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A History Leading Up to the Beginning of Project Management
Civilization, as we know it today, owes its existence to the engineers. These are the men who, down the long centuries, have learned to exploit the properties of matter and the sources of power for the benefit of mankind. By an organized, rational effort to use the material world around them, engineers devised the myriad comforts and conveniences that mark the difference between our lives and those of our forefathers thousands of years ago.
The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good. The story of engineering, pieced together from dusty manuscripts and crumbling relics, explains as well the state of the world today as all the accounts of kings and philosophers, generals and politicians.
To appreciate the accomplishments of the engineers, we must understand the changes that have also taken place in human life during the last million years. A million years ago, at the beginning of the Pleistocene Period, our ancestors were small, apelike primates, much like the man-apes whose fossil remains have ben found in Africa.
Two things distinguished our ancestors from modern apes, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee. First, they lived mostly on the ground and regularly walked upright, so that their limbs were proportioned much like ours. They did not have the long hooklike arms, the short bowed legs and handlike feet of modern apes. Their brains were essentially the same as those of modern apes.
Probably as early as 100,000 years ago, before the last advance of the Pleistocene glaciers, and certainly by 10,000 years ago, the forces of evolution had caused these man-apes to evolve into men, every bit as human in form and as intelligent as we are. Differences in climate in different parts of the world had split the human stock into three major and several minor races.
These men, like all the men who had gone before them, lived by food gathering. They sought a precarious livelihood by hunting, fishing, picking berries, and digging up edible roots and tubers. They greedily gobbled lizards, insects, and carrion. Today only small bands of African Bushmen and Pygmies, a few Australian aborigines, and a handful of Eskimos - a tiny fraction of 1 per cent of humanity - subsists in this manner.
Because of the difficulty in getting food, in Pleistocene times only a few hundred thousand people existed on the entire face of the globe,. But there is no reason to think that we today are one bit cleverer than the men of -8000 (8000 B.C.), at the time of the great Neolithic agricultural revolution that turned hunters into peasants. For one thing, 10,000 years is too short a time for evolution to have had a measurable effect. For another, many geneticists believe that civilization causes the human stock slowly to degenerate, by enabling persons with unfavorable mutations to live and breed, when in a wild state they would quickly perish.
However, that may be, man has spent about 99 percent of his history, since he first learned to make tools, as a hunting and food-gathering tribesman. Civilization has arisen only during the remaining 1 percent of this time, since 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, when men discovered how to raise crops and tame animals. These discoveries enabled a square mile of fertile land to support 20 to 200 times as many people as before and freed some of these people for other, specialized occupations.
This revolution seems to have first taken place in the hills that curve around to the north of Iraq and Syria. From Iraq and Syria the Agricultural Revolution quickly spread to the valleys of the Nile and the Indus, which in their turn became centers of cultural radiation.
The Agricultural Revolution brought about changes fully as drastic in people's lives as those caused by the Industrial Revolution of the last two centuries. Permanent villages took the place of temporary campsites. One theory holds that men were first persuaded to give up their wandering life by the discovery that mashed grass-seeds could be used to make beer, since they had to stay put long enough for the mash to ferment.
In another three or four thousand years, some of the farming villages of the Near and Middle East grew into cities. Then with a rush came metals, writing, large-scale government, science, and all the other features of civilization.
As farmers learned to raise more food that they themselves needed, other men were able to spend all their time in making useful things, which they exchanged for surplus foods. Thus specialization arose.
Human society had long known a couple of specialists: the tribal priest or wizard and the tribal chief or war leader. As specialization increased, merchants, physicians, poets, smiths, and craftsmen of many kinds came into being. Instead of making their own houses, carts, wells, and boats, men began to buy them from workmen skilled in these arts. Soon the arts advanced to the point where even a wise and experienced workman could not know all that had to be known about his craft.
As the chiefs evolved into kings and the wizards into high priests, they waxed rich and powerful. They acquired helpers, messengers, bodyguards, and other servants, who outranked the simple peasants. Slavery - at first a human invention, which made it no longer necessary to slaughter one's prisoners of war - introduced still another class. Thus society became seamed and fissured into a multitude of specialized occupations.
| The first engineers were irrigators, architects, and military engineers. The same man was usually expected to be an expert at all three kinds of work. This was still the case thousands of years later, in the Renaissance, when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Dürer were not only all-around engineers but outstanding artists as well. Specialization within the engineering profession has developed only in the last two or three centuries. |
Wealth and experience piled up. Men undertook projects too large for a single craftsman, even with the help of his sons and apprentices. These projects called for the work of hundreds or even thousands of men, organized and directed towards a common goal. Hence arose a new class of men: the technicians or engineers, who could negotiate with a king or a priesthood for building a public work, plan the details, and direct the workmen. These men combined practical experience with knowledge of general, theoretical principles. Sometimes they were inventors as well as contractors, designers, and foremen, but all were men who could imagine something new and transform a mental picture into physical reality.
Observation
The first project managers (normally technicians or engineers) needed basic skills in: