Schmingénieur As well known, the following day I head a cap of computer network administrator or a cap of history student. Although I majored in history of technology, it is not so often that the two may coincide. And yet ...
And yet, in seminars, symposia and publications on the history of technology, particularly in France, we talk constantly of engineers, on the other hand, I count the responses to tender where I figure it cost the day of engineer - cheaper than a project manager or consultant, but more than a technician. Incidentally, on my payroll, it is marked "engineer," is to say if the engineer there.
What connection between all these engineers, and with Vauban and Belidor I mentioned here or there ?
I confess I do not have to answer this question. And I add to this admission that despite its quality, the book of Helen cylinder authoritative on the issue ( Glory engineers. The technical intelligence from the sixteenth to eighteenth century , Albin Michel, 1993) can not quite convince myself that because we have this word, there is a coherent historical object behind.
At first, I believe it, there is a military engineer - the man of genius in the sense that we hear in the staffs in charge of the siege works and, conversely , fortification. It is becoming increasingly important throughout modern times, when war ceases to be a matter of heroic charges in open country to be reduced to a matter of seats and seats, peaking with large and expensive affair of the reign of Louis XIV, the construction of a line of fortresses on the borders of the Kingdom. 
The engineer is essentially a specialist static, leaving those other problems of Galilee on kinematics and dynamics. Obviously, he is forced to address questions of hydraulics, for example: not worth building a fortress if we die of thirst. This is evident in the books of Belidor and field-at Nine Brissach and elsewhere (the cons, water supply to Briançon).
But it is far from omnipotent engineer of the nineteenth century. How will be the one to the other? How he became an engineer at a point so obvious, and especially in France, the figurehead of technical progress?
A working hypothesis, surely simplistic: in France, the royal corps of engineers (military genius so), I believe, the first body art of the state to receive a strict territorial organization in 1693 an organization with branches in 23 subdivided into chiefdoms recent being the responsibility of a Chief Engineer (see Langin, Engineering the French Revolution, p.81). So, when at the Regency and Louis XV it is concerned with organizing the Ponts-et-Chaussées, the same model and the same designation that prevail, and that the transferred Rees, in the last years of the Ancien Regime, the new body of mine.
We know that engineers Mines (but also those of the Ponts-et-Chaussées, regarding in particular the railways) were given the task of organizing and encouraging the import of the industrial revolution English in France - forgive me the shortcut a bit forced. And, during the Nineteenth century, one begins to see blacksmiths, recognized as such in their province, to be called "civil engineers" in Paris - in the case of Combescot, Forge-Lédrier Savignac, Yvon studied by Lamy. The new glory of the engineer began, which culminated in the Act of July 10, 1934 on the issuance and use of the title of graduate engineer .
This model is it obsolete now? I think, I want to show the pay scale I mentioned at the beginning - indeed, if I was explaining to my American friends I'm engineer (Dipl. failing that I'm not), chances are they think I'm a locomotive engineer. But like Don Quixote believed in chivalry long after it has lost all relevance, some continue to see time in the engineering (and in the schools of the same name) the essential framework of industry, economy and , for that matter, society itself ...
(Illustration: detail from the frontispiece of Science engineers of Belidor, edition of 1729, according Gallica and photo of yours truly, Briancon, July 2005)
