MIT engineering department founding chronology

Origin of "civil engineering" via 1823 Rensselaer (Erie Canal needs) distinguishing from West Point military engineering. MIT 1865 course numbering: 1 Civil, 2 Mechanical, 3 Mining (→ Metallurgy 1888 → Materials 1974), 4 Architecture, 5 Chemistry, 6 (→ EE 1890s). Elihu Thompson and Edison as GE co-founders. Sloan's 1950 gift removing management from the School of Engineering. Tom's role in the 1996 report creating the Engineering Systems Division — originally drafted as "Division of Engineering Management," renamed to evade Sloan School's M-word ownership. Bioengineering as planned outgrowth of the same perpendicular-structure mechanism.

Let's talk a little bit about the difference between structural materials and functional materials. Materials processing is energy interacting with matter. You can't change the shape or the composition of something without doing something to it. And that means you have to input energy. There are a number of different types of energy. There's thermal energy, and Wolfgang Pauli gave an interesting definition of thermal energy: heat is a disordered form of energy. Heat is atoms vibrating in all kinds of random directions. Work is basically the atoms working, pushing all in some uniform manner. Some people talk about work as the atoms in a military formation, all going in the same direction, whereas heat is a political formation, everybody going in their own direction.