History of Engineering

The October 2010 issue of ASEE Prism had Robin Tatu's review of Engineers: A History of Engineering and Structural Design by Matthew Wells.

From the review:

This sort of contextualized overview enlivens Wells’s study of Baroque England’s penchant for “dismemberment” – the systemized study of parts, reassembled into wholes; the 18th-century struggle to devise a theory of elasticity; the technical idealism that suffused Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire building; and the frenzy of American industrialization, during which “almost every possibility for advantage was grasped at.”

It sounds, therefore, that this history is quite different from Henry Petroski's histories of particular artifacts, which focus on the never-ending challenge of overcoming a design's shortcomings.