How important is engineering?

When the western expansion of the United States started, the pioneers were lucky that the watershed of the Mississippi provided a huge area with access down the rivers to markets. Still, there was a rapid expansion of canals during the early 19th century, which opened the markets of the industrializing northeast to the farms further west, and the market created by those farms and the farm towns to the manufactured products of the eastern seaboard.

It was only a few decades after the first railroad was built in the United States that railroads connected the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the 1880's there were more than 150,000 miles of railroads in the United States. Railroads are efficient, and today as oil prices soar we are seeing a return to rail freight.

The development of the national highway system in the United States after World War II also had enormous economic benefits as the national markets were created by trucking, and as the nation became mobile.

While once transportation infrastructure was built and maintained by journeymen workers, the world has discovered that formally trained engineers do better work, paying for itself, in the planning of routes, the specification of cuts and fills, the evaluation of construction materials, the building of bridges, and the management of the system.

Then we come to air transportation, which requires the services of aeronautical and other engineers in the development of the aircraft, but also the civil engineers responsible for the airports, and the engineers who design, build and maintain the air traffic control systems. For shipping, there are not only the navel angineers involved in the design and construction of the ships, but all of the engineers involved in the creating and maintaining ports and port equipment.

The introduction of piped water in the 19th century helped to control the huge burden of water washed and water borne disease. Not only that, but the huge economic cost of obtaining water was greatly reduced, freeing the drawers of water for other productive activities. Similarly, the development of sewerage made the modern urban development possible, as indeed did the development of modern systems for the control of urban runoff.

Agriculture has been made sufficiently productive to feed the modern world's population by irrigation engineering. Think about the dams that impound waters, and the irrigation canals that carry it to where it is needed, as well the land leveling that allow it to be applied by the pumps, and the overall systems for the allocation and control of the waters. The water management also keeps flooding from being more common.

Electric power was obviously developed before there were electrical engineers, but the development of modern turbines and generator plants, the planning and construction of power distribution systems, and the control of those systems now requires the services of professional engineers.

While electrification could be supported simply by lighting, the economic benefits were greatly increased when electrical power was applied to machinery for manufacturing, transportation, and indeed to power the modern mechanized household.

These developments lead to the creation of huge fields of mechanical, electrical and industrial engineering involved in the design of new products and production facilities. Chemical engineers are responsible for the production of gasoline and a myriad of other chemical products used in modern society, including the pharmaceuticals that help maintain our health and that of our animals.

Construction engineers play a role in engineering our largest buildings and other structures. Mining engineers in the development and exploitation of the mineral resources that go into the myriad products of modern civilization.

My own engineering education was in electronics, and electronics engineers are responsible for radio, television, telephony, computers and the entire information and communications infrastructure.

Thus, there is a huge engineered infrastructure in developed nations which has huge economic benefits in reducing the cost of manufacturing and distribution of goods and services. Moreover, engineers are involved in the creation of many key products and the processes by which they are manufactured. Thus the economic importance of engineering is not limited to the cost of infrastructure, but involves the economic costs in developing nations of inadequate infrastructure, and further involves the value of engineered products and processes.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is no intergovernmental organization responsible to promote the engineering profession globally. Many U.N. organizations have some interest in the engineering professions: the Food and Agricultural Organization in agricultural engineering, the World Health Organization in biomedical engineering, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization in industrial engineering, and the International Telecommunications Union in communications engineering come to mind. UNESCO has a tiny program for the support of engineering, but one grossly inadequate to the needs of developing nations.

Note there are significant reasons to treat engineering as a whole, rather than dividing the field into many independent subfields. Not only are many of the fundamental scientific disciplines common among engineering fields, but engineers must cooperate across disciplines in their work on many of our larger systems, and the fields cross fertilize.

Unfortunately, the numbers of engineers available to developing nations is very inadequate to their needs. The creation of a large, competent engineering profession is a long term process. One has to build the engineering colleges to train those engineers, and the faculty to staff the colleges have to be trained. A new graduate engineer needs supervised experience to learn to tackle larger and more complex engineering challenges. Thus generations are required simply to build the numbers of engineers needed for an adequate engineering workforce.

Without engineering jobs to employ the growing engineering workforce, the young engineers will leave, and young people will not be drawn into the field. The tendency to import engineering services must be tempered by the need to develop each nation's cadre of engineers.

Moreover, engineering technology has to be tailored to local circumstances. It has to be affordable and sustainable within those circumstances. Of course, at one level, engineers should learn the skills appropriate to the adaptation of technology to their local situations, but in practice most engineers use good practices which have been developed locally without the cost or bother of reengineering them from scratch. Thus while the materials most cost-effective for construction of highways will differ from country to country, each highway engineer will normally accept the established best practice for his own country, leaving innovation in materials to a small cadre of engineering researchers. Still, the development of best practices to meet the myriad conditions in the developing world remains a major challenge for the global engineering profession.

Similarly, engineering technology is changing all the time. Think for example of the changes that computers have made through the introduction of computer aided design techniques. In my youth, all engineering students had to master engineering drawing, and the production of engineering drawings that could be reproduced into blueprints. Now days that task is done by computers, while engineers have to be expert in computational mathematics and the use of engineering software. New materials, new products, new manufacturing processes, and other innovations occur on a continuing basis.

Thus the institutionalization of continuing engineering education is but one element of the process of building support for the engineering professions.

Technology policy leaders in the United States are justifiably concerned with maintaining a numerically and qualitatively adequate engineering profession to maintain our economic growth. That problem pales when compared with the problem of creating an adequate engineering profession for the developing world. At least, however, the developing world can draw on the experience of the rich nations in approaching this problem.