Seventy Years Of The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Page 183

in the educational life of the Institute. To him goes the credit for procuring some of the ablest teachers who ever presided over Institute classrooms.

The importance attached to the new hydraulics laboratory was responsible for additions to the staff in that field. Two young graduates of 1894, Charles M. Allen and Edward L. Burdick, were engaged as graduate assistants in hydraulics. The latter stayed only a year; the former grew up with the laboratory and became its master. In 1895 Dr. Mendenhall recommended that a chair of Hydraulic and Steam Engineering be established. He was authorized to engage Sidney A. Reeve as adjunct professor. Mr. Reeve was then an editorial writer on gas and gas engines, but he had had excellent engineering experience with Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Co., and had been an instructor at Sheffield Scientific School, of which he was a graduate. In 1898 he was promoted to full professor and placed in charge of the department, which the Trustees decided to separate from the department of Mechanical Engineering. It is questionable whether the Corporation would have approved his appointment had they known that he was an ardent Socialist. He often defended his economic creed in writings and on the rostrum. Apparently it did not affect his ability as a teacher of engineering.

George D. Moore completed a five-year term as assistant professor of Chemistry in 1894. His successor, selected by Dr. Kinnicutt, was a young Harvard graduate named Walter L. Jennings, fresh from graduate studies in Germany. He had received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1892, his master's degree two years before, specializing in Organic Chemistry. He was promoted to a full professorship in that field in 1900. With such a competent man to leave in charge, Dr. Kinnicutt felt free to obtain leave of absence for six months in 1895 to study industrial chemistry, sewage disposal, and water purification in Europe. It was a valuable experience which enhanced his rapidly growing prestige as an authority in Sanitary Chemistry.

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