“Preparing roads over which culture may ride in comfort”
1925 – 1934
The Harris J. Ryan High-Voltage Laboratory debuted on September 17, 1926, with a public demonstration of its 2,100,000-volt test station containing six 350,000-volt transformer units, capable of producing the highest voltage ever obtained at commercial frequency. Erected at a cost of nearly $500,000, it was the largest university electrical lab in existence at the time. | Berton W. Crandall photographs, Box 24, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
by Andrew Myers
Stanford University should be in a position to offer advanced training in engineering for men qualified to be leaders.
— Charles David Marx, 1923
1925 – 1934
On May 15, 1925, when the Stanford University Board of Trustees officially approved the proposal to create the new School of Engineering, the decision was anything but the start of engineering at Stanford. The education of engineers had been a founding intention for the university, with an engineering curriculum in place since its inception.
In March 1884, Leland Stanford had just turned sixty. In addition to gaining extreme wealth by investing in the first transcontinental railroad, he had served as governor of California and would soon become a U.S. senator. Yet his wealth and power could not save his son. While on a grand tour of Europe with his family, Leland Stanford, Jr., just fifteen years old, had contracted typhoid and died. Even while still in Europe, a bereft Leland Stanford searched for a way to honor his child and bring purpose back into his own life. The elder Stanford imagined a university in his son’s name. It was not to be just any university, but one built specifically to educate engineers in a new way.
“I was thinking in the night, since Leland is gone what my wealth could do,” Stanford explained to the Rev. Augustus F. Beard, in Florence, Italy, as he waited for clearance to bring his dead son’s body home to California. “I was thinking, since I could do no more for my boy I might do something for other people’s boys in Leland’s name. When I was connected with the building of the railroad, I found that many of those engaged in the engineering were inefficient and inexact and poorly prepared for their work. I was thinking I might start a school or institution for civil and mechanical engineers on my grounds in Palo Alto.”(1)
“The children of California shall be our children,” he told his wife, Jane Stanford.(2) Though it took seven years for the doors of Leland Stanford Junior University to open in 1891, from its first day it was a school for engineering as much as it was a school for arts and sciences. Five of the university’s first fifteen faculty members were engineering professors, and 141 of the university’s original 559 students were enrolled in engineering.(3) When her husband died in 1893, Jane continued to shepherd this vision.
A look back, and forward
In the ten decades since its founding, the School of Engineering has produced fundamental work in science and transformational breakthroughs that have changed lives and shaped human society. From particle physics to human DNA, airplanes to automobiles, catalysts to computer science, the Stanford School of Engineering has been a leader among engineering schools. Documents from the school’s early years illuminate the founding purposes and principles that compelled university leaders to gather the engineering disciplines of the time—civil, mechanical, electrical, and mining and metallurgy—into a single school.
“In organic union there is strength,” wrote the members of a select committee charged by then Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur to explore the idea of a School of Engineering thirty-four years after the university’s founding.(4) In their 1925 report to the president, the committee unanimously recommended that the school be formed. While their report had no shortage of discussion about what curriculum should be followed and the professional skills this new breed of engineer should master, the committee focused on the sort of people the Stanford School of Engineering should attract.
The committee members noted that their work had been driven by a need to address “the scarcity, among engineers, of men capable of managing, directing, leading. This has given rise, among engineering teachers, to a widespread discussion of the question, How to train the engineering student for leadership.”(5) Theodore Hoover, the first dean of the School of Engineering, detailed the personal characteristics possessed by the “Stanford engineer”—an individual prepared for leadership who would be successful in life as well as engineering. The Stanford engineer would be “something vastly greater and more significant in modern life than just a man with technical training.”(6) That goal of promoting leadership in engineering and life endures to this day.
This undated photograph shows a miniature ore-treating plant in the mining lab. Stanford’s Department of Mining and Metallurgy was created in 1919 from the Geology and Mining Department, one of Stanford’s oldest departments, although the physics of metals had been studied since 1903. Study of metals would be the department’s main subject for nearly half a century. | Berton W. Crandall/Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Stanford’s Civil Engineering faculty at the time of Charles David Marx’s 1923 retirement. Marx is seated in the center of the bottom row. | Courtesy Barbara Wallace.
The committee’s focus on people applied not only to students but also to faculty. Back in 1891, Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, went looking for top engineers across the country. The first hire he made in the engineering program was Charles David Marx, a noted civil engineer then at Cornell University. Marx became known as “The Father of the Stanford Engineer,” a man whom his students affectionately referred to as “Daddy Marx,” for the paternal figure he cut on campus.(7)
The headquarters of engineering education was “Engineering Corner,” a familiar building of sandstone and red tile with an arched portico that opened in 1905. Like many other structures on Stanford’s campus, it was damaged in the 1906 earthquake. Although some buildings, like the newly completed library, were unsalvageable, much of the campus was restored with the help of a committee of Stanford’s own engineers that included Charles Marx; Charles Wing, a structural engineer; and William Durand, a mechanical engineer. Engineering Corner would remain the center of Stanford Engineering for nearly three-quarters of a century, until the Frederick E. Terman Engineering Center was dedicated in 1977.
