The emergence of engineers offers one potential explanation for the sustained technological progress of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Written by W. Walker Hanlon – Associate Professor, Northwestern University. This article was taken from the October 2025 edition of the RES Quarterly Newsletter.
This article is also based on and adapted from W. Walker Hanlon’s research originally published in The Economic Journal (135/670): “Engineering the Industrial Revolution: The Emergence of Engineers and Modern Economic Growth”.
The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of modern economic growth, first in Britain, then in Europe, then spreading to much of the rest of the world. The beginning of sustained economic growth — at rates that were modest by current standards but unimaginable in the pre-modern period — put humankind on the path to the economic prosperity and technological sophistication we experience today.
Generations of economists have sought to understand exactly what led to this crucial turning point in human history. Despite these efforts, the nature and causes of the transition to modern economic growth and why it began in Britain remain shrouded in mystery.
One facet of the Industrial Revolution on which there is broad agreement is the central role played by technological progress. Of course, many important inventions predated the Industrial Revolution. But never before had technological progress been so sustained. “The true miracle,” in the words of Professor Joel Mokyr, “is not that the classical Industrial Revolution happened, but that it did not peter out like so many earlier waves of innovation”.
Why did technological progress become the rule rather than the exception? One explanation is that the process through which new inventions were created changed in important ways during the Industrial Revolution. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, argued that “the great invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention”. Did such a fundamental shift in the innovation process take place during the Industrial Revolution? If so, what was the nature of it?
A natural starting point for addressing these questions is to look at the people who actually developed new technology. This is the approach I take in a recent article in The Economic Journal. Using a variety of sources, including data on patented inventions and inventor biographies, I study how the invention process changed in Britain in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.
What I document is the emergence of a new type of specialised inventor and designer — a role that came to be called “engineer” — that appeared exactly as industrialisation was getting underway. As shown in the upper panel of the figure opposite, prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution (typically dated to the third quarter of the 18th century), engineers were almost completely absent from the patent record.
However, starting in the late 1700s, the share of new inventions produced by people calling themselves engineers increased substantially. By the middle of the 19th century, engineers were by far the most important group of inventors. The same pattern holds if we look at the appearance of engineers among the inventors listed in biographical sources, specifically the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (as shown in the lower panel).
While these patterns are suggestive, it is natural to wonder whether the emergence of engineers represented a substantive change in how invention was done, or whether instead it was merely a relabelling of more or less the same work.
Both contemporary engineers and modern historians of the profession have argued that this group represented a new way of doing things. Garth Watson, for example, in his history of the Society of Civil Engineers, describes “a new profession” combining “the craftsman’s fund of knowledge, based on natural genius and practical experience… with the assimilation of scientific principles”. When I evaluate this claim empirically I find that, indeed, engineers differed in important ways from other patenting inventors: they were more productive, filing both more and higher-quality patents; they were also more versatile, patenting across a broader range of technologies.
Unlike manufacturer-inventors — the primary type of inventor before the emergence of the engineer — engineers specialised in invention and design work. As Adam Smith suggested, specialisation offered productivity advantages. Among these was the ability to form teams. Patents produced by teams, while still rare during this period, tended to be of higher quality than those produced by individual inventors, particularly if one of the team members was an engineer. Moreover, engineers were more likely to harness scientific insights. I show they were more likely to publish academic papers than other patenting inventors, and also more likely to produce inventions than other scientific article authors.
What caused the emergence of the engineering profession during the Industrial Revolution? Several factors were likely important. One factor, highlighted by Douglass North and more recently in the work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, was the institutional environment. Property rights made invention profitable and allowed inventors to monetise their discoveries without becoming managers. This could be done through partnership — such as the famous one between James Watt, an important early engineer, and Matthew Boulton, a business owner — as well as through the licensing and sale of patented inventions.
Another important factor was a growing scientific knowledge base, which, together with training in crafts, provided engineers with knowledge and skills.
The emergence of the engineering profession fundamentally changed how invention was done: it was akin to the introduction of a more productive technology for producing new technology. As I show in a final theoretical section of the paper, this type of change can shift an economy from a slow pre-modern growth regime into modern economic growth. Engineers, therefore, offer a potential explanation for how sustained technological progress emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
