Known as the premier society dedicated to advancing mobility engineering worldwide, Society of Automobile Engineers has revved up the interest into this domain by organising seminars and symposiums at regular intervals offering an informal approach towards learning, allowing other department students to also gain interest into this domain.
Two magazine men of that era: Peter Heldt of The Horseless Age, and Horace Swetland of The Automobile were tireless advocates of the concepts that forged the creation of SAE. Heldt wrote an editorial in June of 1902 in which he said, "Now there is a noticeable tendency for automobile manufacturers to follow certain accepted lines of construction, technical questions constantly arise which seek solution from the cooperation of the technical men connected with the industry. These questions could best be dealt with by a technical society. The field of activity for this society would be the purely technical side of automobiles."
Likewise, Horace Swetland used his editorial pen to become the defacto voice of the automobile engineer of that day, and he became an original SAE officer. Swetland was a man who would leave an indelible mark on the path of SAE history. A mere 27 months after Heldt's editorial the Society of Automobile Engineers was born. Headquartered in a New York City office, four officers and five managing officers volunteered their time and energy to the cause. In that inaugural year of 1905 Andrew Riker served as president, and an up-and-coming engineering talent named Henry Ford served as the society's first vice president. The initial membership figure tallied 30 engineers. Annual dues were set at US$10. Over the first 10 years SAE membership grew steadily, and the young society added full-time staff and began to publish a technical journal and a comprehensive compilation of technical papers called SAE Transactions, which is still published today.
