'Challenges that society faces will only be solved by engineers turning science into reality'

Our Institution held its first official meeting 175 years ago, on 27 January 1847. It took place in the Queen’s Hotel in Birmingham, the site of which will, in the next few years, become the terminus of the HS2 high-speed rail line. Fifty-six people formed the initial membership and one of their first decisions was to elect George Stephenson as president.

The idea of forming an Institution is believed to have originated at a get-together of some prominent railway engineers who happened to be meeting, in the autumn of 1846, on the Lickey Incline, an infamous stretch of railway line south-west of Birmingham. They put their thoughts into a small, folded letter that did the rounds in October and November of that year – we still have it in our archives. They proposed to help engineers develop through meeting and correspondence and, in words redolent of a George Eliot novel, they spoke of “giving an impulse to inventions useful to the world”.

From these modest beginnings, we have now grown to an Institution of 115,000 members who are based in three-quarters of the countries of the world.

And have there been any useful inventions since then? Well, in 1847, railways were coming to the fore but cars, washing machines, electricity and telephones were unheard of. We forget just how far we have come in terms of our standards of living since then, much of which results from the efforts of engineers and manufacturers – I don’t need to remind you of how the food we eat, the transport we use, the buildings we live in and the medicines we take are all dependent on engineers and their work.

At the same time, we should also recognise progress in other fields – life expectancy has almost doubled since 1847, infant mortality has improved by between 10 and 20 times, and major diseases such as smallpox and polio have been largely eliminated – again with substantial input from engineers.

We now live in a world that faces different challenges, climate change being the most obvious, but with pollution and waste not far behind. We have solutions, at least in developmental form, to overcome all these problems. Which technologies will eventually be adopted for particular situations will depend on a form of natural selection based around what works and cost-effectiveness.

Based on what has been achieved since 1847, I am personally optimistic that we will be successful in the coming years. There is plenty for engineers to do and there is no shortage of funding for financially sound projects. In fact, I think this is a rather exciting time to be in engineering. The challenges that society faces will only be solved by engineers as they turn science and technology into practical reality.

These are the points that we will be celebrating in the course of our anniversary year. You will find more details of the plans for the year on the Institution’s website, and I hope that you find something there that appeals to you personally.