Technology and Engineering Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
78 statements marked Debated.
Copper, Origin Year-9000
Copper, Materials
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States -9000
Worked native copper ornaments are attested at Anatolian sites such as Cayonu from roughly the ninth millennium BCE; copper smelting from ore came later, from around the fifth millennium BCE.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Electrical Engineering, Origin Year1871
Electrical Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1871
The Society of Telegraph Engineers, founded in Britain in 1871 and later renamed the Institution of Electrical Engineers, is generally credited as the first dedicated professional body for the discipline; the American Institute of Electrical Engineers followed in 1884.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Environmental Engineering, Origin Year1955
Environmental Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1955
1955 marks the founding of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, the field's first dedicated professional certifying body; its practice descends directly from nineteenth century sanitary engineering, whose own origin is harder to date to a single year.
Forging, Origin Year-3000
Forging, Methods
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States -3000
Bronze Age smiths were forging metal by around the third millennium BCE; a single point of origin is not established.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Glass, Origin Year-3500
Glass, Materials
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States -3500
The earliest deliberately manufactured glass objects are attested in Mesopotamia and Egypt from roughly the mid-fourth millennium BCE; naturally occurring volcanic glass, obsidian, was worked far earlier but is not man-made.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Imhotep, Birth Year-2655
Imhotep, Engineers
Standing
Concerns Birth Year
Currently States -2655
No birth record survives. The year is a scholarly estimate backed into from his known service under Pharaoh Djoser, whose Third Dynasty reign is placed around the twenty-seventh century BCE, and from the working life a chief architect of the Step Pyramid would need to have had by that point.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Imhotep, Death Year-2600
Imhotep, Engineers
Standing
Concerns Death Year
Currently States -2600
No death record survives. The year is a scholarly estimate consistent with the end of Djoser reign and the span of Imhotep known career.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Industrial Engineering, Origin Year1911
Industrial Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1911
1911 marks the publication of Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, the work most often credited with founding the discipline; its first dedicated professional society, the American Institute of Industrial Engineers, was not founded until 1948.
Johannes Gutenberg, Birth Year1400
Johannes Gutenberg, Engineers
Standing
Concerns Birth Year
Currently States 1400
Gutenberg's exact birth year is not recorded; 1400 is the conventionally cited estimate based on guild registration records.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Marine Engineering, Origin Year1807
Marine Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1807
1807 is the traditionally cited start of the modern profession, Robert Fulton's steam-powered vessel demonstration; the same source also dates the broader discipline to the early Industrial Revolution (early 1700s), and credits Archimedes as its first practitioner in antiquity, so no single origin year is agreed.
Source Marine Engineering (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors
Mass Production, Origin Year1913
Mass Production, Methods
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1913
Interchangeable-parts manufacturing predates this by a century, but 1913 marks the Ford Motor Company introduction of the moving assembly line at Highland Park, the breakthrough most closely associated with mass production in its modern sense; the term itself was popularized by a 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica article credited to Ford.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Materials Engineering, Origin Year1958
Materials Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1958
Northwestern University created one of the first departments explicitly named materials science and engineering in the late 1950s, as metallurgy departments broadened their scope during a period of expanded research funding.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Mechanical Engineering, Origin Year1880
Mechanical Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1880
Practices recognizable as mechanical engineering predate this by millennia; 1880 marks the founding of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the first dedicated professional body for the discipline in the United States.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Mining Engineering, Origin Year1765
Mining Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1765
Georgius Agricola sixteenth century treatise De Re Metallica laid out systematic mining practice long before any dedicated school existed; the first dedicated mining engineering school, the Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony, was founded in 1765.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Movable Type Printing, Year1041
Movable Type Printing, Inventions
Standing
Concerns Year
Currently States 1041
Sources place the invention within a 1039-1048 window rather than a single attested year; 1041 is the commonly cited midpoint.
Source Bi Sheng (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors
Nanotechnology, Origin Year1974
Nanotechnology, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1974
Dated here to Norio Taniguchi's 1974 paper, the first documented use of the word nanotechnology itself. Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture supplied the field's conceptual framing fifteen years earlier without using the term, and the field's modern popular identity and research agenda trace at least as strongly to K. Eric Drexler's independent 1981 coinage and 1986 book Engines of Creation as to Taniguchi's manufacturing-oriented usage; historians of science do not treat any single one of these three moments as settling when the field itself began.
Source Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Drexler, 1986)
Nuclear Engineering, Origin Year1950
Nuclear Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1950
1950 marks the establishment of the first dedicated academic nuclear engineering programs, shortly after the Manhattan Project's reactor work was declassified for civilian use; the underlying reactor physics dates to Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 in 1942.
Petroleum Engineering, Origin Year1859
Petroleum Engineering, Fields
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1859
Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, founding the modern petroleum industry; the first dedicated petroleum engineering degree programs did not appear until around 1910 to 1915.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Photolithography, Origin Year1957
Photolithography, Methods
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1957
Bell Telephone Laboratories applied photolithographic patterning to semiconductor manufacture in the mid-to-late 1950s; the exact priority between early adopters at Bell Labs and, later, Fairchild Semiconductor is not settled at the level of a single event, though the period is well attested.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Plastics, Origin Year1862
Plastics, Materials
Standing
Concerns Origin Year
Currently States 1862
Alexander Parkes introduced Parkesine, the first semi-synthetic plastic, in 1862; Leo Baekeland introduced Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, in 1907.
Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors