Every highway you drive on, every bridge you cross, every building you walk into, and every glass of clean water you drink exists because a civil engineer solved a problem that no one had solved before. The infrastructure we take for granted was not inevitable—it was designed, calculated, tested, and built by people who refused to accept the limits of their era.
These are 10 of those people. Their work spans centuries, continents, and nearly every discipline you will encounter on the FE Civil exam. If you are studying statics, soil mechanics, hydraulics, structural analysis, or transportation engineering right now, you are learning the science that these engineers pioneered under pressure, often with far less certainty than any textbook would suggest.
Their stories are worth knowing—not just as history, but as a reminder that the formulas and principles you are mastering have shaped the physical world.
1. John Smeaton (1724–1792) — The Father of Civil Engineering
Before John Smeaton, there was no such thing as a “civil engineer.” He was the first person in history to describe himself with that title, distinguishing his work on public infrastructure from the military engineering that dominated the profession. But his legacy goes far beyond a job title.
Smeaton’s defining project was the Eddystone Lighthouse, built on a wave-battered reef off the coast of Plymouth, England. Two previous lighthouses on the same site had been destroyed—one by a storm, one by fire. Smeaton needed a structure that could withstand relentless ocean forces, and he needed a building material stronger and more durable than anything available at the time.
His solution changed construction forever. Through systematic experimentation, Smeaton discovered that mixing limestone containing clay with volcanic ash produced a cement that would harden underwater—a hydraulic cement that became the direct ancestor of modern Portland cement. He also pioneered the use of dovetail joints in stone blocks and designed the lighthouse with a tapered, tree-trunk profile to deflect wave energy rather than resist it head-on.
The Eddystone Lighthouse stood for over 120 years. More importantly, Smeaton’s hydraulic cement research laid the groundwork for the concrete that now forms the backbone of virtually every piece of civil infrastructure on Earth.
FE Exam Connection: Smeaton’s work connects directly to materials science and testing—understanding cement chemistry, compressive strength, and how material properties determine structural performance. When you study concrete mix design and curing on the FE exam, you are building on research that started with Smeaton mixing limestone and pozzolanic ash in a shed in the 1750s.
2. Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) — The Engineer Who Thought Bigger Than Everyone
If ambition had a patron saint among engineers, it would be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In a career that lasted barely three decades, the British engineer designed and built tunnels, bridges, railways, and ships that were each the largest or most advanced of their kind—often by a wide margin.
At age 20, Brunel helped his father construct the Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel successfully built beneath a navigable river, using a pioneering tunneling shield. He went on to design the Great Western Railway, including its bridges, stations, and a broader gauge track that he argued (correctly) would allow faster, smoother travel. His Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, with a main span of 214 meters, was one of the longest suspension bridges in the world when completed.
Then he turned to ships. The SS Great Britain (1843) was the first ocean-going vessel built with an iron hull and driven by a screw propeller. The SS Great Eastern (1858) was so large that no ship would exceed its tonnage for nearly 50 years. Brunel did not just push boundaries—he ignored them entirely and set new ones.
What made Brunel remarkable was not just his vision but his technical rigor. He performed load calculations, supervised construction personally, and insisted on testing materials before use. His failures—the atmospheric railway system, the troubled launch of the Great Eastern—were as instructive as his successes.
FE Exam Connection: Brunel’s bridges and tunnels are case studies in statics, structural analysis, and mechanics of materials. Suspension bridge analysis involves cable tensions, reaction forces, and load distribution—concepts that appear throughout the FE Civil exam. His railway work also touches on transportation engineering fundamentals like horizontal curves, grades, and sight distances.
3. Joseph Bazalgette (1819–1891) — The Man Who Saved London from Itself
In the summer of 1858, the smell rising from the River Thames became so unbearable that Parliament hung lime-soaked curtains over its windows and seriously considered relocating. The river was an open sewer, carrying the untreated waste of nearly three million people. Cholera epidemics killed tens of thousands. London, the capital of the world’s largest empire, was drowning in its own filth.
Joseph Bazalgette fixed it. As chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, he designed and built a comprehensive sewer system for London—over 1,300 miles of street sewers feeding into 82 miles of massive brick-lined interceptor sewers that diverted waste downstream, away from the city’s drinking water supply. The system used gravity flow along carefully calculated gradients to move sewage without pumping wherever possible, with pumping stations only where the terrain demanded it.
Bazalgette’s genius was not just in solving the immediate problem but in anticipating the future. When calculating pipe diameters, he reportedly took the projected population, estimated the required capacity, and then doubled it. “We’re only going to do this once,” he said, “and there’s always the unforeseen.” That extra capacity is still serving London today, over 150 years later.