The southeast corner of Stanford’s main quad, known as “Engineering Corner,” circa 1910–1915. The building was home to Engineering until 1977, when the school moved into the newly constructed Frederick E. Terman Engineering Center. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Later, in 1923, Charles Marx would write that, even before a single block of sandstone had been laid for Engineering Corner, Stanford had succeeded because it had placed a priority on people over infrastructure: “And this again is characteristic of Stanford, where the bringing and holding of properly qualified teachers has always been deemed of more importance than the addition to buildings and equipment.”(8) As for curriculum, Stanford had held engineering courses on par with other courses, allowing the university to “wipe out the line of division [between] students in technical and so-called cultural courses.”(9)The goal was a well-rounded, liberal education meant to break free of stereotypes about engineers. Speaking to the American Society of Civil Engineers when he was president of the organization in 1915, Marx renounced the idea of engineering as a purely technical endeavor that was “destructive of idealism” and natural beauty. Engineering embodied idealism and art, he insisted, and the same principles of construction applied to “a symphony, a poem, or a bridge.”(10)
Aerial view of the Stanford campus, facing south, circa 1925. | Berton W. Crandall photographs, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
View south from Memorial Church, showing Engineering school buildings 520 (left) and 530 (right), with the old clock tower between them, 1925. Today they are Mechanical Engineering buildings. | Berton W. Crandall photographs, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
View of Engineering buildings on Escondido Mall behind Memorial Church, 1925. From left o right, the buildings today are the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Laboratory (500), the George Havas Engineering Building (520), and Mechanical Engineering (530). Also visible is the roof corner of what is today the Thomas F. Peterson Engineering Laboratory (550), home of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). | Berton W. Crandall photographs, Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
In their 1925 report, Wilbur’s faculty committee concurred: liberal arts and engineering went hand in hand. In recommending a course of study, they wrote, “As to whether all engineering students should be required to take economics, geography or geology, biology, chemistry, history, and English: it is the unanimous judgment of this Committee that all engineering students should be required to take some minimum not only of the studies named above but also of certain others”—among them courses in physics, government, foreign language, law, and psychology.
The professional engineering degree—six years in total—would follow a four-year liberal curriculum leading to a bachelor of arts, a quarter of which would be composed of electives designed to “attract rather than repel the born leader” and develop the “innate capacity to lead.” The curriculum would be followed by two years of specialization in a specific engineering discipline resulting in a graduate “degree of Engineer.”(11)
“If it is to endure,” Charles Marx wrote, “Stanford University should be in a position to offer advanced training in engineering for men qualified to become leaders . . . this brings us to what is commercially the Stanford engineer’s most valuable inherent asset—a certain sense of adequacy which manifests itself in his power of initiative and resourcefulness.”(12)
These leaders would not graduate and remain in Palo Alto, or in California, or even in the American West, but would—as Stanford engineers already had in previous decades—go out to all corners of the world. “We see them dotted over this continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from Alaska to Mexico; we find them in Cuba and the Philippines, in China and Japan, in South America, Australia and South Africa—and wherever they are we see them working hard and faithfully, exhibiting initiative and resourcefulness, many occupying positions of responsibility and power and all engaged, as one of them said, ‘in preparing roads over which Culture may ride in comfort,’ ” wrote Guido Marx, a mechanical engineer, who joined his brother Charles Marx on the Stanford faculty in 1895.(13)
The first dean of the School of Engineering, Theodore “Ted” Hoover, embodied that global spirit. Dean Hoover was an internationally known professor of mining and metallurgy and brother of the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. Prior to his professorship, Theodore Hoover had built a reputation as an advisor to gold mining operations in California and Australia; to lead and silver mining in Burma (now Myanmar); and to copper mining in Finland and Russia. At a time when international travel was made by steamship, Hoover maintained offices in London and San Francisco. As the school’s first dean, Ted Hoover shaped what the School of Engineering would become, building a strong, broad-based undergraduate curriculum while emphasizing graduate education. Hoover served as dean from the school’s inception until his retirement in 1936.
Hoover’s early tenure was notable for the 1926 dedication of the Harris J. Ryan High-Voltage Laboratory, named for Professor Ryan, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering. In 1925, Ryan had been honored with an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Edison Medal for “contributions to the science and art of high-tension transmission of power,” taking his place beside George Westinghouse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla as an Edison laureate.
Inside the Guggenheim Aeronautics Laboratory in 1927, Professor William F. Durand, who had joined the Stanford faculty in 1904, collaborated with Professor Everett P. Lesley to build one of the first wind tunnels, which enabled rigorous study of propeller design. Today, dozens of Durand’s hand-carved wooden propeller designs are on display in the Terman Engineering Library on the second floor of Stanford’s Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. | Berton W. Crandall/Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Construction and plans
From The Stanford Quad, vol. 34, 1927, pp. 38-39
Relatively little construction has been done by the University during the year, owing to a lack of sufficient funds. Such building as has been done resulted from special gifts.
