Founded in 1880 as The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, today's ASME is a worldwide, multi-disciplinary engineering and allied sciences society with over 120,000 members. ASME is dedicated to ensuring that engineers are on the cutting edge of technology, are safety conscious, and are committed to improving the technical well-being of the world. ASME serves its members, industry, and government by encouraging the development of new technologies, and by finding solutions to the problems in an increasingly global technological society.

The Society sponsors more than 30 conferences each year, and is one of the world's largest technical publishers, with more than 2,000 titles in print at any given time, including books, proceedings, and technical papers. ASME has more than 200 local sections and subsections worldwide. The Society also has over 340 student sections at colleges and universities throughout the world.

Manufacturers around the world use ASME's internationally recognized technical standards-setting program. Since 1884, when the first performance test codes were developed, ASME has pioneered the development of codes, standards, and related conformity assessment programs. In addition, ASME has an extensive continuing education program for engineers, and provides career information at the pre-college level.