---
title: "History of engineering"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_engineering"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:34.588219+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Islamic Golden Age ===
Islamic Golden Age witnessed advances of engineering knowledge, after translating the works of Greek, Persian, Roman, and Indian scholars.
The earliest practical wind-powered machines, the windmill and wind pump, first appeared in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age, in what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, by the 9th century AD. The earliest practical steam-powered machine was a steam jack steam turbine, described in 1551 by Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf in Ottoman Egypt.
The cotton gin was invented in India by the 6th century AD, and the spinning wheel was invented in the Islamic world by the early 11th century, both of which were fundamental to the growth of the cotton industry. The spinning wheel was also a precursor to the spinning jenny, which was a key development during the early Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.
After translating the works of Hero of Alexandria, by Qusta ibn Luqa, the earliest programmable machines were developed in the Muslim world. A music sequencer, a programmable musical instrument, was the earliest type of programmable machine. The first music sequencer was an automated flute player invented by the Banu Musa brothers, described in their Book of Ingenious Devices, in the 9th century. In 1206, Al-Jazari invented programmable automata/robots. He described four automaton musicians, including drummers operated by a programmable drum machine, where they could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns. 
Al-Jazari built five machines to pump water for the kings of the Turkish Artuqid dynasty and their palaces. Besides over 50 ingenious mechanical devices, Al-Jazari also developed and made innovations to segmental gears, mechanical controls, escapement mechanisms, clocks, robotics, and protocols for designing and manufacturing methods.

== European Renaissance ==
The first fully-functioning steam engine was built in 1716 by blacksmith Thomas Newcomen. The development of this device gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in the coming decades, allowing for the beginnings of mass production.
With the rise of engineering as a profession in the 18th century, the term became more narrowly applied to fields in which mathematics and science were applied to these ends. Similarly, in addition to military and civil engineering, the fields then known as the mechanic arts became incorporated into engineering.
The following images are samples from a deck of cards illustrating engineering instruments in England in 1702. They illustrate a range of engineering specializations, that would eventually become known as civil engineering, mechanical engineering, geodesy and geomatics, and so on.
Each card includes a caption explaining the purpose of the instrument:

== Modern era ==
The inventions of Thomas Savery and the Scottish engineer James Watt gave rise to modern Mechanical Engineering. The development of specialized machines and their maintenance tools during the Industrial Revolution led to the rapid growth of Mechanical Engineering both in its birthplace Britain and abroad.
The discipline of Electrical Engineering was shaped by the experiments of Alessandro Volta in the 19th century, the experiments of Michael Faraday, Georg Ohm and others and the invention of the electric motor in 1872. Electrical engineering became a profession late in the 19th century. Practitioners had created a global electric telegraph network and the first electrical engineering institutions to support the new discipline were founded in the UK and US. Although it is impossible to precisely pinpoint a first electrical engineer, Francis Ronalds stands ahead of the field, who created the first working electric telegraph system in 1816 and documented his vision of how the world could be transformed by electricity.
The work of James Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz in the late 19th century gave rise to the field of Electronics. The later inventions of the vacuum tube and the transistor further accelerated the development of Electronics to such an extent that electrical and electronics engineers currently outnumber their colleagues of any other Engineering specialty.
Chemical Engineering, like its counterpart Mechanical Engineering, developed in the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. Industrial scale manufacturing demanded new materials and new processes and by 1880 the need for large scale production of chemicals was such that a new industry was created, dedicated to the development and large scale manufacturing of chemicals in new industrial plants. The role of the chemical engineer was the design of these chemical plants and processes.
Aeronautical Engineering deals with aircraft design while Aerospace Engineering is a more modern term that expands the reach envelope of the discipline by including spacecraft design. Its origins can be traced back to the aviation pioneers around the turn of the 20th century although the work of Sir George Cayley has recently been dated as being from the last decade of the 18th century. Early knowledge of aeronautical engineering was largely empirical with some concepts and skills imported from other branches of engineering. Only a decade after the successful flights by the Wright brothers, the 1920s saw extensive development of aeronautical engineering through development of World War I military aircraft. Meanwhile, research to provide fundamental background science continued by combining theoretical physics with experiments.
The first PhD in engineering (technically, applied science and engineering) awarded in the United States went to Willard Gibbs at Yale University in 1863; it was also the second PhD awarded in science in the U.S.
In 1990, with the rise of computer technology, the first search engine was built by computer engineer Alan Emtage.

== See also ==
Timeline of historic inventions
History of women in engineering
History of chemical engineering
History of electrical engineering
History of structural engineering

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Bix, Amy Sue. Girls Coming to Tech!: A History of American Engineering Education for Women (MIT Press, 2014)
Hill, Donald. A history of engineering in classical and medieval times (Routledge, 2013), on Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs
Landels, John G. Engineering in the Ancient World (University of California Press, 2000, rev. ed.) ISBN 978-0-520-22782-8
Lawton, Brian, ed. The Early History of Mechanical Engineering - Vol. 1 (2004) online;  vol 2 (2004) online
Rae, John and Rudi Volti. The Engineer in History (2001) online
Rhodes, Edward, ed. Engineering America: The Rise of the American Professional Class, 1838–1920 (Washington: Westphalia Press, 2014) 142 pp.
Smith, Edgar C. A short history of naval and marine engineering (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Usher, Abbott Payson. A History of Mechanical Invention (2nd ed. 1954), 450 pp.  online review

== External links ==
History of engineering at University of Minnesota