Engineering as people understand it today encompasses a very large platform. Simply by definition it covers a multitude of disciplines and sub disciplines. Engineering is a science, math and an art all at the same time bringing together aspects of social, economic, and practical applications to design and build structures and machinery. Not only this but systems, devices and their processes, all in hopes of bettering the world we live in. Even so, that is most general generic definition of engineering.

Engineering by definition may have been began earlier than we could have possibly recorded, perhaps even predating language. The very first person to use a stick as a lever or rolled a rock to a given place to stand on used engineering. The word engineering derives itself from a 1325 reference. An engineer was one who worked on military engines of war, like a ballista or a catapult. Some of the earliest pioneers of engineering we recognize today would be the Romans, the Greeks and the Egyptians. Considering the tools and the resources they had to work within their times the engineering feats they accomplished were nothing short of miraculous. The aqua duct, the Parthenon, the great pyramids, the Great Wall of China, not to mention what was accomplished by the Aztec and Incan empires in South America were and still are engineering wonders.

While these are great examples of engineering architecture it wasn’t until the invention of the steam engine that mechanical engineering came into its own. The first steam engine was developed and built by Thomas Savery back in 1698. This single event would enable mass production and in the coming decades usher in the industrial revolution. The electrical motor was brought into existence in 1872 and this created an entirely new field which when coupled with the mechanical engineering brought huge advancements. Electrical engineering has grown so rapidly and so large that now it has far surpassed all other forms of engineering disciplines. It was not too much longer when chemical engineering, in the late nineteenth century, complimented the industrial revolution and took it even further.

It goes without saying that the invention of the automobile and then the airplane soon after brought forth a wave of engineering achievements the world had never seen. The engineering advancements of the 20th century alone are perhaps equal to all that had transpired up to that point in history. Engineering at this present day has brought us to a level of technology that, in very many ways, is advancing faster than we can keep up with it. It seems anymore that no sooner is one form of technology or advancement available to industry, medicine or the public than there is something superior already waiting to take its place.

The four main branches of engineering as we know them are chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical. Many of the disciplines and sub disciplines of these branches have to overlap their knowledge to further their individual goals; this usually requires an engineer to be proficient in a various number of disciplines that may at times seem irrelevant to his own calling.