Along the way, he also created the Victoria Embankment, reclaiming 52 acres from the Thames to house his sewer lines, a new underground railway, and a public garden—one of the first examples of integrated urban infrastructure planning.
FE Exam Connection: Bazalgette’s work is a masterclass in hydraulics, fluid mechanics, and environmental engineering. His sewer system relied on Manning’s equation for open channel flow, gravity-driven hydraulic gradients, and pipe sizing calculations—all core FE exam topics. His approach to population-based demand forecasting is exactly the kind of design thinking tested in water resources and environmental questions.
4. Emily Warren Roebling (1843–1903) — The Woman Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is often credited to John Augustus Roebling, who designed it, and his son Washington Roebling, who oversaw its construction. But neither of them finished it. John died from a tetanus infection before construction began. Washington was left bedridden with caisson disease—what we now call decompression sickness—from working in the pressurized underwater caissons used to dig the bridge’s foundations. For over a decade, he could barely leave his apartment.
Emily Warren Roebling stepped into the gap. She became the bridge’s de facto chief engineer, serving as the sole intermediary between her husband and the construction site. But she was far more than a messenger. Emily taught herself higher mathematics, cable construction, strength of materials, and the detailed engineering of caisson foundations. She negotiated with contractors, managed day-to-day construction decisions, responded to political challenges from city officials who wanted her husband removed, and ensured that the project met its technical specifications.
When the Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883, Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross it. The bridge’s 486-meter main span made it the longest suspension bridge in the world, and its stone towers were the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. It remained a critical piece of New York City infrastructure for over a century.
Emily later earned a law degree from New York University—at a time when almost no women held professional credentials of any kind—and became an advocate for women’s access to education and the professions.
FE Exam Connection: The Brooklyn Bridge is a textbook case in structural analysis, statics, and geotechnical engineering. Its construction involved cable tension analysis, foundation design on bedrock through underwater caissons, and the behavior of materials under sustained loading. Emily Roebling’s self-taught mastery of these subjects is a testament to how deeply the fundamentals matter.
5. Karl Terzaghi (1883–1963) — The Father of Soil Mechanics
Before Karl Terzaghi, foundation engineering was essentially guesswork. Engineers knew that some soils supported buildings and others did not, but there was no scientific framework for predicting how soil would behave under load, how water moved through it, or why slopes failed. Buildings and dams collapsed with alarming regularity, and nobody could explain exactly why.
Terzaghi changed that single-handedly. His 1925 book Erdbaumechanik (“Soil Mechanics”) created an entirely new branch of civil engineering. He introduced the principle of effective stress—the insight that soil behavior is governed not by total stress but by the stress carried by the soil skeleton after subtracting pore water pressure. This single concept explains consolidation, shear strength, slope stability, and bearing capacity.
Terzaghi developed the one-dimensional consolidation theory that predicts how much a clay layer will settle under load and how long it will take. He created bearing capacity equations that engineers still use to design foundations. He pioneered laboratory testing methods—the consolidation test, the direct shear test—that remain standard practice today.
Perhaps most importantly, Terzaghi insisted that soil mechanics was not just a theoretical exercise. He consulted on hundreds of projects worldwide, always emphasizing that laboratory results must be validated by field observation. His approach—theory grounded in empirical testing—set the standard for modern geotechnical engineering.
FE Exam Connection: If you are studying for the FE Civil exam, you are studying Terzaghi. His effective stress principle, consolidation theory, and bearing capacity equations are among the most heavily tested geotechnical topics. Geotechnical engineering accounts for 7–11% of the exam—and nearly every question in that section traces directly to Terzaghi’s work.
6. Arthur Casagrande (1902–1981) — The Engineer Who Taught Us to Classify Soil
Karl Terzaghi created soil mechanics. Arthur Casagrande made it usable. A student and later colleague of Terzaghi at Harvard, Casagrande developed the practical tools and classification systems that allow engineers to communicate about soil behavior consistently and reliably.
His most enduring contribution is the Unified Soil Classification System (USCS), which classifies soils based on grain size distribution and plasticity characteristics. When you see a soil described as “CL” (lean clay) or “SP” (poorly graded sand), you are using Casagrande’s system. It remains the standard classification method used by geotechnical engineers worldwide and is the system referenced in the NCEES FE Reference Handbook.
Casagrande also developed the Casagrande plasticity chart, which plots the liquid limit against the plasticity index to distinguish between clays and silts and to predict their engineering behavior. He invented the Casagrande liquid limit device—the brass cup apparatus that every geotechnical lab in the world still uses for Atterberg limits testing. And his graphical method for determining the preconsolidation pressure from a consolidation curve (the “Casagrande construction”) is still taught in every soil mechanics course.
Beyond classification, Casagrande made critical contributions to seepage analysis, earth dam design, and the understanding of frost action in soils. He trained a generation of geotechnical engineers at Harvard who went on to shape the field.
FE Exam Connection: The USCS classification system, Atterberg limits, and the plasticity chart are guaranteed topics on the FE Civil exam. You need to know how to classify a soil given its grain size distribution and Atterberg limits, how to use the plasticity chart, and what engineering properties different soil classifications imply. This is pure Casagrande.
7. Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929–1982) — The Einstein of Structural Engineering
When Fazlur Rahman Khan arrived in the United States from Bangladesh in 1952 on a Fulbright scholarship, skyscrapers were built with rigid frames—heavy, expensive steel cages where every beam-column connection resisted lateral loads. The taller you built, the more steel you needed per floor, and the economics got worse fast. There was an effective height ceiling, and the industry was stuck beneath it.
Khan shattered that ceiling. Working at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, he developed a series of revolutionary structural systems that fundamentally changed how tall buildings resist gravity and lateral forces:
- Framed tube: Instead of distributing lateral resistance throughout the building, Khan moved it to the perimeter. Closely spaced exterior columns connected by deep spandrel beams created a hollow tube that behaved like a cantilevered box beam—far more efficient than an interior frame. He used this system for the 100-story John Hancock Center (1969) in Chicago, adding dramatic exterior X-bracing to create a “trussed tube.”
- Bundled tube: For the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower, 1973), Khan bundled nine framed tubes together. Tubes could be terminated at different heights, allowing the building to step back gracefully while maintaining structural efficiency. At 442 meters, it was the world’s tallest building for 25 years.
Khan’s structural innovations reduced steel usage by as much as 50% compared to conventional framing, making supertall buildings economically viable. He also championed the use of reinforced concrete for tall buildings—previously considered unsuitable—proving that concrete tubes could be competitive with steel at significant heights.
Tragically, Khan died of a heart attack at age 52 while on a trip to Saudi Arabia. He had been working on designs that would push buildings even higher. His colleague described him as “the greatest structural engineer of the second half of the twentieth century.”
FE Exam Connection: Khan’s work is rooted in structural analysis and structural design—understanding how lateral loads (wind, seismic) flow through a structure, how moment connections differ from pinned connections, and how different structural systems affect load paths. The FE exam tests your ability to analyze frames, trusses, and combined systems—the building blocks of every system Khan invented.
8. Mary Jackson (1921–2005) — From Segregated Classrooms to the Leading Edge of Aerospace Engineering
Mary Jackson began her career as a “human computer” at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor to NASA) in Hampton, Virginia, in 1951. To advance from mathematician to engineer, she needed to take graduate-level courses in physics and mathematics—courses offered only at Hampton High School, which was segregated and whites-only. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton for permission to attend, won, completed the courses, and in 1958 became NASA’s first Black female engineer.
As an aerospace engineer, Jackson worked in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, a 60,000-horsepower wind tunnel that generated winds approaching Mach 2. Her specialty was analyzing the effects of airflow on aircraft surfaces—the boundary layer, drag, and pressure distributions that determine whether an aircraft flies or falls. She authored or co-authored twelve technical research reports on topics ranging from boundary layer effects to thrust reversal.
Later in her career, Jackson moved into management, becoming the Federal Women’s Program Manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center. In this role, she worked to open pathways for women and minorities into STEM careers—hiring, mentoring, and advocating for engineers who might otherwise have been shut out of the profession.
Her story, along with those of Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, was brought to wide public attention by the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures. In 2021, NASA renamed its Washington, D.C. headquarters in her honor.
FE Exam Connection: Jackson’s wind tunnel research directly involved fluid mechanics—boundary layer theory, pressure distributions, drag coefficients, and the behavior of compressible flow. Fluid mechanics is a core FE exam topic (4–6%), and the fundamental principles of pressure, velocity, and viscous effects that Jackson studied in supersonic tunnels are the same ones you will apply to pipe flow, open channels, and hydraulic systems on exam day.
9. Abel Wolman (1892–1989) — The Engineer Who Made Water Safe to Drink
At the beginning of the twentieth century, waterborne diseases—cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery—killed tens of thousands of Americans every year. Cities drew their drinking water from the same rivers and lakes that received their untreated sewage. The death toll was staggering and accepted as normal.
In 1919, a 27-year-old engineer at the Maryland Department of Health named Abel Wolman, working with chemist Linn Enslow, developed a standardized formula for chlorinating drinking water. The concept of adding chlorine to water was not new—sporadic chlorination had been tried for over a decade—but there was no reliable method for determining how much chlorine to add based on water quality, flow rate, and demand. Too little was ineffective. Too much created taste problems and public resistance.
Wolman and Enslow solved this by creating a systematic, quantitative approach that accounted for the variables affecting chlorine demand: turbidity, organic content, pH, temperature, and contact time. Their method could be applied consistently by any water treatment operator in any city. It worked.
The results were dramatic. Typhoid death rates in American cities dropped by over 90% within a generation. The chlorination standards Wolman developed spread worldwide and remain the foundation of water disinfection practice today. Public health experts have credited water chlorination with saving more lives than any other public health intervention in history—and Wolman was the engineer who made it practical and scalable.
Wolman went on to a seven-decade career at Johns Hopkins University, advising governments on water supply and sanitation systems across six continents. He lived to age 96, spending his final years still consulting on water quality issues.
FE Exam Connection: Wolman’s work is the foundation of environmental engineering as tested on the FE exam—water treatment processes, disinfection kinetics, chlorine dosing and demand, and the chemistry of water quality parameters like pH, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen. Understanding how treatment processes protect public health is a core part of the FE Civil exam.
10. David Billington (1927–2018) — The Engineer Who Proved Structures Could Be Beautiful
David Billington spent his career arguing that structural engineering is not just science—it is an art form, and the best structures are simultaneously efficient, economical, and elegant. As a professor at Princeton University for over 50 years, he created the concept of “structural art” and demonstrated that the greatest engineers in history were not just problem-solvers but designers whose work achieved a kind of beauty that arose directly from structural honesty.
Billington’s scholarship focused on the thin-shell concrete structures of engineers like Robert Maillart, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Félix Candela—designers who used the inherent strength of curved concrete forms to create roofs, bridges, and buildings of extraordinary grace using minimal material. He showed that Maillart’s bridges in Switzerland, built in the early twentieth century, used less concrete and less steel than conventional designs while achieving far greater visual impact.
At Princeton, Billington created what became one of the most popular courses in the university’s history: “Engineering in the Modern World,” which introduced non-engineering students to the great works of structural and civil engineering. He believed—and demonstrated through decades of teaching—that engineering achievement deserved the same cultural recognition given to architecture, art, and science.
Billington also made direct contributions to thin-shell analysis and design. His research on the structural behavior of concrete shells advanced the understanding of how these forms carry loads through membrane action rather than bending—an insight that explained both their extraordinary efficiency and their occasional catastrophic failures.
FE Exam Connection: Billington’s work connects to mechanics of materials, structural analysis, and structural design. The distinction between membrane forces and bending moments, the concept of structural efficiency, and the relationship between form and load path are all tested on the FE exam. Understanding why certain cross-sections and structural forms are more efficient than others is not just theoretical—it is how engineers make safe, economical decisions every day.
What These Engineers Have in Common
These 10 engineers worked in different centuries, on different continents, and in different subdisciplines. But they share several qualities worth noting as you prepare for your own engineering career:
- They mastered the fundamentals. Every one of them built their innovations on a deep understanding of basic principles—equilibrium, material behavior, fluid mechanics, soil properties. The fundamentals were not a stepping stone to the “real” work. They were the real work.
- They solved problems that mattered. Clean water, safe buildings, passable roads, functional sewers. Civil engineering is not abstract—it is the most tangible, consequential form of engineering there is.
- They persisted through difficulty. Roebling worked through debilitating illness. Jackson fought segregation. Khan immigrated to a foreign country. Bazalgette took on a project that had defeated his predecessors. The FE exam is hard, but it is a well-defined challenge with a clear path through it.
- They never stopped learning. Smeaton experimented with cement recipes. Terzaghi spent decades refining his theories in the field. Wolman was still consulting on water quality in his 90s. Engineering is a profession of continuous learning, and the FE exam is just the beginning.
Your Turn
You are studying the same statics, the same soil mechanics, the same hydraulics, and the same structural analysis that these engineers used to build the infrastructure we depend on. The formulas in your FE Reference Handbook are not abstract—they are the distilled insights of people who built bridges, designed sewers, classified soils, and made water safe to drink.
Passing the FE exam is your first professional milestone. It demonstrates that you have the foundational knowledge to begin solving the problems that matter. These 10 engineers show where that foundation can take you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should FE exam students study the history of civil engineering?
Understanding the real-world origins of engineering principles helps you see the “why” behind the formulas. Many FE exam topics—soil mechanics, hydraulics, structural analysis, concrete design—were pioneered by the engineers in this article. Connecting theory to landmark projects makes concepts more memorable and easier to apply on exam day.
Which FE Civil exam topics relate to the engineers in this article?
This article covers engineers whose work directly connects to statics, structural analysis, geotechnical engineering, hydraulics, fluid mechanics, materials science, transportation engineering, environmental engineering, and construction—collectively accounting for the vast majority of FE Civil exam content.
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