Royal Academy of Engineering

Conceived in the late 1960s, during the Apollo space programme and Harold Wilson’s espousal of ‘white heat of technology’, the Fellowship of Engineering was born in the year of Concorde's first commercial flight. The Fellowship's first meeting, at Buckingham Palace on 11 June 1976, enrolled 126 of the UK's leading engineers. The first fellows included Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, the jet engine genius,the structural engineer Sir Ove Arup, radar pioneer Sir George MacFarlane, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, Sir Barnes Wallis, father of the UK computer industry Sir Maurice Wilkes. The Fellowship's first President, Lord Hinton, had driven the UK's supremacy in nuclear power. The Fellowship focused on championing excellence in all fields of engineering. Activities began in earnest in the mid-1970s with the Distinction lecture series, now known as the Hinton lectures. The Fellowship was asked to advise the Department of Industry for the first time and the Academy became host and presenter of the MacRobert Award. In the 1980s, the Fellowship received its own Royal Charter along with its first government grant-in-aid. At the same time it also received significant industrial funding, initiated its research programme to build bridges between academia and industry and opened its doors to International and Honorary Fellows. In 1990, the Academy launched its first major initiative in education, Engineering Education Continuum, which evolved into the BEST Programme and Shape the Future and Tomorrow's Engineers. The Academy's increasing level of influence – in policy, research and education – was recognised when it was granted a royal title and became The Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992. The Academy's new and current logo is inspired by the Neolithic hand-axe, humans' first technological advance, which was taken to be a symbol appropriate to the Academy, supposedly representative of the ever-changing relationship between humanity and technology. The old logo is no longer in use but shown here for historical reasons.