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 26 By late nineteenth century the growing bond between engineering schools and industry, and the increasing identification of the engineer with his company, posed some problems for the engineering profession. The professional societies were a natural forum for debate on these questions. (Even the ASCE, founded in 1852, had immediately begun to wrestle with "ethics" issues.) Pressure from within and without the professions to standardize the quality of the engineering-education "product" for business needs was one of the principal reasons for the establishment of a Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education in 1894 (Noble, 1977). The central problem was one of conflicting professional identities. Was a professional engineer to be primarily (a) a businessman, (b) an employee, organized along the lines of production workers, or (c) a repository of arcane scientific knowledge? For many practicing engineers, professional identity centered on the businessman concept. But the interpretation of this role varied among the different branches: In civil, mining, and mechanical engineering it tended to include the consultant and entrepreneurial role; whereas for the electrical and chemical engineering branches (and many mechanical engineers) the focus was on management within the corporate framework. The practicing engineer now found himself in a dilemma analogous to that encountered by early engineering educators, struggling to maintain professional respect and self-respect in an environment not wholly conducive to it. Unlike other professional groups (physicians and lawyers, for example), engineers had become largely coopted by the organizations that their special knowledge, technology, had helped to breed (Layton, 1971). Professional standing, for an engineer, was now very closely aligned with corporate standing. This condition inhered in the nature of the technology development process and was thus inevitable, but it is nevertheless one that continues to be debated even today. Global Depression, Global War By 1930, the primary change in engineering was the great scale on which engineering activities were conducted. Industrial research had fueled much of this expansion: From the first industrial research laboratory in 1901 (the General Electric Company's), the number of such labs had grown to 375 in 1917, and to over 600 by 1930 (Pursell, 1981). The rapid growth in the use of electricity and electrical products in the home, combined with the growth and spread of population, created a vast economy dependent on technological goods and servicesâthe
EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN ENGINEERING 27 "technological society." In addition, new branches of engineering (e.g., chemical and aeronautical) had emerged in strength after World War I. The most significant new engineering discipline in terms of impact on the economy was production engineering, which was concerned with improving the efficiency of the manufacturing process. An important element was the concept of "scientific management," championed by Frederick W. Taylor and others. These new techniques had their most notable application in the burgeoning automobile industry, where Henry Ford's moving assembly line became the catalyst for revolutionary changes in American life and industry. The effects of the automobile on all the engineering-based industries were profound. The car required tires, radios, engine improvements, synthetic materials, roads, bridges, and fuel. Residential and commercial construction spread far from the city centers. By 1937, U.S. per capita consumption of oil was 10 times that of any other nation (Armytage, 1961). Across the country, the building of the modern metropolis had enormous implications for engineering. Spearheaded by planners such as Robert Moses, urban development arrived. Skyscrapers, rapid transit systems, and public utilities operating on a vast scale brought a boom in civil engineering in particular. The needs of business for communications and an array of other services were mixed with the requirements of large, densely clustered residential populations. The modern city was becoming a new organism, sustaining a fast-paced, affluent style of living through the provision of a coordinated network of technological goods and services. Nationwide, the speed of development meant that little was done to coordinate different lines of development, or even to examine their present and future impacts on society and the economy. President Hoover was interested in conservation of resources (land, lumber, and water), and in 1929 commissioned studies that did draw attention to the "unsynchronized" developments in technology. These were clearly matters requiring government attention, but there was as yet little precedent for governmental intervention in economic development on a large-scale. The Panama Canal was one partial exception; and the building of large dams for water management in the Mississippi Valley and the western states early in the century was another step in this direction. Certainly the federal mobilization of scientific and engineering effort during World War I (for example, in the chemical industry) had had an economic impact, if not intent. However, it remained for the Great Depression to provide the opportunity and the rationale for broad, coordinated federal programs bearing on technology.
