Starting a Society: Now, as in decades past, history's place in engineering education is a source of debate

摘要

THIS ACADEMIC YEAR marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Society for the History of Technology, an event in which ASEE played a significant role. In the early 20th century, the relevance of history to engineering was a hotly debated topic, just as it is today. There were those practitioners, like the prominent bridge engineer J. A. L. Waddell, who believed that professional engineers should be fully apprised of the history of their field. And there were those academics who thought that history and other humanities and social science courses took up instructional time better spent on technical matters.