Engineer

The word engineer entered English in the fourteenth century from Old French engigneor, meaning one who operates a war engine. The root is Latin ingenium, meaning cleverness or innate quality, the same root that gives us ingenious.1

For centuries, an engineer was a military role. The person who designed catapults, battering rams, and fortifications. The French military engineering corps, the Corps des Ingénieurs, was formalized under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century.2

The transition from military to civilian engineering accelerated in the eighteenth century. John Smeaton, who rebuilt the Eddystone Lighthouse in 1759, is often called the first self-described civil engineer, a term he coined to distinguish his work from military engineering.3 The Institution of Civil Engineers, founded in London in 1818, was the first professional engineering body in the world.

The industrial revolution multiplied the specializations. Mechanical, electrical, chemical, and eventually software. Each generation of engineers built the infrastructure the next generation took for granted.

In France, the grandes écoles system established the engineer as an elite professional. The École Polytechnique, founded in 1794 during the French Revolution, trained engineers who went on to build the nation's roads, bridges, and railways.4 In Germany, the Technische Hochschulen created a parallel tradition.

The word's journey from siege warfare to software development spans a thousand years. A medieval engigneor would not recognize a DevOps engineer, but both share the Latin root: ingenium, the capacity to devise.