Author’s Note: On Architects and Engineers

In keeping with the age in which Paine lived, I have elected to refer to him and his fellow bridge builders as “architects” and to refer to their bridge-making activities as “architectural” activities.

The terms “architect” and “engineer” now denote two distinct, though related, provinces of knowledge. The architect tends to be responsible for form, for aesthetic choices, for the parts of buildings we take note of. The engineer tends to be associated with the parts we do not see—the underlying skeletons of skyscrapers or the trusses that hold up a stadium roof. It is the architect who designs the structure; the engineer who makes it stand.

In the eighteenth century, this distinction did not exist. Those who imagined buildings also accounted for their structural worthiness. Indeed, in many cases they also built the buildings. Much that we would now leave to architects and engineers was done by carpenters, bricklayers, and stonemasons. A combination of experience, intuition, and widely available builders’ handbooks guided their aesthetic and structural choices. Insofar as the term “architect” appeared in English, then, it as often referred to builders as it did designers of buildings and their inner workings.

What was true of buildings was also true of bridges. For the most part, these structures, whether stone or timber, were designed and built by the same people, stonemasons or carpenters. Insofar as there was a single English-language term designating the designers and builders of structures, it was architect.

Outside of France, the term “engineer,” derived in its modern usage from the French ingenieur, generally had military associations. Engineers were those who built and operated “engines” or devices—catapults, assault towers, bridges, and later artillery—used to breach castle walls. In the eighteenth century, the meaning had expanded to include those who built roads, fortresses, and other military installations. But the term would begin to be widely applied to the builders of civil, nonmilitary structures only in the early nineteenth century.