As the Industrial Revolution arose in Europe in the 1800s, the era of human or animal power transformed to an era of steam power, with engines that could cut wood, move merchandise, or thresh grain. Soon, a steady stream of artisans was coming from Europe to the United States and finding plenty of opportunities to exercise the art of manufacturing. As the century wore on, many new machines were invented in the United States. Soon, with one advance piling on top of another, a complex set of skills called engineering began to be devised. These new skills were taught at selected colleges and universities.
With one exception, it was during those times that the biggest, oldest engineering disciplines formed. The one exception was civil engineering, which used to be called military engineering. Military engineering was the practice of building the roads, bridges, and forts that armies on the move needed. The West Point Academy, founded in 1802, was the source of the first military engineers in the United States. Military engineering began to be taught in 1817. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, offered the first courses that were formally known as civil engineering.
Each of the engineering disciplines profiled here traces its roots back to the nineteenth century. Even so, an engineer of that era would hardly recognize anything going on in today s versions of these disciplines. Skill in drafting has given way to skill in manipulating images on a computer screen. Familiarity with steam locomotives has been replaced by an understanding of power supplies for communications satellites. Each of the disciplines listed here not only has a long history, but also has a new, up-to-the-minute look.
Electrical/Electronics Engineering
To a large degree, saying that you are an engineer is synonymous with saying that you are an electrical/electronics engineer. The reason for this is the vast number of students studying electronics and the correspondingly large number of such engineers at work today. About one-third of all engineering students are in electrical and/or electronics programs. If computer engineering students and electrical engineering technology students are added together, the number approaches one-half.
Why is electrical/electronics engineering so popular and so dominant among working engineers? Most of the reasons can be found all around you-the radio you might be listening to, the television you might be watching, and perhaps even the computer you might be using. The twentieth century has been called many things, but perhaps the most accurate of all is to call it the Electric Age.
Spurred by new scientific discoveries, and then by practical inventions, electricity has flowed into every aspect of our lives. Electricity supplies light; power to run appliances and heavy machinery; and communications such as the telephone, radio, and television. In much smaller quantities, electricity powers electronics-small devices that mimic large machines. And, of course, electronics is changing everything around us every day, through such pervasive devices as handheld calculators, computers, and control devices that help operate automobiles, airplanes, and homes.
There are roughly 288,000 electrical/electronics engineers at work today, according to federal data. The latest projection from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is that it will see average growth-11 percent-through 2010, reaching a total of 319,000. Newly graduated B.S.E.E.s earn around $50,000 annually, according to various sources.
Federal data blur the outlook for electrical/electronics engineers somewhat. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has recently defined a new profession, "computer software engineer," which it characterizes as much involving computer science as it does engineering. (BLS has another category called "computer hardware engineering.") On the academic and professional side, however, there are considerable numbers of electrical engineers whose primary work involves programming computers or similar microelectronic devices. What makes this more than a trivial distinction is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the current number of computer software engineers as 697,000 and that the growth rate will be an eye-popping 95 percent over this decade, meaning a near-doubling to 1.4 million software engineers. Many of today's B.S.E.E.s will partake of that growth as they find themselves working in various software fields, rather than in hardware. This topic will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, where computer engineering will be described.
History
Electrical/electronics engineering has participated in some of the most momentous discoveries in science, both in terms of applying them to practical use and in uncovering phenomena that led to new scientific theories.
The science of electricity had only a rather quaint value as a curiosity for most of history. William Gilbert, an English scientist, characterized magnetism and static electricity around the year 1600, and Alexander Volta discovered that an electric current could be made to flow in 1800. In the mid-1800s a variety of European scientists had established the general rules governing electricity, and, ultimately, theories involving electricity and magnetism were joined under a concept called "electromagnetism" (James Clerk Maxwell's discovery).
Key Inventions
Although the theory largely was developed in Europe, it was in America that most of the first practical applications appeared.
These included the telegraph (Samuel Morse, 1838), the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, 1876), the light bulb (Thomas Edison, 1878), and the electric motor (Nikola Tesla, 1888). All these inventions-but most of all, Edison's light bulb-soon created the need for systems of generating and conveying electricity and manufacturing the telephones, motors, and bulbs that would use it. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers was formed in 1884, partly to professionalize the growing number of workers in the field and partly to prepare for international visitors expected at the International Electrical Exhibition being held in Philadelphia that year.
From that era to the 1930s, electrical engineering was primarily concerned with figuring out how to generate ever-larger amounts of power and refining the motors, transformers, lighting devices, and other machines that used the electricity. The needs of the electricity industries helped raise the standards of metalworking, machining, and general manufacturing because precisely shaped parts were essential to getting electricity to work correctly. Edison-who went on to create the phonograph (for both recording and playing back), the film camera, and a variety of electrical instruments-brought all his discoveries under the umbrella of the General Electric Company around the turn of the century. Bell's invention, the telephone, led to the creation of American Telephone and Telegraph.
