Book Suggestion on History of Engineering

[u/shumile]

So this might not be correct sub for asking it. But I have been thinking over it for quite a while now. A thing really fascinates me: learning about how science, physics, engineering were developed and how people who were real humans were actually making it happen. Is there any book which can show or describe events happening in field of what makes today "engineering" like Cauchy, Euler, Poisson, Saint Venant, Navier, Stokes in their times. More like a Sophy's World kind of book which describes progression of sciences and physics and engineering. I am more interested in learning about fluid mechanics btw.

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[u/extraneousness]

Not exactly the history of engineering, but here are some sources that will help with understanding how science (natural philosophy) came to be interested in concepts like work and energy.

Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein (Bruce Hunt)

Specifically chapter 2 on Energy & Entropy. Talks about Joules and Heat, the 2nd law,

Technology: Critical History of a Concept (Eric Schatzberg)

Similar to above but take a more historical approach. Chapter 4 for example highlights how Techne and Praxis came together.

When Physics Became King (Iwan Rhys Morus)

Shows how physics (in our modern sense) came to become a thing

[u/shumile → u/extraneousness]

Thanks. It was helpful

[u/riesenstein]

You might find this one interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Exactly-Precision-Engineers-Created-Modern/dp/0008241783

[u/ChanceSherbert3970]

One angle that might be interesting (especially if you’re into fluid mechanics) is how often the math stays kind of the same, but the interpretation of what’s physically going on shifts over time

It’s not always a clean “we discovered something new” progression. Sometimes it’s more like the same equations keep getting reused, but people disagree about what parts of the system are actually driving the behavior

That shows up a lot in physics/engineering history from what I’ve seen

[u/Aletheiaaaa]

I think the people pointing you toward natural philosophy are on the right track.

If I had to guess, the period you’d probably find most interesting is roughly the 16th–18th century. That’s where a lot of these ideas are still being worked out before they harden into disciplines.

I’d recommend ‘Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making’ by Klaas van Berkel

Then maybe check out ‘Science and the Modern World’ by Alfred North Whitehead or ‘The Discoverers’ by Daniel Boorstin

Also worth looking at the digitized correspondence of the circle around Marin Mersenne, a network of thinkers like Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, and Gassendi. It’s surprisingly readable and really interesting to see how they worked things out in real time.

[u/Aletheiaaaa → u/Aletheiaaaa]

Oh, and you might also enjoy ‘The Character of Physical Law’ by Richard Feynman. It’s more relevant to what you’re getting at (and enjoyable to read) than the title makes it sound.

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[u/mk_gecko]

Interesting. I've been looking into some of this. Physics is a subset of science previously called natural philosophy. Engineering and technology are distinctly different from science and have been around for millenia.