Civil engineering got its name simply by not being military work
Engineers once built fortifications and siege works first; everything else needed its own label. In the 18th century the word civil was attached to all the peaceful building, from roads to sewers. Yet the craft itself is far older, stretching back to the first settled farmers who needed shelter, water and routes.
Organised building probably began somewhere between 4000 and 2000 BC in Egypt, the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, as people gave up wandering and needed permanent homes and transport. For most of history the builder and the architect were effectively the same person, and knowledge passed through craft guilds of masons and carpenters, so designs repeated and grew only gradually. The Egyptian pyramids, Iran's qanat water channels, the Appian Way and the Great Wall all belong to this long tradition.
Mathematics slowly entered the picture. Archimedes in the 3rd century BC worked out the principle of buoyancy and devised his famous water-lifting screw, and in the 7th century AD the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta applied arithmetic with Hindu-Arabic numerals to calculating the volume of excavations.
The profession took formal shape in Europe. France opened the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in 1747 as the first school devoted to the subject. John Smeaton, builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, was the first to call himself a civil engineer, and in 1771 he and colleagues started a society that was mostly a dinner club. London's Institution of Civil Engineers followed in 1818, with Thomas Telford as its first president from 1820 and a Royal Charter in 1828. Across the Atlantic, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute awarded the first American degree in 1835, and Cornell granted the first to a woman, Nora Stanton Blatch, in 1905.
Modern practitioners split into specialities such as coastal, earthquake, environmental and construction engineering. North American rules reserve the right to seal plans for public approval to licensed professional engineers, while the United Kingdom has no equivalent law.
Source: Civil engineering