The Harris J. Ryan High Voltage Laboratory is practically the only recent addition to the University plant, and is without question the most valuable and outstanding improvement which Stanford has acquired in several years. The building, located near “Frenchman’s dam,” has been under construction since August, 1925, and was formally opened on September 17, 1926, when Professor Ryan gave the initial demonstration of the equipment capable of producing 2,100,000 volts.
The main portion of the laboratory building is a steel frame, asbestos covered structure, 173 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 65 feet in height. It can be made absolutely light proof by closing the three huge steel doors, which are the largest ever built, but which can be operated readily by one man through the use of combinations of gears. The large size of the building was partly necessitated because safety in handling high voltages requires much space. Adjacent to the main room is an accessory wing containing offices and generator rooms.
The equipment of the laboratory consists of six 350,000 volt transformer units, two motor generator sets, and a switchboard. The transformer units, which were presented by the General Electric Company, weigh twenty-two tons apiece and are mounted on cylinders of compressed paper. They are capable of producing the highest voltage ever obtained at commercial frequency. The University has set aside nearly 200 acres for the use of the laboratory, making possible the construction of a seven mile transmission line.
In the kind of collaboration that became a hallmark of Stanford Engineer- ing, the Ryan Lab worked closely with industry and government. At a time when electrical engineering was focused on developing power plants to transmit electricity over high-tension wires to growing cities, the lab was the first at Stanford to be financed by external organizations, including the General Electric Company, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the California-Oregon Power Company, the San Joaquin Light and Power Company, the Great Western Power Company, and the City of Los Angeles.
In 1927, the School of Engineering appropriated an entire building to house the Daniel Guggenheim Experimental Laboratory of Aerodynamic and Aeronautic Engineering, where William Durand, professor of Mechanical Engineering, and his associates could explore the expanding discipline of aeronautics. Educated at the U.S. Naval Academy, Durand was an expert in designing propellers for ships, a skill he applied to the design of aircraft propellers. The Guggenheim Lab included an 8-foot-wide wind tunnel and fans capable of producing air velocities up to 90 miles per hour; its dynamometer could test propeller designs up to 6 feet in diameter. Dozens of Durand’s hand-carved wooden propellers now adorn the walls of the Terman Engineering Library in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center.
Clipper Ships to Turbojets
The Career of William Durand
William Frederick Durand (1859–1958), who joined Stanford in 1904 as a professor of Mechanical Engineering, had previously served as an engineer and engine designer in the Navy and had taught at Michigan State and Cornell Universities.
At Stanford, Durand’s work extended beyond the classroom and lab. From 1906 to 1908, he served on Stanford’s Commission of Engineers, which was responsible for rebuilding the university after the 1906 earthquake; he organized the Engineering Congress held in conjunction with San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915; and he played a significant role in the design of the electrical and water systems of Los Angeles, the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and the Colorado River project.
His chief accomplishments at Stanford were in aeronautical engineering. His background in marine engineering prepared him for studies of airplane propellers during the American preparation for World War I. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Durand to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA, later NASA), a new organization charged with coordinating national efforts in aeronautics research. In 1918, with Everett Parker Lesley, Durand established the Aeronautical Experimentation Laboratory at Stanford, the forerunner of the Daniel Guggenheim Experimental Laboratory of Aerodynamic and Aeronautic Engineering. The laboratory conducted propeller studies jointly with NACA installations such as the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia.
Long after his retirement from Stanford, in March 1941, Durand rejoined NACA to chair a special committee assigned to the project of developing jet propulsion for aircraft; he also chaired the Engineering Division of the National Research Council during World War II.
Durand’s active career as an engineer in public service continued through the end of World War II, when he retired at the age of eighty-six. His professional contributions spanned more than sixty years, taking him from clipper ships to the turbojet. The breadth of his projects engaged him in many of the central engineering problems and public engineering projects of his age, with a record of service that was unrivalled among American engineers of the first half of the twentieth century.
—Henry Lowood
Harold C. Hohbach Curator for
History of Science & Technology Collections
and Head, Silicon Valley Archives
In 1927, a gift from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics helped create the new Daniel Guggenheim Experimental Laboratory of Aerodynamic and Aeronautic Engineering, located in the Engineering Lab buildings. The gift included $45,000 for equipment and $15,000 yearly for expenses for ten years. In this lab and others, Professor William F. Durand and his colleagues studied aerodynamics, naval propulsion, and engineering research methods. | Berton W. Crandall/Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
But this growth trend was soon dealt a serious blow by the Great Depression. Student enrollment dropped significantly for a few years at the School of Engineering and at Stanford as a whole. Not until 1934 could Dean Hoover predict that enrollment would soon increase. Meanwhile, the school invested in new facilities to house students and provide classrooms and lab spaces for the expected rise in numbers. As its first decade came to a close, the School of Engineering was positioned for growth and leadership.
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