ABSTRACT
Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist of the 17th and 18th centuries. For all the Renaissance revival in Italy, its engineering provided little to the practical art of engineering after the 16th century. France became the center of engineering from the 17th century. Outside of France one of the largest wooden bridges was built by the Suiss Johann Ulrich Grubenmann. It crossed the Rhine at Schaffausen with a 119-meter span at one point. Before the 18th century, France had about 50,000 kilometers of roads maintained by corvee labor — men “drafted” for up to 50 days from farms to work on roads. Thomas Telford and John Loudon MacAdam were to do for Britain what Tresaguet had done for France. As for civil engineering, the canal era begun in England later than in France and Europe was to produce the generation of engineers that forever linked industry and engineering.
