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EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN ENGINEERING 22 Of course, this admixture was not universally accepted. Many engineering educators (and industry employers) objected to the distraction of students from their technical studies, and to the abstraction and "refinement" imparted by the study of philosophy, religion, and literatureâqualities deemed worthless if not dangerous in the future employee (Noble, 1977). However, by the end of the century this view was altering somewhat: the social sciences were gaining general acceptance as additions to the engineering curriculum. This "humanistic- social stem" (economics, political science, sociology, and psychology) was seen as having practical value as more and more engineers became corporate managers. It accommodated a new and broader conception of the professional engineer within an organizational framework. Diversification of the Engineering Disciplines. Largely because professional civil engineering education (at West Point and RPI) predated any significant comparable training for other technical occupational groups by many years, civil engineers were the first to acquire formal professional status. By any practical yardstick, civil engineering was a profession in America by the time the great canal and rail projects got under way (around 1820). But perhaps the least ambiguous way to assign dates to the emergence of the disciplines as formalized branches is according to the establishment of professional societies. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) was formed in 1852. Nearly 20 years later (1871), the mining elements of the profession broke away from the ASCE to form the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, the first of many fragmentations of the profession. It was not until the last quarter of the century that mechanical engineering emerged as a full profession, gradually evolving away from the role of mechanic in the machine shop. When the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) was formed in 1880, it was dominated by prominent, established entrepreneurs with powerful business connections. As younger school-trained membersâemployees of the large companiesâentered, what emerged at first was a two-track professionalism featuring a certain amount of tension between these two disparate orientations (Noble, 1977). Gradually, with industrial diversification and greater specialization of mechanical work, the newer, employee aspect of work in this field came to predominate. In the 1870s, the intensification of business activity and the associated pressure for information dissemination combined with increasing technical advancement to bring about a series of important advances in communications. These included the typewriter (1873), the rotary press (1870s), and the telephone (1876). In addition to the telephone,
