Engineers

What is an engineer? When were he born? What is the difference between the engineers of the past, those of the industrial era and today’s engineers?

The engineer is a problem solver. If we go back to the Paleolithic period, he is the one who can raise the stakes and tie and straw them to make a pile.
From humble and daily works, but of great importance for civilization, as the plow, the yoke and the wheel, to the great works erected to celebrate the power or to exorcise the fear of the sacred, like  pyramids, temples, castles:  at the base of everything there is a problem, and a more or less brilliant way to solve it.
The engineer was often confused with the old carpenter and craftsman on one hand, and with the artist on the other.
The figure of the engineer of our time begins to take shape in the industrial age: if the medieval “inzignere” came from the Latin ingenium (practical intelligence, manufacturing skill), the modern engineer comes from the English engine (motor).
If the industrial age wanted an engineer focused on his task of building an assembly line, the post-industrial age, the era of information, an engineer must widen his views from the working machine to the mind that imagines and gets emotional.
He remains a problem solver, a technical capable of solving the  problems posed by others, a creative able to identify still latent problems, a creative who poses new problems, who can see things with different eyes from other…