Engineering Education in the 19th Century
Engineering education started out with tentative
experiments,
then boomed after 1862. There were a total of 85 college
grade
engineering
schools in 1880, 63 of them had been founded between 1862 and
1876.
Early experiments
- In England engineering was still learned
by
apprenticeship
until around 1900, while France had developed a system of
formal
schooling
in engineering in the late eighteenth century.
The
flagship school in France, Ecole
Polytechnique, taught a broad
foundation
of mathematics and science with the idea that the students
would then
go
to specialized programs to learn such fields as mining
engineering and
bridge design.
- Mechanics institutes founded between 1820
and
1870: a
combination of professional association plus technical high
school. The Ohio
Mechanics
Institute was founded in 1828 and had about 1200
members
by 1850. Mechanics Institutes stressed practical
education, often
held in the evening for practicing
mechanics (machinists). These evolved into high school
programs,
often
associated
with large public high schools.
- U.S.
Military
Academy at West Point founded 1802 to teach military
engineering,
did not operate until
1812.
Modeled on the French system of formal engineering education
for the
elite,
with an emphasis on math and science. Retired military
engineers
became an important part of the engineering labor supply
after about
1830
(15 practicing in 1830, more than 100 in 1838)
- Rensselaer School founded in 1823.
Started
granting
degrees in civil engineering in 1835, and reorganized to
imitate French
technical education in 1849.
- Civil Engineering courses at Union
College
1845,
Univ.
of Michigan 1847, Brown 1847, Yale 1852. These
programs were
small;
Lawrence School of Science at Harvard (founded in 1842)
graduated only
49 men before the civil war.
Amos
Eaton
The history of Rensselaer
shows the struggles of early engineering schools
- The Rensselaer School was founded in
1825,
the
first civilian
technical school on the college level. Stephen
Van Rensselaer put up the money and Amos
Eaton (1776-1842) provided the ideas and directed the
new school.
- Eaton stressed that students would learn
science
from
its practical applications. At Rensselaer: "In every
branch of
learning,
the pupil begins with its practical application; and is
introduced to a
knowledge of elementary principles, from time to time, as
his progress
requires. After visiting a bleaching factory, he
returns to the
laboratory
and produced the chlorine gas and experiments upon it, until
he is
familiar
with all the elementary principles appertaining to that
curious
substance."
Eaton was struggling to figure out the relationship between
science
and engineering education. He was also a pioneer of
hands-on
education.
- Van Rensselaer wrote in 1824: "My
principal
object is,
to qualify teachers for instructing the sons and daughters
of Farmers
and
Mechanics, by lectures or otherwise, in the application of
experimental
chemistry, philosophy, and natural history, to agriculture,
domestic
economy,
the arts and manufactures."
- Rensselaer was reorganized to teach more
courses
in engineering,
particularly after Eaton left in 1842. The
trustees hired a
director, B.
Franklin Greene, who was committed to the French model
. This
proved successful, and for twenty years or so Rensselaer was
the
civilian
equivalent of West Point for training in civil engineering.
The civil war marked the beginning of a
sudden
change (only 5% of practicing engineers had an engineering
degree in
1871):
Morrill
Act became law in 1862,
in the absence of opposition from the southern
states (first proposed 1857, attacked on grounds of states
rights and
competition,
passed in 1859 but vetoed on constitutional grounds).
- Gave each state federal land (or land
script)--30,000
acres for each Senator and Representative--to sell to raise
money for
colleges "to
teach such branches of learning as are related to
agriculture and the
mechanic
arts... in order to promote the liberal and practical
education of the
industrial classes..."
- problem of what to teach--engineers
weren't
using much
theory. Three possibilities:
- same as other colleges (classics) to
make
education democratic.
- science, which was somehow the theory
behind
engineering,
but not in fact very useful.
- technical training (farming and shop
practice)--why go
to school to learn that?
- the eventual solution to this problem
was
to
teach applied
science, but there wasn't much of that to teach before
about 1900
- Clemson University opened in 1893 with
446
students. History
of
Clemson
Fort
Hill
Private engineering schools:
- MIT 1861 (instruction began
1865--followed a
Russian model
emphasizing teaching students to use machine tools but not
manufacture
of finished products), Worcester
Polytechnic Institute 1865 (intended to train foreman
for shops,
not
professionals--put its emphasis on actual production of
items for sale
by students in the shops), Lehigh 1866, Stevens
1871 (mechanical engineering only--no general cultural
education).
- 17 schools taught engineering in 1870
(11%
of
American
engineers were college graduates), 85 in 1880, 110 in 1890
Also newly created: universities--granting the
Ph.D.
degree
(the first one, Johns
Hopkins, was founded in 1876)
- A Ph.D. is supposed to train you to do
research
and discover
new knowledge, not just teach you existing knowledge
- university professors were expected to do
research, while
earlier college professors had just been teachers
- doing scientific research became
professionalized, where
earlier it had been done mostly as a hobby
Applied science:
- Engineering became increasingly
scientific
- the new fields of electrical
engineering
(professional
society 1884) and chemical engineering (professional
society 1908) had
a scientific base from the beginning, but employment
opportunities were
almost entirely with large corporations
- Starting in the 1870s engineering
schools
latched onto
the idea of building laboratories for technical research
or testing.
- Development of agricultural experiment
stations,
particularly
after the passage of the Hatch
Act in 1887.
- during World War I Arthur D. Little
articulated
the concept
of "unit operations," breaking chemical engineering
processes down into
individual building blocks like "pulverizing, dyeing,
roasting,
crystallizing,
filtering, evaporations, electrolyzing, and so on." Now
there was a
theory
you could teach students, instead of explaining the process
by which
you
make bleach.
Arthur
D.
Little
- Nearly all engineers entering the
profession
after 1910
had engineering degrees. Applied science was fairly
well
established,
though what else should be taught was still controversial
This page written by and copyright Pamela E. Mack
last updated 9/2/05