Origins
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers was founded on 27 January 1847, in the Queen's Hotel next to Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham by the railway pioneer George Stephenson and others. The founding of the Institution is said to have been spurred by outrage that George Stephenson, the most famous mechanical engineer of the age, had been refused admission to the Institution of Civil Engineers unless he sent in "a probationary essay as proof of his capacity as an engineer". However this account has been challenged as an exaggeration: though there was certainly coolness between Stephenson and the Institution of Civil Engineers, it is more likely that the motivation behind the founding of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was simply the need for a specific home for the growing number of mechanical engineers employed in the burgeoning railway and manufacturing industries.
George Stephenson became the Institution's first President in 1847, followed by his son, Robert Stephenson, in 1849. Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries some of Britain's most notable engineers held the position of President, including Joseph Whitworth, Carl Wilhelm Siemens and Sir Harry Ricardo. It operated from premises in Birmingham until 1877 when it moved to London, taking up its present headquarters on Birdcage Walk in 1899.
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