On the Shoulders of Giants

Abstract

The education of our future civil engineers is incomplete without an appreciation of the men who created the profession of civil engineering in the late 18th and early 19th century. This paper presents an approach to introducing the history and heritage of civil engineering into existing course work by the use of packaged “history modules.” One such module is contained in this paper with two additional modules available to the reader on request. The module traces the evolution of truss design and construction from da Vinci and Palladio in wood to Whipple in iron. It describes the efforts of many men over a 300‐year period to move truss design from an art form (pre‐1847) to a science with the publication of Squire Whipple's book of 1847. It is my hope that additional modules will be written and packaged by ASCE for distribution to engineering faculty around the country.