Civil engineering

• 1. Introduction

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  Civil engineering is the discipline behind the roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage systems, pipelines, and railways that hold daily life together. It deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment. It is the second-oldest engineering discipline, ranking just behind military engineering. In fact, the very word civil was coined to mark a difference. In the 18th century, the term arrived to cover all things civilian as opposed to military engineering. So how did a profession that began with stonemasons and master builders become a vast field of specialized sub-disciplines? Who first dared to call himself a civil engineer? And how did soil, water, earthquakes, and the surface of the Earth itself each become a branch of study? The answers reach from ancient Egypt to a dinner society in London, and from a lighthouse in the sea to the tools a surveyor carries today.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  Between 4000 and 2000 BC, the earliest practice of civil engineering may have begun in ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, and Mesopotamia. As humans abandoned a nomadic existence, the need to build shelter appeared, and transportation grew more important, leading to the wheel and to sailing. The construction of pyramids in Egypt, around 2700 to 2500 BC, gave history some of its first instances of large structure construction. For most of ancient and medieval history, the work fell to artisans such as stonemasons and carpenters, who could rise to the role of master builder. Knowledge stayed locked inside craft guilds and was seldom supplanted by advances. Structures, roads, and infrastructure were repetitive, and any increase in scale came only in small increments. Across the wider ancient world, builders left works that still command attention. The Qanat water management system in modern-day Iran has examples older than 3000 years and longer than 71 km. Iktinos built the Parthenon in Ancient Greece between 447 and 438 BC. Roman engineers laid the Appian Way around 312 BC, and General Meng T'ien raised the Great Wall of China around 220 BC under orders from Ch'in Emperor Shih Huang Ti. The Romans spread aqueducts, insulae, harbors, bridges, dams, and roads throughout their empire, a legacy of civic building that later thinkers would try to put on a scientific footing.

• 3. Science Enters The Work

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  Archimedes, working in the 3rd century BC, offers one of the earliest examples of a scientific approach to problems that bear on civil engineering. His principle underpins our understanding of buoyancy, and his screw gave a practical solution for moving water. Brahmagupta, an Indian mathematician of the 7th century AD, used arithmetic built on Hindu-Arabic numerals to compute volumes for excavation. These threads show why the field's history is bound up with physics and mathematics. Because civil engineering is so broad, its story also draws on structures, materials science, geography, geology, soils, hydrology, environmental science, mechanics, and project management. For a long time the discipline had no clear edge of its own. Until modern times there was no clear distinction between civil engineering and architecture. The terms engineer and architect were mainly geographical variations for the same occupation, often used interchangeably. That blurred boundary would only sharpen once the profession built institutions to teach and govern itself.

• 4. Birth Of A Profession

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  John Smeaton, who constructed the Eddystone Lighthouse, was the first person to call himself a civil engineer. In 1771 he and some colleagues formed the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers, a group of leaders who met informally over dinner. There was evidence of some technical meetings, but it amounted to little more than a social society. Formal schooling arrived before formal recognition. In 1747 the first institution for teaching civil engineering, the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, was established in France, and other European countries followed, including Spain's Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos. The profession found its center in London. In 1818 the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded, and in 1820 the eminent engineer Thomas Telford became its first president. The institution received a Royal Charter in 1828, formally recognizing civil engineering as a profession. That charter defined the field as the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man. The same language reached toward roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, ports, harbours, lighthouses, and the drainage of cities and towns, a definition broad enough to seed the classrooms that came next.

• 5. Learning The Trade

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  Norwich University, founded in 1819 by Captain Alden Partridge, was the first private college to teach civil engineering in the United States. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute awarded the country's first civil engineering degree in 1835. Cornell University granted the first such degree to a woman, Nora Stanton Blatch, in 1905. Britain's classrooms grew under pressure from the railways. King's College London founded the Class of Civil Engineering and Mining in 1838, largely in response to the growing railway system and the need for more qualified engineers. The private College for Civil Engineers in Putney opened in 1839, and the University of Glasgow established the UK's first Chair of Engineering in 1840. This split from military engineering, served by the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, met the demands of the Industrial Revolution. Today a civil engineering degree takes three to five years and is designated a bachelor of technology or a bachelor of engineering. The curriculum runs through physics, mathematics, project management, and design before students specialize, and some institutions offer post-graduate degrees that carry that specialization further.

