The social and economic roots of engineering science

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how the social and economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped to create a need for engineering science. The chapter describes how the development of cheap sources of iron, the development of the steam engine and the revolution in textile manufacturing combined to create what has come to be called the Industrial Revolution. While most of these developments had little dependence upon science, the chapter argues that with the development of new large-scale technologies, such as iron bridges, steam engines, railroads, steamboats and new factories engineers could no longer rely on traditional techniques such as rule-of-thumb or cut-and-try empiricism and had to rely more and more on scientific ideas and methods. While science could be of some use in solving the problems of large-scale technology the chapter concludes by arguing that much of traditional science was of little use in understanding actual machines and structures and that a new engineering science was required to address these problems.