As I was reading Asimov’s New Guide to Science, I came across this passage:
The first person to translate this idea into a practical working device, however, was an English military engineer named Thomas Savery. His steam engine (the word engine originally denoted any ingenious device and comes from the same Greek root as ingenious) could be used to pump water out of a mine or a well or to drive a waterwheel, so he called it the “Miner’s Friend.”
Hmmm.
It’s not that I doubted the Good Doctor, of course, but I thought the word engine needed further investigation.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a helpful article on that very subject:
An engine in a car or aeroplane is such a solid, physical thing that it might be hard to imagine that the word engine has shown much development over its history. Instead, the history of engine is a curious one, and is a good example of a process which is common in English nouns: the transferral of what was once an abstract concept to something very concrete.
This original, abstract meaning of engine in English was ‘ingenuity, artfulness; cunning, trickery’; in the fourteenth century, the poet John Gower could write of women being ‘of great engyn’ in his Confessio Amantis. From a modern perspective this sense can seem rather surprising, but this befits the word’s ultimate origins in the Latin word ingenium—from which the English ingenious is also derived.
So Dr. Asimov was correct. Not that I doubted him, but it’s good to see confirmation.
From this sense, it was only a short step to applying engine to the products of such ingenuity. This could be something abstract, like a plan or plot, such as in Edward Gibbon’s ‘dark engines of policy’. More frequently, however, engine referred to a physical product of skill or ingenuity—to tools, implements, or devices.
At first, these engines were relatively simple, and could include anything from smaller objects, such as bows, nets, or ropes, to larger ones, such as catapults or torture racks. This broad sense remains current in English only in isolated cases, such as in fire engine, which originally referred to any apparatus used to put out fires (including buckets, ladders, and ropes), and, oddly, in fishing contexts:
2002 Irish Times (Nexis) 20 Mar. 26 In its first year of operation, 13 owners of 23 fishing engines (nets and traps) have agreed to cease fishing on a permanent basis.
However, apart from these few vestigial uses, engine began from the sixteenth century to be applied less frequently to simple implements and more often to complicated machines, ones with many moving parts, which were used to produce some physical effect. These could be anything from clocks to mills to pumps, but later engine more specifically came to refer to the steam engine, which performed the particular function of converting the energy of boiling water into motion.
The article goes on to point out the different types of steam engines, such as stationary ones that imparted motion to machinery and those such as locomotive engines that could give motion to wheels and pull heavy goods, including people.
The sense of engine has kept evolving all the way through car engines and into the present day as we speak of search engines, a concept that would have made no sense to folks hundreds of years ago, but is quite ingenious nevertheless.