Excerpt

From To engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski:

As the Oxford English Dictionary attests the word engineer designated one who contrives, designs or invents more than a century before it came to mean also one who manages an engine. The latter meaning dates from 1839 when the railroad was emerging as the great metaphor for the Industrial Revolution, and it is not surprising that there came to be a deliberate confusion of the contriver and the driver of the vehicle.