Origin
The Industrial Revolution led to an unprecedented escalation in demand, both with regard to quantity and quality, for bulk chemicals such as sulfuric acid and soda ash. This meant two things: one, the size of the activity and the efficiency of operation had to be enlarged, and two, serious alternatives to batch processing, such as continuous operation, had to be examined. This created the need for an engineer who was not only conversant with how machines behaved, but also understood chemical reactions and transport phenomena (how substances came together to react, how the required conditions could be achieved, etc.), and the influence the equipment had on how these processes operated on the large scale. Thus, Chemical Engineering was born as a distinct discipline; distinct from both Mechanical Engineering on one hand and industrial chemistry on the other.
Read more about this topic: History Of Chemical Engineering
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)