Gary Downey (Virginia Tech)

This paper examines the emergence of dominant methods of engineering formation across the territories of England and Great Britain between 1771 and 1914.  It explores the extent to which the evolution of such methods can be seen as, in part, responses to broader metrics of social advancement or progress.  In particular, the presentation traces the participation of engineers in an emergent struggle to define the dominant identity of Great Britain.  The analysis is an historical ethnography designed to account for the achievement of dominant identities.  It seeks to build plausibility for its account by demonstrating correlations between modes of engineering formation and dominant metrics of progress, across both time and territory.

In 1771, John Smeaton and ten other engineers attempted to certify their independence by founding the Society of Civil Engineers as an honorary group.  Importantly, the Society included Scots, indicating that their orientation extended beyond England.  For inhabitants of England, status was attributed to individuals and calculated on a metric of relative independence and epitomized by the gentleman of landed property.  Although professionals were dependent on clients, their position was better than the dependency of manual labor.  The work of Smeaton and others to build a hierarchy of supervision on construction projects was designed to make engineering fit the identity of a profession.  By the time the Institution of Civil Engineers was established in 1818, many engineers were working to advance themselves in terms of a calculus that had accounted for a stable inequality within England but which they were using to help build a progressive Britain.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, civil and mechanical engineers successfully elaborated models of formation via apprenticeship, which emphasized practical training.  Also, tradesmen seeking the status of engineer established trades societies, such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, to facilitate individual improvement via mutual assistance.  These developments correlated with the broader emergence of the “practical man,” an identity marking elite status within British industry and contrasting with the rural gentleman.  The possibility existed of a Britain defined primarily by a metric of progress emphasizing collective improvement through industry.

Yet a metric of collective improvement carried the danger of erasing the stabilized reality based on degree of independence.  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a tension developed as rapid spread of the public school system marked the emergence of an alternative vision of advancement as the development and demonstration of character.  This tension correlated with ambivalences in modes of engineering formation.  On the one hand, advocates of higher education successfully built a model of science-based education prior to apprenticeship training.  On the other hand, technical higher education suffered in relation to liberal higher education, and technical institutions drifted to become multidisciplinary universities.