Engineering at Johns Hopkins was originally created in 1913 as an educational program that included exposure to liberal arts and scientific inquiry. In 1919, the engineering department became a separate school, known as the School of Engineering. By 1937, over 1,000 students had graduated with engineering degrees. By 1946 the school had six departments.

In 1961, the School of Engineering changed its name to the School of Engineering Sciences and, in 1966, merged with the Faculty of Philosophy to become part of the School of Arts and Sciences. In 1979, the engineering programs were organized into a separate academic division that was named the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering. The school's named benefactor is George William Carlyle Whiting, co-founder of The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company.

Several departments at the school have been nationally and historically recognized. The Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering is recognized as the top-ranked program in the nation. The Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering has consistently ranked as one of the top 5 programs nationally by U.S. News & World Report in recent years.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering is well known for its fundamental and historic contributions, especially in the fields of mechanics and fluid dynamics. Although it has always been a very small department, an uncharacteristically large number of highly acclaimed scholars have been associated with it over the years. These include Clifford Truesdell, Owen Martin Philips, Jerald Ericksen, James Bell, Stanley Corrsin, Robert Kraichnan, John L. Lumley, Leslie Kovasznay, Walter Noll, K. R. Sreenivasan, Hugh Dryden, Shiyi Chen, Andrea Prosperetti, Fazle Hussain, Harry Swinney, Stephen H. Davis, Gregory L. Eyink, Charles Meneveau, Joseph Katz (professor), Lauren Marie Gardner, Gretar Tryggvason and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak. Many of the landmark papers in the field of fluid mechanics (turbulence in particular) were written using data from the Corrsin Wind Tunnel Laboratory. The wind tunnel is still in operation today. The department was also home to the school of rational mechanics. It was recently ranked as one of the top 5 departments in the nation for research activity by the National Research Council (the department was ranked 13th by the generic U.S. News & World Report rankings), and is still considered one of the main centers of fundamental research in fluid dynamics and solid mechanics.