Engineer: roles, skills, history and areas of practice

The Latin word ingenium means "sensible invention" or "acumen". The Italian word ingegnere (i.e. "master of armour", "master builder of war"), which originated from it, was only used in the Middle Ages in connection with war technology and in German as an equally restrictive loan word Ingenieur. It was not until the 17th century that the French word ingénieur came to mean "expert in the technical field with theoretical training". In the 18th century it came from there again as a loanword engineer into German, but now in the more general French meaning and in the course of the 19th century also displaced the term Kunstmeister (master craftsman) commonly used in mining and hydraulic engineering.

The Middle Latin title ingeniarius, which referred to the maintenance and use of military instruments (armour, weapons, guns), was also borne by Leonardo da Vinci in the Italian form ingegnier of the time. Under Sebastien le Pestre de Vauban, Louis XIV's master fortress builder. The term "engineer", which is still used today, developed beyond the military. In this sense, Archimedes, known from antiquity, is retrospectively referred to as an engineer due to his technical inventions.

Since the Thirty Years' War, many armies in Europe have recruited a group of technical specialists and integrated them into the hierarchy of the army as a more or less independent permanent formation. Artillery and engineer corps were formed. Later the field of work of these engineers was extended from military engineering to state civil engineering and mining. The absolutist states organized a technical bureaucracy in both military and civil government services. The linkage of the two services was evident in fortification engineering. The fortification engineer was a technician in war and in peace. He had to build fortified places. In war he gave assistance in their defence and in the conquest of foreign fortresses.

Engineering education from the 18th century

In the German-speaking world, the development in Saxony in particular played a pioneering role. August Christoph Graf von Wackerbarth, chief of the engineer officers since 1702, separated them from the artillery corps in 1712 and thus formed the first engineer corps in Germany. The engineer officers worked in peacetime in hydraulic engineering including melioration, in road and bridge construction, in geodesy and cartography. They were also involved in the great national survey of 1780 and in many areas of infrastructure and regional development. Until 1745, the commanders of the Corps of Engineers were also at the head of the Civil Chief Construction Office. In December 1743, the Dresden Academy of Engineering, the concept of which had been drawn up by Jean de Bodt, began teaching in the Neustadt barracks - with subjects such as mathematics, fortress construction, geodesy, geography, civil engineering, mechanics and machine science. The early formation of an independent corps of engineers in the military organization and the establishment of a technical college that also taught scientific subjects were significant contributions to the development of both the engineering profession with its established job description and the engineering sciences.

In France, there was the creation of the first military corps of engineers for road and bridge construction in 1720. The scientific training of engineers began at the civil engineering school opened in Paris in 1747, followed by the École polytechnique in 1794 and the school of road and bridge construction in 1795 (École nationale des ponts et chaussées).

In Austria, a formal engineering academy for the Habsburg army was created provisionally in 1717; from 1720 it was a permanent institution. In 1736 the Technical Military Academy moved into the present Stiftskaserne in Vienna. From this time onwards, engineering schools and later technical colleges were also established in numerous other countries, and in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries they were given equal status to universities (today's technical universities). On the occasion of the centenary of the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg on 19 October 1899, the academic degree of Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing.) was introduced at the Prussian technical universities together with the degree of Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften (Dr.-Ing.) by "Allerhöchsten Erlass" (cabinet order) of Wilhelm II, King of Prussia.

In the following years, the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees were also introduced at technical universities in other states of the German Empire:

• in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt on 25 November 1899,
• in the Grand Duchy of Baden on 10 February 1900,
• in the Kingdom of Saxony on 12 February 1900,
• in the Kingdom of Württemberg by decree of 22 February 1900
• in the Kingdom of Bavaria on 10 January 1901.

In the 1970s, a start was made in the Federal Republic of Germany to convert engineering education to a higher level of scientific education. The outward sign of this was the dissolution of the previous higher technical schools (engineering schools and academies) and the establishment of universities of applied sciences. In the German Democratic Republic, for similar reasons, the engineering colleges were created from 1969 onwards, which also became universities of applied sciences after the GDR joined the Federal Republic.

Admission of women to engineering studies, first diplomas and doctorates

The first female graduate engineer in a European country was Cécile Butticaz, who obtained her diploma in electrical engineering from the Lausanne School of Engineering in 1907, managed an engineering office from 1909, worked on the second Simplon tunnel and obtained her doctorate in physics from the University of Geneva in 1929.

In the various states of the German Empire, women were admitted to study at technical universities and thus to study engineering between 1900 and 1909. However, only a few women studied engineering subjects. By 1918, there were 29 female architecture students, five female electrical engineering students, three female civil engineering students and one female mining student at the TH Berlin. In the winter semester of 1918/19, there were 75 female engineering students in the German Reich, 56 of whom studied architecture. In addition to Berlin, the technical universities of Darmstadt and Munich also attracted female engineering students during the imperial period.

The first female graduate engineer at a German university was Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff, who graduated in architecture from the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1911. Jovanka Bončić-Katerinić and Thekla Schild followed in 1913. Bončić-Katerinić graduated from the Technical University of Darmstadt and settled in Belgrade as an architect. Thekla Schild earned her diploma at the TH Karlsruhe. Until her marriage in 1916, she worked, mostly unpaid, in several architectural offices. The first female mechanical engineer to graduate was Elsbeth Steinheil, whose father was an entrepreneur. She studied at the TH Munich from 1913 to 1917. A year after her graduation, she married one of her father's employees. The first female graduate in civil engineering known by name was Martha Schneider-Bürger, who graduated from the TH Munich in 1927. She published the steel profile tables for many decades.

Marie Frommer, who had received her diploma in architecture in Berlin in 1916, completed her doctorate in 1919 at the Technical University of Dresden on the subject of "River Course and Urban Development". It was the first doctorate for a woman in an engineering subject. After Frommer had been employed in architectural offices for several years, she opened her own architectural office in 1925. Frommer was Jewish and had to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where she was again successful as an architect. The first woman to earn a doctorate in mechanical engineering was Ilse Essers, who earned her engineering degree in Aachen in 1926. Essers discovered mass balancing on movable wing flaps and wing rudders to prevent fanned wing vibrations. In 1929 she received her doctorate from the TH Berlin. With her findings and inventions she created essential foundations in the field of aeronautical engineering, structural design and mechanical engineering. At Darmstadt Technical University, Kira Stein was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mechanical engineering.