From Four Branches to a Field of Fields

One of the oldest engineering disciplines, mechanical engineering traces continuous practice from ancient siege engines and water mills through the steam engine to the automobile and the industrial robot, taking its modern taught shape during the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution.

A branch of mechanical engineering's later reach, the compound term aerospace engineering was first defined in 1958 to treat the atmosphere and outer space as a single realm, though Sir George Cayley is credited generations earlier as the first person to separate the forces of lift and drag in atmospheric flight.

Archimedes is traditionally credited as marine engineering's first practitioner in antiquity, and Robert Fulton's 1807 demonstration of a steam powered vessel is traditionally regarded as the start of the modern profession that grew out of mechanical engineering's broader concern with machines.

Civil engineering took its name to distinguish itself from military engineering, the discipline it split from as a recognized civilian profession in eighteenth century Europe, after France opened the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees in 1747 to formally teach the new field.

Environmental engineering grew out of nineteenth century sanitary engineering, the public health response to cholera and typhoid outbreaks traced to contaminated water supplies in industrializing cities, before broadening into the full range of pollution control practiced today.

Long before it became a formal civil engineering specialty, Roman miners used aqueduct fed water for hydraulic mining and reverse overshot water wheels at sites such as the copper mines of Rio Tinto in Spain.

Electrical engineering emerged as a distinct discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, once practitioners had built a global electric telegraph network and founded the field's first professional bodies in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Distinct from both electrical engineering and software engineering, computer engineering traces to the first dedicated degree program in the United States, established in 1971 at Case Western Reserve University, growing to more than 250 accredited programs nationwide by 2015.

The term and the formal discipline date to the late 1960s, when the growing size and unreliability of software systems prompted engineers to argue that writing software needed the same rigor as building a bridge.

Robotics engineering draws together mechanical design, electrical and control systems engineering and software, spanning applications from industrial assembly line arms to surgical robots and robots sent to explore other worlds.

Chemical engineering grew out of industrial chemistry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as chemists and mechanical engineers combined their skills to design continuous, large scale production processes rather than one off batches.

Materials engineering is organized around a single chain of causation, that how a material is processed determines its structure and that structure determines its properties, underlying advances from stronger steels and aerospace alloys to modern composites such as carbon fiber and Kevlar.

Nuclear engineering emerged directly out of the Manhattan Project's wartime reactor work and became a distinct civilian engineering specialty once nuclear power moved from weapons research to electricity generation in the 1950s.

Nanotechnology's conceptual origin is usually traced to physicist Richard Feynman's 29 December 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, though the term itself was coined in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi to describe ultra precision machining at the level of a single atom, and the field's popular identity grew mainly from K. Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation.