The history of The Department of Engineering Science

The Early Days

Maths has been taught at Oxford since the 1300s, and those early academics frequently applied their studies to practical ends, particularly military engineering topics such as bullet trajectories.

Notable figures at Oxford included the scientist Robert Hooke, who worked as a surveyor for his friend Christopher Wren during the rebuilding efforts following the Great Fire of London.

It is in the 1800s that the University starts building a series of laboratories – notably the University’s Museum of Natural History, designed as a central courtyard surrounded by lecture rooms and labs. 

1886 – The first workshop

In 1886, Trinity College opens a ‘workshop’ under the direction of Reverend Frederick Smith. For the price of £3.15 per term, students can attend three lectures and lab sessions per week.

The workshop is the brainchild of Reverend John Percival, who would later become Bishop of Hereford. A strong supporter of expanding education, he campaigned for scholarships for poorer students. He was also a supporter of women’s education, and played a key role in the founding of the (then) all-female Somerville College; in 1889, the laboratory welcomes its first female student.

The Trinity College laboratory very nearly becomes the site of a major breakthrough when Reverend Smith narrowly misses out on discovering x-rays in 1892, having noticed that photographic plates became clouded when stored near discharge tubes.

Unfortunately, Smith fails to realise the significance of his observation, and will have to settle for taking the world’s first x-ray photograph (of his own hand) three years later.

1929 - Expansion

Jenkin having resigned after 21 years in the Chair to pursue work at the Building Research Station in Watford, mathematician Richard Southwell (later Sir Richard) takes over as head of department, overseeing a period when the Engineering Science department expands the range of courses on offer.

This had mixed results. The addition of a lecturer in electrical engineering was a great success (these days, our electrical engineering research includes everything from optical communications to nano-science). A new Diploma in Coal Mining was less long lasting: in 1950, the University ended the course, having received only one enquiry in 15 years.

Richard Southwell also developed a research group to work on his relaxation method for solving partial differential equations in engineering and theoretical physics.

1930s - War Work

Many of the Department's students in this period went on to achieve great distinction, including Dr F Llewellyn Smith, later head of Rolls-Royce, and Sir Stanley Hooker, who improved the performance of British aircraft including the Spitfire onwards.

After his 3 years studying Engineering at Oxford 1930-33, Brigadier Douglas Henchley OBE took a Commission in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps as an ordnance mechanical engineer.

George Whitby spent most of his career with ICI, apart from a secondment to the Ministry of Munitions during World War Two. His wartime work for the Ministry of Munitions was initially on the development and production of an effective new anti-tank shell, which came into use after D-Day, and then on the study of intelligence reports about the V2 rockets then being developed in Germany. For his war work he was awarded an OBE, and in 1982 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. One of his early contributions at ICI was as engineering manager for the construction of plants to make the polyester fibre Terylene.

Heat Engines & Fluid Mechanics

Stuart Swinford Wilson read Engineering Science at Oxford from 1941 to 1944, leaving with a First, returning in 1946 to teach in the Department until his retirement in 1984. He was a sailing enthusiast, and designed for the University Yacht Club one of the first fibre-glass sailing dinghies, the 12 ft Alpha, to replace the wooden Fireflies which the Club had been using.

Stuart was responsible for the planning of the Heat Engines and Fluid Mechanics laboratories in the new Thom Building.

Alan Knight, who worked at the Department from 1967 to 2002, remembers the early Thom days:

“The separate facets of engineering, civil, structural, electrical, electronic and mechanical all had their own areas. There were no computers (in the modern sense), no electronic instruments with digital readout (with the exception of a couple of decatron counters), and the oscilloscopes were about as large as an elephant and radiated just about as much heat. The students' drawing offices were located on the sixth floor, where slide rules and some mechanical hand-wound calculators supplemented long hand calculations.

"Much of the equipment was obtained from Government surplus auctions, and we even had a water tunnel which was obtained as part of the reparations from World War II. The workshop machine tools also came from Government sources, and even to this day one of the milling machines has still got its wartime identification marks, which can be seen from the Banbury Road.”

1964 - Medical Links

In 1964, the department makes its first foray into medical engineering, when the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre requests help in developing aids for children affected by Thalidomide. This would result in the development of sonar navigation aids for wheelchair users.

This period also sees the development of the ‘Oxford Knee’, a joint replacement currently being used by thousands of patients worldwide.

Today, medical engineering is a huge part of our work. Recently, our researchers have seen success with the use of ultrasound to deliver cancer drugs to specific areas of the body, as well as new techniques to keep transplant organs viable for longer.

This was also the period during which the Department appointed its first female fellow. Professor Gilliane Sills, now Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College, was the first female Fellow at the college in 1974 and went on to work as a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science, becoming a professor in 2002.

“When I applied for the post at Oxford, it was to teach engineering. My PhD was in engineering, but I had never taught it at undergraduate level. I would have to work into the small hours of the morning preparing for tutorials. But it is a very rewarding way of teaching, because you really found that you got to know the students rather well… I do remember being very well supported by the college. Everyone was very helpful. I remember Alan Bullock, the Master, asking me if I would join the domestic committee at the college. He took great pains to explain that he wasn’t asking… because I was a woman. It was a surprisingly long time until all of the colleges got more than just a very small number of women fellows. The whole idea now that colleges would be single sex seems a very strange one. I think they are better institutions because of it.”

1980s - Alumni

The 1980s saw national efforts to upgrade engineering education, and the Department of Engineering Science followed the example of the joint schools, moving to a four-year course, conferring an MEng upon its students and providing the same graduate status as the MA. The schools of Physics and Mathematics would soon follow suit.

From 1986 to 1987, Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte was a BP research fellow in the Department of Engineering Science. Then to 1995, he was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in engineering science. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010. Hugh has published more than 350 research papers, graduated more than 70 PhD students, and won numerous awards and prizes for his work. He played a critical role in raising the visibility of Australian robotics internationally and was named "Professional Engineer of the year" (2008) by the Institute of Engineers Australia Sydney Division.

David Warren Arthur East, now CEO of Rolls-Royce, earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science in 1980. Warren helped build ARM, the Cambridge based chip designer, into one of the world's most successful tech companies. Chips made by ARM power the vast majority of smartphones and tablets on the market.

2008 – Biomedical Engineering

2008 sees the opening of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. It brings together six groups with an interest in the field and places them all under one roof, in a site adjacent to the Churchill Hospital and shared with various medical research units.

The Institute puts engineers in close contact with clinicians, working together to address unmet needs in prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Since its opening, it has more than doubled in size, and raised over £50m in research funding. The Institute of Biomedical Engineering is now home to over 220 researchers.