Although forensic engineering has been in use as a discipline for very few decades, its processes have actually been with us for about 6,000 years. Basically, ever since we started building structures and they started to collapse in ways we hadn’t anticipated, or since the first machines started giving us problems.
When a clay lathe or a mill broke because of one of its pieces, the first engineers analyzed which piece it was in order to replace it with another one of higher quality and durability. They would take a look at the problem so that it would not happen again; this is the universal principle of the forensic engineering field: to anticipate a failure.