ASCE is the oldest national professional engineering society, founded in 1852 by twelve engineers in New York City. It was originally formed as the American Society of Engineers and Architects and in 1867, becoming exclusively for civil engineers, it was appropriately renamed ASCE. In 1850, the U.S. census counted only 512 civil engineers in the U.S. and by the year 1875, 408 of those were ASCE members. Since that period the Society has grown by leaps and bounds and has become a global organization with 112,000 members, some 6,000 of whom live outside the U.S.