Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN ENGINEERING 23 Alexander Graham Bell invented in this period the photophone (a system for transmitting sound via light waves), tetrahedral construction techniques, a version of the aileron, and a hydrofoil boat. Similarly, Thomas Alva Edison developed his electric light and power system (featuring the carbon filament lamp) in 1879; by 1885 he had acquired more than 500 patents. George Westinghouse accumulated more than 400 patents during the same period, including his air brake in 1869 (Armytage, 1961). This burst of individual inventiveness, built on the diffusion of the American System of manufacturing throughout industry, brought to a climax the era of the "heroic" engineer/ entrepreneur of popular mythology. Devices such as these, and such as the reaper and the telegraph, were very often the product of a single man's inspiration and effort. From the 1880s on, for many engineers invention and development increasingly took on a corporate and collective character. Entrepreneurship continued to be an important force (as it is today), but the proportion of engineers engaged in this type of activity became much smaller. The first engineering discipline to experience this change was mechanical engineering. As described earlier, there was a lengthy transitional period in which the inventor/entrepreneur/industrialist dominated the profession. Even by the turn of the century, the shop-culture ethos in ASME was still in conflict with the newer science-based, specialization-oriented trends. However, the new engineering environment was given clear expression through the emergence of electrical engineering as a new field. In 1884, engineers employed in the new industries generating and using electrical power broke away from ASME to form the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This new field had been thoroughly based in science and formal technical training from the start and thus did not have older professional traditions to accommodate. Like the chemical engineering profession that emerged somewhat later (professional society formed in 1908), electrical engineering evolved from science toward technology, rather than the reverse, and was closely identified with the role of the corporate employee. This set the pattern for the future role and professional image of the engineer. Corporate Technology and the Corporate Engineer: 1880 and After By 1900, the engineering profession in the United States was second only to teachers in size, with 45,000 members. With the annual output of engineering schools increasing rapidly (up from 100 to 4,500 per year between 1870 and 1916), the growth of the profession substantially
EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN ENGINEERING 24 outpaced that of the industrial work force and the working population as a whole. Between 1870 and 1916, the relative proportion of engineers in the overall population increased by a factor of 15 (Noble, 1977). This geometric rise in the engineering work force reflected the great boom in industry as American technology advanced and successive waves of immigrants supplied a labor force and consumer base simultaneously. After 1875, the United States was leading the world in invention and industry. By 1890, it led the world in patents awarded and in the production of iron and steel, coal, and oil. A good index of the acceleration of engineering is the increase in patents given: Between 1790 and 1860, some 36,000 patents were assigned; in the 30 years between 1860 and 1890, there were more than 440,000 (a more than twelvefold increase in less than half the time) (Armytage, 1961). Another index: Between 1850 and 1900, the total consumption of energy in the United States increased fivefold (Pursell, 1981). In the last two decades of the century, much of this increase in energy, inventiveness, and productivity was harnessed by large corporations. Founded in most cases by inventive entrepreneurs such as Edison, Westinghouse, and Bell, companies like General Electric, Western Union, and AT&T took on a life of their own, absorbing engineering talent and producing engineering products in great numbers for a ready market. Products of the haphazard progress of technology over the previous half-century, such companies now began to make technological progress itself one of their foremost products. The electrical industry was a major force by 1900, only 20 years after its founding. Just as electrical engineers were setting the pattern for modern professional engineering, their parent industry was establishing new standards for industrial production and management in its development of power generation, lighting, transportation, and communication systems. This industry (1) introduced systematic patent procedures, (2) organized the first industrial in- house research laboratories, and (3) began to provide extensive in-house technical training for engineer employees (Noble, 1977). It was also a participant in the great movement toward product standards from about 1900 on. Perhaps the most critical innovation was the research lab. At first these emerged ad hoc, in response to some intractable development problem; or they were outgrowths of the company founder's original workshop/lab, such as Edison's Menlo Park establishment in which a team of researchers and technicians worked on development of his electrical lighting system. Later they became indigenous departments of the company, and ongoing R&D became standard for the modern, science-based company. In the process, the research lab (particularly in
EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN ENGINEERING 25 the electrical and chemical industries) began to blur the distinction between scientists and engineers. The introduction of in-house training for engineers was also an important new development. With the rapid pace of innovation, by 1900 schools often lagged behind the technical needs of industryâin both course content and school laboratory equipment (still a common problem today). An unofficial cooperative arrangement between academia and industry came into being, in which the prospective employee would receive the more theoretical scientific/ technical education in college and, after graduation, would receive company- specific technical training in "corporation schools," which were a transitional step on the way to professional employment. For the first two decades of the twentieth century this practice remained most common in the electrical industry. In the mechanical manufacturing industries, the experience-trained older engineers continued to mistrust science-based training, and pressured colleges to add "shop training" to their curricula (Noble, 1977). Engineering education in the United States was becoming a major focus of corporate interest and attention. Another noteworthy innovation of this period was the development of product standards. Pressure for standards began to grow in the early nineteenth century in connection with the American System of manufacturing, as a requirement for mass production. The first standards actually emerged in mid- century (e.g., screw-thread standards were proposed in 1864). But systematic standards did not come into widespread use until the turn of the century, when the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) became active in this field (in 1898 and 1901, respectively). Great impetus was given to the standards movement by the railroad industry, which required a standard track gauge along with standard equipment of many kinds, such as safety couplings and air brakes. But recognition of the benefits of standardization quickly spread to every industry, so much so that even standards-setting soon became unstandardized as dozens of corporations, trade associations, and professional societies formed standards for their industries. This situation led the professional societies of the civil, electrical, mechanical, and mining engineers to join with ASTM in 1916 in forming the American Engineering Standards Committee (forerunner of today's American National Standards Institute). Throughout the first third of this century, voluntary standards, developed in large part by engineers, enormously facilitated the manufacture and sale of products, stimulated industries, and spurred the growth of engineering-based companies (Florman, 1981).
