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Global Perspectives on Engineering - Johnson Abstract

Engineering America: National Identity and the Mathematization of Nature, 1789-1870
Ann Johnson (University of South Carolina)

In the project proposed here, I look at the way engineering was mathematized in antebellum America and the nature of the nascent and evolving community that developed and disseminated these new practices. While much has been written on the institutionalization and mathematization of engineering in 18th century France, far less attention has been paid to the development of engineering institutions and methods in other places. The unasked questions about how engineering became mathematical in various places stem from an underlying assumption that somehow the mathematization of engineering was a ‘natural’ development. In fact mathematization took a variety of different paths and was anything but inevitable. The central problematic in this project is to determine how engineers in 18th and 19th century America developed unique mathematical practices, why they did so, and to show the institutional resources were used and created in the process. However, this is not a narrow study of engineering mathematics; instead, questions about mathematization open up a broader inquiry about the work antebellum engineers were doing and the role of engineers in the development of the nation. The political, legal, religious, ethnic and gender, educational and economic dimensions of nation building were neither separate nor separable from the development of American engineering practices and culture.

The structure of this project is heavily narrative and dependent upon the voluminous writings of the engineers who populate this story, from to published articles to field notebooks to state records to personal letters. Material culture, from handbooks to scientific instruments, and the landscape also play important evidentiary roles. The narrative begins with an examination of engineering in the 18th century, and here I examine the convergence of French and British modes of engineering in the American environment. I pay particular attention to the political implications of emulating French institutions in America during and following the French Revolution. French models of military engineering brought fears of standing armies and hereditary elites into the fragile political context of the early Republic. After discussing the institutions that formalized engineering knowledge, I show a highly informal generator of engineering knowledge: state and private land surveys. Nearly every engineer I discuss worked as a surveyor in his career and surveying was the basis for the apprenticeship system that made large projects like the Erie Canal possible. Thus surveying was how engineers encountered and shaped the landscape.

The book will then turn its attention to the development of mathematical methods, starting with French-influenced West Point and the Corps of Engineers. The centrality of militarily-trained engineers, but also the peripatetic nature of their careers as they moved among different infrastructural projects across the growing United States, thrust American engineers into a central role in the process of defining the nation. Engineering served economic development and was, therefore, highly philosophically and politically contentious, a problem highlighted by John Lauritz Larson’s keen account of the political and legal battles over various internal improvements. Development was much debated. In the broadest sense, should the U.S. be an agrarian or a commercial nation, with attention to the fact that either required an engineered landscape? What national or regional aims did particular engineering projects favor—and who advocated them? Thus, important American cultural phenomena including religion and Providence, debates about constitutionality, regional identities and rivalries, the role of commerce and the frontier, etc. all affected American engineering methods and the nascent profession’s ethos. These methods then shaped the American landscape. Race and, especially, gender or manliness were important aspects of this narrative, as Michael Adas points out in Dominance by Design. The gendering of engineering was more than a social and political construction; in addition, engineering developed a gendered epistemology, which is partially traceable to the kinds of practices engineers developed, expressed in the modular and formulaic practices I describe in this project. Then the Morrill Act, which set up American land grant colleges, effectively formalized and replicated a system of engineering knowledge and institutions that had been developed in the previous century. By the Age of Edison, America was a technological nation.