Seventy Years Of The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Page 21

foremost citizens, Ezra Cornell. Mr. Cornell gave a large tract of land at Ithaca, an endowment of $500,000, and secured for the university land scrip for the 990,000 acres to which New York was entitled under the Morrill Act. The charter was signed April 21, 1865, seventeen days before the Worcester charter. The university opened October 7, 1868, one month ahead of the Institute's opening, and the first engineering degrees were conferred in 1871.

Also in 1865, Asa Packer inaugurated the movement to found Lehigh University at Bethlehem, Pa. He gave land for the campus, an endowment of $500,000, and bequeathed an additional $2,000,000 to the institution. Lehigh was chartered February 9, 1866, but opened almost immediately, so its first graduates received degrees in 1869.

Stevens Institute of Technology, founded by the bequest of Edwin A. Stevens, was incorporated at Hoboken, N. J., February 15, 1870, and opened in September, 1871, under the leadership of Henry Morton, an eminent physicist. Its course was devoted exclusively to Mechanical Engineering. The foundation included a gift of land, $150,000 for a building fund, and $500,000 for endowment.

Much competition arose in Indiana over the use that should be made of the state's share, $340,000, in the Morrill Act grant. Finally, in 1869, a gift of 100 acres of land and $200,000 from John Purdue and other citizens of Lafayette was accepted, and Purdue University was incorporated. It opened in 1872.

Another school, known as the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute had been opened in 1854. It was designed as a preparatory school, but a course of advanced study in Civil Engineering was introduced in 1870. It was reorganized as the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1889.

The technical schools of Russia, Germany, and France offered the most helpful ideas for the development of the Worcester plan. The Imperial Technical School at Moscow, earliest of them all, had a long history of success in combining

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Last Modified: Fri Jul 30 11:15:25 EDT 1999