On the Shoulders of Giants—part II

Abstract

The education of our future civil engineers is incomplete without an appreciation of the men and women who created the profession of civil engineering in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper presents an approach to introducing the history and heritage of civil engineering into existing course work by the use of “history modules.” This module traces our understanding of open channel flow and the development of the Manning equation. It begins in the time of Aristotle and Archimedes and ends in the late nineteenth century with the publication of Manning's work and equation. The first module dealt with the development of the truss. It is the writer's hope that additional modules will be written and packaged by ASCE for distribution to engineering faculty around the country.