• 6. License And Liability

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  A bachelor's degree in engineering is only the first step toward professional certification in most countries, with a professional body certifying the degree program. After a certified program, an engineer must satisfy work experience and exam requirements before being certified. The resulting title varies by place: a professional engineer in the United States, Canada, and South Africa, a chartered engineer across most Commonwealth countries, a chartered professional engineer in Australia and New Zealand, or a European engineer across much of the European Union. International agreements between professional bodies let engineers practice across national borders. The weight of a license depends on where it is held. In the United States and Canada, only a licensed professional engineer may prepare, sign and seal, and submit engineering plans and drawings to a public authority for approval. This is enforced under provincial law such as the Engineers Act in Quebec, while no such legislation exists in countries including the United Kingdom. In Australia, state licensing is limited to Queensland. The stakes are not only professional. Engineers must obey contract law, and when their work fails they may face the tort of negligence or, in extreme cases, criminal charges. Their work must also comply with building codes and environmental law, and almost all certifying bodies keep a code of ethics that members must follow.

• 7. The Many Branches

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  General civil engineers, also called site engineers, work closely with surveyors to convert a tract of land from one usage to another, designing grading, drainage, pavement, water supply, sewer service, dams, and electric and communications supply. From this base, the field splits into many specialties. Coastal engineering manages coastal areas, where sea defense guards against flooding and coastal protection against erosion. Construction engineering plans and executes the work, and because construction firms carry higher business risk, its engineers often draft and review contracts and monitor supply prices. Geotechnical engineering studies the rock and soil that support civil systems. Soil resists prediction because, unlike steel or concrete, it shows nonlinear strength and dilatancy, the volume change that comes with shear stress. Efforts to protect groundwater and maintain landfills have spawned geo-environmental engineering. Environmental engineering, the contemporary term for sanitary engineering, treats chemical, biological, or thermal wastes, purifies water and air, and remediates contaminated sites. Structural engineering identifies the loads acting on buildings, bridges, towers, tunnels, and offshore oil and gas structures, then designs them to resist self weight, wind load, earthquake load, and more. Its demanding cases gave rise to wind engineering and earthquake engineering, the latter aimed at structures that survive hazardous earthquakes in compliance with building codes. Forensic engineering investigates materials, products, or structures that fail and cause injury or damage, often serving civil law cases and sometimes patent claims. Materials science studies concrete, asphalt concrete, aluminum, steel, and polymers like polymethylmethacrylate and carbon fibers, placing it at the forefront of academic research alongside nanoscience. These branches rarely work alone, since municipal engineering exists precisely to coordinate them.

• 8. Measuring The Earth

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  Surveyors measure dimensions on or near the surface of the Earth, using levels and theodolites to read angular deviation and horizontal, vertical, and slope distances. Computerization has largely supplanted those traditional instruments with electronic distance measurement, total stations, GPS surveying, and laser scanning. The data becomes a map that civil engineers, contractors, and realtors use to design from, build on, and trade. Surveyors also lay out the routes of railways, tramways, highways, roads, pipelines, and streets, and position harbors before construction. The profession divides along legal lines. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and most Commonwealth countries, land surveying is a separate profession, and land surveyors are not considered engineers, holding their own associations and licensing. Their work covers boundary surveys and subdivision plans, both referred to as Cadastral surveying. Construction surveying, by contrast, is performed by specialized technicians whose plans carry no legal status. It runs from surveying existing conditions, through lay-out that places reference points to guide new structures, to As-Built surveying that confirms the finished work matched the plans. Water work follows a similar split between knowing and building. Water resources engineering predicts and manages the quality and quantity of water in aquifers, lakes, rivers, and streams, while hydraulic engineering designs the pipelines, dams, channels, culverts, and canals that carry it. Holding all of this together is the aim of civil engineering systems, which uses systems thinking to integrate a project's whole life cycle, from conception and planning through making, operating, and decommissioning.