength of materials, structural mechanics, and dynamics on a mathematical footing. Hungarian-born Theodore von Kármán brought German theoretical work in fluid dynamics to the new California Institute of Technology. At the University of Illinois, Danish-born and German-educated Harald Westergaard connected civil engineering and theoretical mechanics through studies of bridges, pavement slabs, and dams.
Only Caltech, Harvard, and, belatedly, MIT embraced the changes introduced by this generation of European engineers in the 1930s. Developments during World War II in such areas as radar and atomic weapons confirmed the value of the European engineers' approaches. Major educational reforms followed, including greater emphasis on research and graduate study. Theory outweighed practice for the first time as engineering science replaced shop work and drawing. Driven by Cold War rhetoric and apparent challenges such as Sputnik, the Soviet satellite program, federal military funding supported this transformation and promoted hybrid inter-disciplinary fields, such as materials engineering, that blurred the boundary between science and engineering. By 1960 engineering education was remarkably uniform.
Transforming engineering from a white-male preserve was much more difficult. Wartime "manpower" concerns in the 1940s and 1950s led some faculty to accept women students. But progress was slow until the social movements of the 1960s brought serious steps to recruit women and underrepresented minorities. Engineering remains, however, the least diverse profession in the United States. And by the late 1980s declining numbers of American students meant most graduate students in engineering were born outside the United States.
This demographic shift was accompanied by questions about the postwar emphasis on engineering science. Declining American competitiveness in global markets was partly connected to the lack of engineering graduates with practical problem-solving skills. New attempts to balance theory and practice in the 1990s marked a very basic continuity in the history of American engineering education.
Bibliography
Emmerson, George. Engineering Education: A Social History. New York: Crane, Russak, 1973.
Grayson, Lawrence P. The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada. New York: Wiley, 1993.
Reynolds, Terry S. "The Education of Engineers in America before the Morrill Act of 1862." History of Education Quarterly 32 (winter 1992): 459–482.
Seely, Bruce E. "The Other Re-engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965." Journal of Engineering Education 88, no. 3 (July 1999): 285–294.
———. "Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges, 1900–1960." Technology and Culture 34 (April 1993): 344–386.
—Bruce Seely
