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West Point long remained America’s only engineering school, and it more than held its
own against competition from other schools before the Civil War. It always trained military engineers, but it also
responded to America’s expanding demand for civil engineering. West Point graduates helped survey and construct
the nation’s roads, canals, and utilities. They devised new techniques in iron-working and chemical manufacturing.
They helped pioneer the development of interchangeable parts manufacturing, called the American system, that astonished
Europe at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
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As leaders in early railroad building, West Point graduates applied their military training to the management of the new
kind of business corporations that railroads pioneered. Two of the four-member engineering team hired by America’s
first major railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, and nine of the ten topographical assistants were West Pointers. Most of these
assistants became railroad engineers, forming the core of this new profession.
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